I left for school via Metro, and my forty-year old English-illiterate bicycle rickshaw driver was wearing an old shirt that said “I think better when I’m drunk”. Not reassuring, but hilarious. Class started an hour and a half late, and was in a big room, but you can hardly hear the professor Shanta Verma because of the noisy fans. She commented on the fans, “Can you students please vacate the front row? I need the fan more than you because I’m the one giving the lecture”. There are four required texts, and then she wants us to go to the library and research journals. Yeah, that’s definitely not going to happen. Yet I still write them down in my notebook as though I will at some point. One time a student asked a question, IN HINDI. And the instructor answered IN HINDI. This is an English-medium university; what if they spoke Chinese at UCs in Engineering classes? That’s going to get really annoying fast, especially if the instructor is hard to understand as is. The instructor seems good and really passionate about the class, India and the World. In order to get a hold of our other teacher to see at what time class begins, the department gave us her cell phone number and told us to call ourselves. That’s completely not awkward. We’re going to have to call ‘nose-goes’ to see who has to call. We rode back and ate at (you guessed it, Fiesta). In Time (I swear the only articles in magazines like that are about India, China, or Israel/Palestine/Lebanon), I read about health outsourcing to India where a heart bypass surgery costs $10,000 including airfare and everything, compared to in the United States which costs anywhere from $50,000-$80,000. If only I had to get a bypass surgery right now... But the doctors are comparable because they study in the US, the wait is short, the hospitals facilities are excellent, you get your own personal assistant, and they can even add on a trip to the Taj Mahal for cheap. I’m definitely going to outsource my healthcare, you save $40,000-$70,000. I spent the entire afternoon trying to book my trip with Alix to Dharamsala, the home of the Dalai Lama, and the center of the Tibetan government in exile. We rode to Connaught Place to look at Travel Agents down a back alley. I guess we couldn’t put two and two together to realize that ‘back alley’ equals ‘shady’. The first place looked online and told us no train seats were available. Then he quickly whipped out a photo album of Kashmir and told us he could fly us there for $165, and we left. Then the second place the guy kept sending his servant outside, somewhere, to come up with prices for the train, and he said it was not full but we had to travel via the most expensive class. We left. Then we rode over to New Delhi Railway Station, in New Delhi, but it was more congruous to Old Delhi with dilapidated buildings, small dusty streets, and poor people and bicycle rickshaws everywhere. The outside façade of the station was like a busy airport. The eye was overburdened with the sea of black and yellow of taxis, green and yellow of motor rickshaws, and a large drive-up lane with an awning. The area was teeming with thousands of Indians from lower, middle, and upper classes, waiting in lines, walking to catch trains, sitting on the ground waiting, meeting their families, and trying to rip us off. Inside the building was just as busy, people waiting in lines everywhere or just sitting on the ground with their luggage. We had to go to the tourist office, where we waited for them to no avail because we didn’t have our passports. We had to order our tickets four hours beforehand, so we had to hurry home to get our passports and rush back. The Metro is incredibly fast and efficient, considering how bottlenecked traffic is here (this could be because everything from pedestrians to cows to bikes to buses to trucks share the roads, and freeways don’t exist). We walked out of the Metro station at New Delhi, on a bridge past all the platforms. Indians from all walks of life sat waiting on the platforms. The color-coated cars of trains pulled up to the dozen lanes of railway. The class was clearly labeled on each car in English and Hindi. When we attempted this time to buy tickets they told us that student visas could not use the Foreign Tourist Office. So we had to go stand in line like all the Indians at the ticketing office. It was outside the station a ways, and consisted of a crowded but AC (Thank God) room where thousands of people waited in line to purchase tickets. There were probably 50 lines. It was like a baseball game. However, only two served women. The ratio in that room was probably one hundred men to one woman. And every woman was accompanied by a man. We had to wait in line (if you consider a push-and-shove free-for-all a line), which took 45 minutes because the employee decided arbitrarily to take a 15-minute break. Then he told us it wasn’t possible to order tickets because it was less than four hours before departure. We pleaded, but he told us the best he could do was put us on the waiting list. So we agreed, until we discovered the waiting list was 245 PEOPLE LONG. This system is so unintuitive and disorganized. From now on, I’m using a good travel agent who takes a commission; it’s worth it to avoid this nightmare which wasted five hours of my life this afternoon. We returned, again, to the Foreign Tourist Office, and I guess the manager pitied us so much that he let us buy tickets for tomorrow. All trains to Pathankot are overnight sleeper express trains. Classes include the following: First class AC (what the British used to travel), second and third class AC (two and three levels of bunks with AC), sleeper (three bed tiers with no AC), chair class (reserved seats), and unreserved seats (quintessential economy Indian trains with people hanging out and sitting on top). We were able to get sleeper class for tomorrow leaving at 10:30 pm and getting into the station at 6:30 am, and a return on Sunday night. However, because Mariel and Kim chastised Alix for compromising her safety by walking outside alone, we are telling everyone we got tickets for 2AC. But really, we are traveling in sleeper for only 400 Rs round-trip, and are going to have to sleep clutched to all of our belongings to ensure we are not robbed. After that whole fiasco, we ate in a South Indian restaurant in Connaught Place, which I enjoyed. Then we hung out in Subway and I took the Metro back, while the rest of them ended up talking to these really annoying British guys in a hookah lounge for hours.
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