the hidden treasures of Old Delhi

I feel like I've reached a new stage of culture shock. Most of Thursday we spent in Old Delhi, a place where Westerners rarely go - even taxi drivers won't normally take non-Indians there. I didn't think it was possible for anywhere to be more chaotic than what I had already seen of Delhi, but I was wrong. Old Delhi was like walking straight into the middle ages. The winding labyrinth of streets, markets that have probably been there for centuries, and the historic Red Fort and temples in the area made "normal" tourist attractions (ie. anything in Paris, New York or London) seem like Disney World. Old Delhi has its own culture that is completely separate from the rest of the city: I mused that there might be people there that had never left the maze of alleyways to see the rest of the city in their whole lives. Pastimes there are those of the genteel Urdu ways of yore; kite flying and pigeon training especially. Every so often you'd see flocks of pigeons flying in formation, directed by some invisible trainer. I feel like a lot of Delhi is that way - this city is not overrun with tourists, and one of our guest speakers told us that there are so many hidden or decrepit historical sites of interest that the Preservation Society can't keep up with them. Is it a lack of interest in history in favor of pure survival? Has Delhi just been relatively undiscovered because it is so intimidating? (save the sections of the city that were razed and remade by the British of course). It's a fairly difficult culture to break into or go unnoticed anyway - and the resentment toward anything English is still here. I feel like it takes a lot of work even to begin to understand the culture, and many times more work to feel a part of it. But as the excursion to Old Delhi exhibits, the rewards are very much worth the catcalls, dehydration and chaos involved in getting there. I hope that I'll start to get even the first hint of that by the time I leave.

In other news, the heat has been unbearable the last few days - 41 degrees celsius or higher (that's 112 to those of you stateside). The car hiring companies that get us around town keep running out of cars with AC because they're so in demand. Beggars have stopped asking for money and started asking for a drink from my water bottle. There's this wind that blows in from the desert this time of year and it feels like you're sticking your head in a furnace (a really dusty furnace). We're not even in the desert yet, either - where actually, they are having caste riots at the moment. Stay tuned for more on that...