India, Round 1

Mentally. Exhausted.
So far India and I have gotten along alright (so far) on a love/hate basis. There is so much going on in this place that there's no way I'll begin to understand by the end on my short 8 days here. But, its been a crazy learning experience so far.
India has a huge learning curve for foreigners coming with little or no knowledge about the way things work, like I was when I stepped off the plane. This became real apparent when I booked train tickets from the airport kiosk. It took an inordinate amount of time to do so...first off, the kiosk dude wasn't there and took 30 minutes to return. Second was the ridiculousness I had to go through to just get change for big bills (India pet peeve #1 - it seems like when you need small change for something, noone has it, or won't give it up). The whole ordeal took about 2 hours to do, just at the limit of the time that the driver for my hostel was there for. Luckily, due to traffic, I was able to call the hostel and get a ride relatively easily, which was lucky because the place was in the middle of nowhere, crazytown, south delhi. But that first ride... seeing continous rows of tiny shop after tiny shop (behind piles of garbage and dirt on the sidewalks) was a good look into what to expect while travelling this place.
The hostel was awesome, had a charismatic owner that spoke almost flawless English - too bad the same couldn't be said about the some of the other staff... (India pet peeve #2 - people that can speak a little English have a really difficult time communicating because of poor pronuncitaion - I can't tell if their speaking English or Hindi). Still, there was unlimited purified water (allbeit 35 C water), and the place was pretty clean, which was a relief after going through the surrounding area. Met lots of cool people, hung out at some interesting places, and got tout-ed pretty hard one of the days (subject for another time). Also learned about bargaining for transportation, the ridiculous distances between places in India, and how to stay calm on roads without rules when riding in a golf cart's younger brother.
More posts later, gotta go buy another liter of water for the 45 C heat.