India today through my eyes, Juanita - The following is in no way meant to offend any of you wonderful people who call India home. I am not complaining nor in anyway ungrateful for this amazing opportunity we have to visit India. I am simply trying to give those who have not had the privilege of visiting India an insight into our lives here.Yes, this is long but for those interested in details, make a cuppa and hopefully enjoy......
We arrived back in Delhi from Varanasi last Friday. In Varanasi, we were staying in the suburb (or colony as they are called here) of Sarnath. Sarnath has grass, trees, flowers, blue sky and while lots of rubbish, very little smell or extra odors. While it is getting hot in the direct sun, once you go into the shade the heat is more bearable. The air was easy to breath and really a pleasant place to be.
Parts of Delhi however, are not like Varanasi. We are staying in a colony called Pahar Ganj.
Pahar Ganj - what words describe this place? It is couple of long streets that are an incredible hive of activity 24 7. There are 1000s of small shops and stalls all jammed into each other and all overflowing with everything from jewellery, clothing, shoes, food stalls, henna stands, tattoo stalls, plastic assortments and drugs. This all sounds glamorous until you throw in the dust, dirt,rubbish, sewage, grime, beggars cows, motorbikes, rickshaws, trucks and 1000s of people all haggling for the best price or best sale. Rubbish is everywhere and many use the streets and walls as their toilets and the odors can be choking at times. In the heat, the open sewers and rotting rubbish are smells that one really can't describe and it is impossible to avoid these areas. Everything is covered in a thick layer of dust and grime. There are no flowers, trees or grass. Armed police walk the streets in an attempt to make locals and tourists alike feel safe in amongst the chaos and mayhem.
Today as I look out our window, the place where the blue sky should be, is a brown grey color. The sun does manage to shine through the pollution and dust, but as a result it is really muggy and hot here and the shade provides little relief from the heat.Both Makaia and Azariah are suffering from nasal infections due to, I think, the air pollution and dust and so today we are staying put in our accommodation and pumping the girls full of legal drugs in an attempt to get them well again.
Accommodation – Pahar Ganj has the cheapest accommodation in Delhi and our accommodation is the cheapest we could find that has a private toilet and shower at $15.00 for the 5 of us per night. We are on the 3rd floor (lots of steps to climb up) and surprisingly its not too noisy. Our room consists of a double bed, a bunk and a small bed/couch. The mattress at 1.5 inches thick are about half an inch thicker than Varanasi but still very thin for my old bones. The room has a small window, a bench, wardrobe, yellow and orange walls and large cream ceramic tiles on the floor. There is an air conditioning unit in the wall that hasn't worked in the past 20 or so years, judging by the dust and its condition and two ceiling fans that we have going all the time. The ceiling fans are both falling out of the ceiling and shake and make amazing noises but at least they do help with the heat. We have another room that has a flush toilet, sink and shower. The shower is a pipe coming out of the side of the wall next to the toilet and the water just falls onto the ground and runs down a drain pipe. There is no bedding etc provided but we brought our own towels, bedding and blow up pillows from NZ.
Washing – we have brought some rope and have strung it up across our room and we hand wash each day and string our clothes along the rope. The ceiling fans do a great job of drying the washing but we have to make sure the wet clothes don't drip onto the beds.
Meals – Apart from 5 days in Varanasi, we have had no cooking facilities so meals and having a variety are a challenge. We are able to buy jars of jam, peanut butter, crackers and cornflakes from a small store and each morning a small bag of cold milk to have on the cereal. We have been told that the milk may be buffalo milk but as this point no one is really worried as long as it is cold and hasn't gone off – as it has on several occasions. We also buy bread (although it's rarely fresh), bananas and sometimes oranges and carrots. Sometimes we have found cheese slices to have on our crackers or bread.
Lunch and Dinner - While there are many food stalls on the street that the locals use, most westerners, including us, go to budget restaurants as the street stalls are unclean and have a reputation for giving their foreign customers 'Delhi belly' and potentially other worse illnesses. There is no guarantee that the food we eat is any better than the street stalls but the restaurants do have plates and cups. Due to our budget (again I'm not complaining) we choose the cheapest things on the menu and share them. Mostly lunch and dinner consists of rotti's, rice and noodles with a few veges on top and a non spice veg curry. Meat is available in some curries, but to be honest, I am doubtful about how safe it is being left in the heat and with flies all day. Some restaurants do have french fries (of a sorts) and we have taken them back to our accommodation and had chip sandwiches for dinner.
We do splash out and get either McDonalds or KFC which is available about 20 minutes walk from here. A meal at either of these places costs approx $25 for all of us, which while it is our budgeted food amount for the whole day, it is also great to get some chicken into our bodies. Any leftover tomato sauce we take home with us to be used as a spread on crackers.
Water – each day we buy water in 2 or 5 litre bottles. There is tap water available but it is very unsafe and unwise to drink this water and so we use the brought water for drinking and also for washing teeth. Many an illness has been caught through unsafe water.
Utensils - We make cups for drinking water and bowls for our cereal by cutting the bottoms off the 2 litre plastic water bottles and also make spoons out of the tops of the bottles - clever kiwi ingenuity we think. Sometimes there are extra plastic spoons or plastic cups that we are able to bring back from McDonalds or KFC.
There are a lot of foreign tourists in Pahar Ganj but after being here for a few day some of the locals recognise us and some remember us from when we where here at the beginning of our trip so it is lovely to be greeted warmly by them. A smile or pleasant greeting exchanged can have such a positive impact.
Everytime I think that I am getting used to being here, something surprises me, whether its an odor, a sight or a sound, both positive and negative, there really is no place like Pahar Ganj, India.
