Day 51 - India Day 4

Friday, March 14th, 2008

They woke us up today for breakfast at 3:30am, we got about 2 hours of sleep. They brought an ‘’American breakfast’’ right to our room, it was really nice. Then we went right to the Delhi Airport. New Delhi is the capital of India with a population over 14 million people. For being the capital of a country, and having that many people in the area, the airport was terrible. There were signs saying that they were remodeling, but in my opinion the airport was barely functioning. Our ticket said that our gate was ‘JET’ but once we got to where the terminals were they were numbered 1 through 4, and nothing else. This was the domestic terminal, so maybe the international terminal is better. There were no signs saying ‘SpiceJet’ or anything about where we were supposed to be. We asked some people who were working if we were in the right spot and they said yes, but that doesn’t mean that we really were. Luckily, it did end up being the right gate and we were able to take the bus to our plane no problem. Once we got to Chennai and found a rickshaw to take us back to the ship it started raining. The first bad weather we’ve had in port since we were in the Bahamas. For whatever reason, rickshaws can’t go all the way up to the ship’s gangway but cars/taxi’s can. So it’s pouring rain and we have all of our luggage that we brought to Delhi, including our laptops so we’re not about to go out into the rain. Our driver says that we can wait in the rickshaw while we wait for a bicycle rickshaw (who are allowed into the port). While we were waiting our driver just kept on trying to get rid of us and saying “pay me now, pay me now!” This was after he told us that we could stay in the rickshaw until the rain stopped or at least slowed down a little bit. Luckily, some random guy saw us in his car and said he would take us to the gangway. He was just an ordinary person that was headed that way and didn’t mind dropping us off. We even tried to give him a little something but he refused to take it. Just another example of how nice the vast majority of India was towards us.
Once back in Chennai we got a little bit of rest, and then headed out to do some shopping. We went to a few shops then to the big mall, called Spencer’s Plaza. The shops are basically all the same, they sell really nice rugs, wood carvings, bronze figures, paintings, and other stuff of that sort. The mall was different from a traditional mall in America in that it was full of a lot of small shops. There are no ‘anchor’ stores in the mall like big department stores, just smaller stores that sell the same thing like an American store. After the mall we headed to an extremely nice hotel for dinner.

Other than being an extremely nice hotel, they had an authentic southern India restaurant there. The plates were a big metal dish with a big leaf on it where we were suppose to put our food. There was also traditional music playing. A singer and a dancer (who are suppose to help tell the story of the music) joined in for a couple songs as well. I ordered something that wasn’t spicy but asked the guy if he could make it spicy. It was a kind of curry-lamb dish with sauce that you mix in with some rice. This place had, without a doubt, the best service that I’ve ever had in my entire life. The dishes that you order come in bowls, then they dish them onto your plate. When you’re done with the amount that they put on your plate they come back and put more on your plate. There was a group of 5 of us and anytime we tried to share our food, they would come and take our bowl that we were passing, go walk around to the person who we were going to share it with, then put some on their plate, then walk back and put the dish back in front of us. Always going around the person from the left side. It is culturally insulting to eat or grab anything with your left hand, so eating and drinking, and putting dishes on your plate were all done with the right hand. Drinking is also highly discouraged in the Hindu culture. To deter people from drinking the government has but a large tax on all alcoholic beverages. Wine, for example, has a 50% tax. If you order a couple of beers with your meal you’re going to be paying more for those two beers than you did for your actual meal. The high prices surely discouraged me from ordering anything besides water during dinner! “Bread” in India isn’t really bread. They call it nan (sp?) and it’s more like tortilla or pita bread than bread as we know it. It’s really good though. A lot of the time they’ll put something in between the bread to make it more of a quesadilla. There are a wide variety of breads that they served us, all delicious.

After dinner we checked out the night life for a little while then headed back to the ship. In all it was a really fun night in Chennai.