Thursday, February 3, 2011

Wednesday

Delhi
First day in the capital of India.. lots of things to see lots of things to learn...
Started our day walking half a mile to a local stall.. had some really nice food... some rice kind of stuff and samosa.. and there is some south indian food too.. not as great as in south india of course.. but somehow, food here seems to be less spicy and more enjoyable... anyway, hot food on a cold morning is always welcome...

next, we walked to some ancient observatory, which i forgot the name...
huge structures were standing there.. looks really mysterious..
guess i'm not much of a scientist.. or astronomer, or architect... anyway.. dunno how they work... it seems that they are used to measure the position of the earth and its relations to the sun, moon and individual stars...
one of it was a 5-storey high sundial.. which of course tells time... why is it made that huge?.. no one knows...
then there is the auxiliary globe shaped structures which help correct the time according to the seasons where the length of days and nights vary...
i thought about the whole thing of why they built such things... came up with a theory that the scientists of that time loved astronomy and recording it.. but due to lack of funding.. they told the kings that the stars and their movements direct the fate of men.. and that by observing they can predict the future... so ka-ching... jackpot from the royal coffers!!

anyway... we went on to visit the flea market.. which was called janath - something...forgot..
anyway.. its like Petaling street with lots of carpet vendors... loads of clothes and baubles and weird stuff... then there are these crack sales people who sell some fake rayban glasses and "genuine" leather woodland and gucci wallets.... the crazy thing is their persistence and extremely unpredictalbe prices.. leaves me wondering what it actually costs.. they go like rs500 to 250 to 100 to 50 to 20...

then we tried out the malls... took some time really...
coz we didn't know where to find them.... and we realized that the indian gov does not approve and thus the absence of any of those super giant wholesale markets like tesco or jusco or cold storage or carrefour...
and we realised that malls are pretty much the same everywhere in the world and theres really not much point in visiting them unless you some really special thing you need to get thats only available there...
so.. yeah... when we realized that, its time to head home...

One nice thing about india is that you get veg food everywhere.. yeah... they even have veg zinger burger in KFC... which we tried it out... they don't have whipped potato though... and the pizza huts don't have a salad bar... sad...