We arrived in Delhi at noon. I had forgotten to confirm our arrival, so nobody came to pick us up. I called the hotel but they advised us to take a cab to Karol Bagh and call them again from there there so that they could send someone to bring us to the hotel. So that is what we did. Julian, me and two big suitcases were dropped around two in the evening in a very busy road, with several street shops behind us selling crash helmets and other sports gear. A tall guy from the hotel came to greet us, took our suitcases and guided us towards the hotel. I remember that there was no footpath and we had to follow him almost in the middle of the traffic. At one point, one auto-rickshaw was coming towards us and our tall guy stopped walking and stood there giving him a challenging look that made the rickshaw stopped suddenly, thank goodness!
When we arrived to the hotel we asked for Borja who came down to meet us with a big smile. We later learned that he just went for a short walk along the hotel street and had not eaten much since the day before. The truth is that the street was not the best. It had no pavement, there were people sleeping in the street and cows passing by. A big shock for Borja who was new to India and arrived to the hotel the night before all by himself.
The hotel was modest but it was clean. We were surprised to find that the people working at the hotel slept on the floor right below ours.
We first went to meet Vikas, our travel agent, that took the occasion to ask us a few questions about how to best structure an AdWords account. His office was in the same roof as his house I believe, I think it was his children playing in the front yard when we were walking into the office. He looked like a nice guy to me, he told us it was his birthday and he just turned 38. We also met Rinku, our driver, that same day. We arranged to meet him in two days to head off to Agra and Rajasthan. Rinku dropped us in the metro station. Vikas adviced us to do so if we wanted to meet Jitu on time, because the traffic was crazy and it would take us very long to go by taxi. Delhi is amazingly huge.
We were very impressed by the security measures at the metro station. If it wasn't that is was way too crowded, we would have thought we were at the airport. We bought a bottle of water but were unsure if we should drink it so we did not. Now I think it was probably perfectly safe, but we had a long trip ahead of us and did not want to take the risk.
We found Jitu in the train station about 45 minutes later. We were starving then, so he drove us to a Pizza hut restaurant nearby. After lunch it was already getting dark, so Jitu took us to Khan Market, one of the expats favorite places he told us. I liked it too. It is a square full of shops, most of them for fabrics, sarees, stoles... and we did some shopping of course. We bought bangles and stoles, and the guys when to a tailor to have a shirt made. Jitu was so friendly and nice to us.
Then we went for dinner to a very fancy restaurant in a very nice part of the city, I do not remember the name. The menu had many dishes from different countries, I remember there were Spanish dishes too. We sat at a table in beautiful garden, very nicely decorated with candlelit and Halloween pumpkins. The temperature dropped a little and when we finished our dinner we had a nice tea inside.
Then we went back to the hotel to get enough sleep and get ready for a full day in the Old Delhi...
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