I already wrote about Indian Traffic: here are some shorter thoughts on some other impressions from my first visit to India.
- Great birds flapping across the sky just yards from the highway: I thought some sort of vulture, but when my Dad saw the photo he said it was a black kite.
- Temples - 3 or 4 between the hotel and the city. In daylight, you could see the colours - grey / blue / pink mosaic tiles mostly. In the evening it was the 20'-high monkey-god statue at the entrance that caught the eye. I would love to go back and look around those temples.
- High-rise blocks, buildings of glass and steel, as futuristically curved and cantilevered as you would see in any major European city.
- Building sites so dusty and chaotic-looking that it was hard to believe that these futuristic buildings would emerge from them - and yet they do.
- Dusty, crowded, low-rent low-rise concrete apartment blocks right around and inbetween the glass and steel office blocks.
- A Mercedes overtaking a cow: cows, of course, wander freely by the roadside.
- A dog running across the highway: even in rush-hour drivers braked to let it cross.
- That beautiful sideways head-shake that Indians do when you are talking to them. If I visit India for more than a few days I am sure I will start doing this too.
- Indian food. A colleague advised being a vegetarian while in India, and certainly the vegetarian food was quite delicious. And curry for breakfast is a fantastic idea.
- The number of people everywhere. So to have 3 security guards and 2 doormen round the clock is no problem: to have 3 people clipping the grass is no problem: to have 3 ladies sweeping dust from the driveway is no problem.
- Sweet coffee! I forgot to tell the coffee wallah I didn't want sugar, and boy was it sweet. But disappointingly they didn't have real chai in the office.
- The disappointingly Western food at the hotel: of three restaurants, one was a steakhouse, one Italian, and one served a mixture of Asian cuisines (Malay, Indonesian and Chinese at least alongside Indian food).
- Genuinely friendly people everywhere: even the security guards at the airport said 'hello' and 'thank you'. And the politeness and willingness to oblige shown by the manager at the hotel lounge club when we wanted beers after the Happy Hour was over was a joy to behold.
- The rubber stamp is alive and well and living in India: to leave the country we acquired no less than 5 different stamps, on boarding cards, visas, exit forms, and hand-luggage tags.
- As usual as a Brit abroad, awestruck at the multi-lingual capabilities of everyone else (well, except Americans). For almost everyone in India, English is a second language, and yet they speak it amazingly well.