Trip to India - Day 1

Left for New Delhi, India yesterday to attend a conference on palliative care, where I had submitted an abstract of my audit project and it was selected for an oral presentation.

The flight to India via British Airways was okay. It was a full flight, made worse by screaming babies everywhere. What irritated me the most was the in-flight food. Instead of offering a choice of meals for dinner, I was given an Indian vegetarian dish, which consisted of rice and kidney beans. The meal tasted so bad that the world's best passenger complaint letter came to mind. I asked the air stewardess if there were any other options, and she basically said this is our Indian sector flight thus this is the food offered. I was not pleased and was glad that I had eaten a full meal prior to the flight.

I landed at Indira Gandhi International Airport at 5am. After passing immigration, I went to the Foreign Currency counter to exchange Indian Rupees. Apparently, it is not possible to change Indian Rupees outside of India. The customers ahead of me were exchanging huge sums of money that they were given huge stacks of Indian Rupees. When it was my turn, I only exchanged 50 pounds worth of Indian Rupees (Rs 3500) and was told-off for asking for a receipt with the reason being that I had only exchanged such a small sum of money. Hmmph!

Then, I took a pre-paid taxi to Ginger Hotel, which was located next to the New Delhi Railway Station. I purposely chose this hotel as my train to Agra was leaving at 6.15am the next morning and I wanted to avoid the hassle of finding a taxi in the early hours of the morning.

I arrived at the hotel around 7-ish am. The traffic in New Delhi was amazingly chaotic and honestly, terrifying. I wasn't allowed to check-in until 12pm, unless I was willing to pay 50% extra for my room for early check-in. I decided to wait out in the 24-hour hotel restaurant instead to have my breakfast.

The long 5 hour wait in the restaurant was physically-challenging due to sleep debt. I sat in one corner of the restaurant, had my breakfast, and tried to take short naps, while trying to pass the time. Things got a bit more interesting when a team of people came to shoot a video commercial of the restaurant. And I was in the video commercial! They went around asking people what they thought of the restaurant and came to ask me as well. I just gave a generic answer of good good, clean environment, reasonable ambience. The usual...

Finally, I got my room at 11am and went to sleep. I am getting old. Previously, I would have set out to explore Delhi, sleep debt or not. But now, my sleep took priority. Slept for about 3 hours and then went out to visit Connaught Place. The area is instantly recognizable on any map of Delhi, as it has a big circle in the middle with radial roads spreading out in all directions, like spokes on a wheel. It was modeled after the Royal Crescent in Bath, England.

It was basically a shopping and tourist attraction. Walked around, had my dinner, then came back to my hotel to rest and sleep for my early morning journey the next day.