Welcome to India, AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

I'd like to get something out of the way right off the bat:

India is absolutely...the most different, animated, wild and chaotic place I've ever been to. ever. Okay let me rephrase that, what litle I have seen of India is the most different, animated, wild and chaotic place I've ever been to.

Out of all my travels(which are numbered admittedly) I have never seen such a diverse group of people and animals live side by side so openly and oderously. Is that even a word? well, you know what I mean any way. There are people and cows and dogs and cats and garbage and birds and insects and every kind of automobile or wheeled machine, everywhere. I can tel you right now that everything I've seen of this country could be documented and sold to National Geographic. Everything that enters my vision is a beautiful and/or bizarre photograph.

The roads in Delhi are jam packed with absolutely every wheeled mechanism invented, all vying for the same road space, all honking and yelling at every chance and every close call. And believe me there are close calls(read: accidents) all the time. Don't worry, there seems to be a method to the madness, although I have no idea what that method is.

We(Amelia, Joanna and I) Are staying in the tibetan district of New Delhi called Majnu-Ka-Tilla, at a hostel called Lhasa(laza) House. The staff are super friendly and the district is really a series of connected alleyways free of a lot of the insanity that is Delhi, i.e. cows and traffic and mountains of garbage. The area we're staying in is pretty far from downtown, but the subway is only a 15 rupee($.30) rickshaw(three wheeled bicycle taxi) ride away!. We went downtown today and we all agree that where we're staying is awesome, downtown is so loud and so crazy, and for our jet lagged and sleep deprived minds it would be more overwhelming than it already is.

The flights here were fine, although the flight from Beijing to Delhi has to be one of the weirdest plane rides I've ever been on. The plane was full of East-Indian people, and they all seemed to know one another, and they all talked and walked back and forth in the isles talking to different friends and family. The poor stuardesses couldn't keep up with the demands of snacks and drinks that were being demanded constantly. It was a very loud, boisterous ride the whole 7 hours to Delhi.

Amelia and I arrived in Delhi first and decided to wait for Joanna's flight that landed 2 hours later. Unfortunately her flight was delayed by two hours and Amelia and I thought it would be better to wait for Jo than to make her face Delhi alone. That brought Amelia and I's total time in transit to about 36 hours. That is a long time without a lot of sleep, let alone the 13 hour time difference. In a bizarre coincidence, I ran into Hannah Couper, an english girl that Jo and I made friends with in Vietnam last year, waiting for her mum in the airport. It turns out that she's here for a few months as well and were going to try and meet up and some point. The world is a small place, I mean what are the odds? it was really weird.

Delhi is definitely the most polluted city I've visited and it looks permanently foggy outside. It was very confusing to our jet-lagged brains that because of the pollution, sunrise and sunset look exactly the same, so it felt like the day was done and we could go to bed, when really it was 10am. We slept for a few hours in the morning and then ventured downtown.

I am exhausted and overwhelmed and overjoyed all at the same time right now.

I can't really believe I'm here right now, It feels like no time has past since I was traveling last time, and all of my travel habits have come back to me like I'd never left. I think that maybe it's such a huge change in scenery and lifestyle that I can't really put the two lives together, one at home, the other traveling.

OR...

I'm just exhausted and overwhelmed, and trying in vain to make sense of the enormous change of pace my life has just undergone.

I think it's time to put the keyboard down, I'm starting to get philosophical, and that's a bad sign, trust me.

Thanks for reading,
I'll talk to you soon.

-Ben