Green Park in Delhi

No, this isn't some nice public space, it's just a neighborhood. It is however, named, Green Park. Yvonne and I were running around trying to find some place with a reliable internet connection. So we walked out of our guest house in Delhi, turned left and walked for a while. We stopped to ask people if we could find a travel agent, or a booking agent, or anything else we could think of. It turned out to be a big hassle.

Let me set the record straight: VERY FEW PEOPLE IN INDIA SPEAK ENGLISH. I don't know what the tour books and tour guides tell you, but they are lying if they tell you it's possible to get around only speaking english. It simply is not possible. I work at an upper echelon institute full of PhDs in the sciences. I still have a hard time understanding some of them and they are educated in English. My ears are pretty good now, but a few months ago... forget about it.

So, what does one do when one wants to book plane and train and automobile tickets? Ask for a travel agent naturally. Well, we got led around to a car rental place. I stated immediately, "I'm not driving a car in Delhi. I'm not likely to drive a car in India." Turns out, it didn't matter. The car rental place only rents to companies. Useless. So we asked the guy at the counter who "CLAIMED" to speak english where a travel agent was. He pointed us in some direction, we walked that way. Just to be sure, we asked another half dozen people on the street en route to the "travel agency." My Indian friend (from Delhi) had warned me about this early on in my stay, but he warned me against the Tamils. "They will tell you to go somewhere, because they don't want it to seem like they don't know." Well, he was completely and utterly correct in that statement. My belief now, however, is that this phenomenon is not unique to just southerners. We walked around and every person seemed to give us different directions. So we decided, it was internet cafe time. Eventually we wound up at a Reliance store and Yvonne bought some 500 minutes of internet usage. So we sat in there for almost 2 1/2 hours booking trains to Agra, Jaipur, mumbai, goa, and a couple plane tickets too. Luckily, we got most of our travel arrangements for the first half of the trip finished at that point.

In the meantime, walking around Green Park we found a charming little neighborhood in south Delhi. Furthermore, there are a few random mausoleums and tombs identical to those in Lodhi Gardens, which are no doubt from the same sultancy, just removed a few kilometers.