The Last Day in Delhi

So today is it. In about ten hours we will be boarding a plane to Amsterdam and taking our last look at Delhi. We're all trying to soak it in as much as we can while we still can. It may be a little difficult doing all we would like with the monsoon apparently deciding to greet us on our last day. It started raining about an hour ago and hasn't lessened much since. The entire trip it has rained only a handful of times, and each time it has only rained for a few hours at most, so perhaps we will get lucky and be able to go outside without coming back in soaked to the bone.

Thursday most of the day was spend in the office working on a presentation to give to Dr. Lall as a preview of the presentation we will present to the Provost and Board of Directors at USI in the coming months. However Dr. Banerjea made sure we didn't spend the entire day working. She took us to the ruins of a very old campus complex/mosque/tomb in Old Delhi before we ate Himalayan Indian food at a restaurant called Yeti (she has made it her mission to make sure we eat more than just Punjabi food while here, which is the type of Indian food served in the Delhi region). It was very delicious, and surprisingly slightly spicier than much of the food we have eaten.

Yesterday we presented to Dr. Lall and Dr. Banerjea before eating lunch in the office and meeting Dr. Lall's son, who works for the IMF and the World Bank. He is just as highly intelligent as his parents, and provided some very thought provoking discussions on things involving the U.S. and Indian economies.

After lunch Hari and Dr. Banerjea took us around Delhi to see a Buddhist temple, a Hindu temple and the Jama Masjid (the biggest mosque in India, or so we've been told).

 The Buddhist Temple

 The Hindu Temple

 Jama Masjid

It is amazing the different cultural groups all living together peacefully for the most part. Each area we visited had its own distinct population and feel to it. That has been one of the best things about India. There are so many different types of people that the term Indian is so general it can't even begin to describe the various people that coexist in this country.

The night ended with us going back to the restaurant at the top of one of the India Habitat Center buildings where we ate the first or second night in India. Dr. Lall, his son, Bachan and Sanje (a man from SDS who helped us translate some in the village in Alwar) all joined us for another night of overeating from the Punjabi buffet. It was all very emotional to be quite honest. Dr. Lall gave a small impromptu speech about how great the trip has been for him and how great it has been to have us there. All of us were very touched by how much he and the rest of SDS have done for us, and were slightly saddened by the thought that after dinner it would pretty much all be over. Dr. Lall and his son drove us back the hotel, where we said our final goodbyes.

Today has basically been spent spending the last of our rupees and savoring it while we can. We fly to Amsterdam at 12:50 a.m., have a three hour layover in Amsterdam until we fly for ten hours to Atlanta. After another couple hours in Atlanta we finally fly back to Evansville at around 5:00 or 6:00 at night Sunday. The next blog post will be from the states.

(By the way, the rain is down to a slight sprinkle now, so perhaps the Indian gods are reading my blog.)

Namastee