Emily's Worldview

My brother David and I are traveling in India! The trip did not get off to an auspicious start. While David was in India being scammed by the first two taxi drivers he met, I was in Tanzania first rebooking my plane ticket, cancelled by the airline, and then hunched over a toilet in homage to some questionable meat I had for my last dinner in Arusha. But I made it to the airport, and on and off the appropriate planes, and soon David and I were reunited at our hotel in Delhi.

And it was all so...India. The streets all crammed with people, cows, horses, bicycles, rickshaws, and stands and stores selling every kind of food and fruit and drink and shiny brightly colored thing. At the monuments we visited in the city, Indian people gaped at us and the old buildings in turn. We gaped back, taking in groups of young men in Eurotrash jeans with slicked hair, women in vivid saris with red bindis, men in turbans, babies with their eyes lined with kohl. We found a place to eat, managed not to get hit by any cars, browsed in the market.

We were pleased with ourselves for navigating the city successfully as we jumped on a bicycle rickshaw to go from a historic mosque to a Bollywood movie theater. The driver seemed confused, however, about where we were going and kept stopping to ask for directions, taking an ever more circuitous and deserted path. But when we said the name of the movie theater and the circle it was on, he smiled and nodded, and repeated what we said. Then, on one of his shortcuts, we came around a corner and saw a group of children holding water balloons on the roof of a building. No, no, no, we shook our fingers at them; 1, 2, 3, the balloons hit their marks.
Emily and David, welcome to India.