This Time with the Group! BAD FORMATTING AGAIN

People entering the dining hall at the Sikh temple 

Where to begin? This was such an amazing day. More than once on this trip I have teared up, thinking about all I’ve seen and done. I am really HERE. “You’re in India, Karla,” I told myself (yes, aloud) several times. This is not a dream.

This morning we all met Abhi (there’s a sneaky h in his name I didn’t know about) in the vodka bar near the lobby. Not for vodka, but for our orientation. It was great meeting everyone; I am the youngest one in the group of 12. Most people have traveled extensively, and most travel with OAT exclusively. “This is my fourth trip.” “This is our tenth.” And so on.   Most of the people are from California, one couple is from MN, and one is from NC. Everyone is really nice, but of course we tend to gravitate to certain people. I like that Mimi and Sharon said, “Wow, you’re by yourself? You can tag along with us any time!” And after dinner tonight I walked around Khan Market with Charlie and Diane (“Just remember Prince Charles and Princess Diana,” Charlie said helpfully) and we squeezed into a tuk tuk to get back to the hotel. After our driver found out we were Americans, he declared, “Ah! America! Obama country! We like Obama. We don’t like Trump.”

Anyway, Abhi is a wonderful guide. He told us about himself and then described the itinerary all the guidelines of the trip (“If something is upsetting you, tell me right away. Don’t wait until the next town to tell me. Then it’s history. Am I clear for that?”) That kind of thing. Then we boarded our giant tour bus and off we went to a Sikh temple. 

Abhi said that with OAT we’re travelers, not tourists. So we see and do things that many tourists wouldn’t. We parked about 15 minutes away from the temple and Abhi told us the rules of crossing the crazy busy Delhi streets. “Stay with me and cross when I cross, but don’t go fast! Take your time. Act like a holy cow. They walk slowly when cars are zooming around them and drivers make way for them because the drivers aren’t distracted.” Abhi has the holy cow walk down pat! (Speaking of holy cows, I haven’t seen any yet. Have only seen many kinds of birds [mostly mynahs but also bright green parrots], palm squirrels, and some macaque monkeys.)

 Taking photos of the outside of the temple (left) are allowed, but not of the inside. Which is too bad—it was gorgeous! We all had to take our shoes and socks off in a nearby room, cover our heads with scarves, wash our hands in a sink and our feet in a trough, and then walk through the square and into the temple. If someone had told me I would one day be walking barefoot in New Delhi, I don’t think I would have believed them! It felt great!

The temple room was gold and flowery and filled with people chanting and playing instruments. The worshipers, as we did too, would enter and sit cross-legged on the floor for a while, then leave. We then headed over to the soup kitchen, which is one of those most amazing things I’ve ever seen in my life. The kitchen, all run by volunteers, serves over 10,000 people a day every day. Anyone can come eat there—it’s a mixture of young, old, rich, and poor. It’s all so well-organized, too. The people arrive and wait in a sort of holding area, then when one group (how big is the group? 400?) is finished the next group is let in. Everyone sits on the floor, back to back, and is served lentils, chickpeas, and chapati. When you’re finished, you take your metal tray to the dishwashers, where it is really loud because of all the clanging.

Then we got to go into the giant kitchen and watch the volunteers make the food, which was one of the reasons I teared up, as mentioned earlier in this post! Massive iron pots to make the curry . . . enormous iron kettles to cook the lentils ... wooden tables on the floor where people rolled dough to make chapatis . . . and of course giant griddles to fry the chapati dough. 

Making curry

Frying chapati dough

I helped roll the dough!

After we helped in the kitchen we went into the hall, sat cross-legged on the floor, and ate with the people. I can’t even describe how that felt. The food was so good and the volunteers were so kind. It was pretty incredible. (Oh, and remember, all this is happening while we’re barefoot, which for some reason made perfect sense!)

My tray of food

Loved her! She didn’t eat but was making sure others got enough food.

I am exhausted and tired of the freaky formatting of this blog (I’m on an iPad grrr) so will tell you after this we went to India Gate (my second time haha), the last place Ghandi lived before he died and the actual place where he was assassinated, and Khan Market, which is actually not seedy at all! We had dinner at a quirky restaurant called Sodabottleopenerwala and the food was the best I’ve had in my entire life. Wait, did I say that last night too?