Feast for the Senses

We're not in Canada anymore...

September 10th
    Blurry-eyed and stiff from eighteen hours worth of flights, we at last arrived in New Delhi at 3:30 a.m. After a few short hours of sleep, we hit the ground running to explore our surroundings; in a city of about 18 million people, there's a few things to see. Our friend Nancy expressed well what us India first-timers were experiencing; a "feast" for the senses.  

In addition to the din of ceaseless horn-honking and seemingly patternless stream of traffic, throngs of people criss-cross streets and sidewalks, every which way. Although still hot and humid, the sun is always slightly hidden behind a layer of smog. In a nearby market ("M-Block"), no saleable item if off the table; produce is being sold from carts, make-shift portable shops are selling all imaginable knick-knacks, streams of colourful cloth are draped in shop windows beside a butcher shop where men cut chicken carcasses between their toes (yes, really). The smell of leaded gas, all kinds of cooking, incense being burned to gods, & trash of every kind fill the air, playing on all of our senses, all of the time.

Street food

     It is impossible for the profoundly overt dichotomy between the wealthy and the poor to go unnoticed. Where a high-end hotel stands, a shanty town hugs it's walls. As a Mercedes Benz drives on an overpass, people lay underneath to feel the cooler breeze created by traffic & to escape the mosquitoes that flee the carbon monoxide. Where business men wait for the metro, women beg for food and money with their babies on the ground beside them, and beggars drag themselves with their hands across the ground before being moved along by security guards.

M-Block Market