Day 8

No rest for the weary, as we had a 10:40am flight out of Pune to Delhi. We got all our stuff packed up and separated out all the things we didn't need to lug with us and could keep at the house in Pune. There would be eight of us on this adventure: the happy couple, Dennis's mother and sister, me, Tony, and Arjan, and then Swati's father would join us the next night.

Swati's cousin Priya is an air hostess for Jet Airways, and just happened to be on the same flight (as a passenger) that Dennis, Arjan, and I were on. And wonder of wonders, she secured us first-class seats right up amongst all the dignitaries and hot-shots. Ok, so there weren't two important-looking cars waiting for us right at the plane when we arrived (as there were for one fancy-looking fellow), but it was still awfully nice.

Swati's "cousin" Akshat met us at the airport (it sure is nice being taken care of everywhere you go!) and we drove off in a couple cars. Delhi is a completely different city than anything we had seen before. The traffic was almost "normal". Ok, I'm sure if I was plopped down directly from the U.S. into Delhi, I'd still think it insanity, but in India, everything is relative. The streets are wide, there are nice cars everywhere, not many cows, seatbelts are required, and the auto-rickshaws run on CNG. It was only after I realized that it was New Delhi, built by the British relatively recently, that it made some more sense.

On the way to our hotel we stopped to visit Qutb Minar, the tallest minaret in India. It's a pretty amazing structure, and much more impressive than the 2nd-tallest that we'd already seen at Daulatabad Fort. All of the Islamic buildings on the site were built from the stones of demolished Hindu temples, and for the most part it seems like people are OK with that (it was a long time ago), which is nice to see.

We freshened up at the hotel, and then went back out to the center of the city. We did one loop of the shopping on Connaught Circus, which could almost be European, and then met up again with Akshat and his family at Rodeo, a Mexican restaurant. Seeing the Indian waitstaff dressed as cowboys guaranteed that it would be a good place. After dinner most of the group went on home, but the four guys stuck around with Akshat and his wife having drinks. He studied for 9 years in Moscow, and he definitely learned how to drink vodka there. The rest of us stuck mostly with beer, which somehow has yet to leave me with a real hangover. It's so nice to be welcomed in with open arms by people who don't even know us. There might be something to this whole Indian super-extended-family thing.

After they dropped us back at the hotel we had some drinks at the Starbucks-like coffee shop on the ground floor (somehow I happened to have a bottle of vodka in my bag), and finally went to bed about two hours before we'd agreed to get up for an early morning trip to see a bird sanctuary.