New Delhi, India – what to visit
Hey hey! When I started this blog I promised to myself that I will share my honest impressions of the places I am visiting. It is true that people have different tastes and we like different things, which is fair. What I don’t like is how the touristic industry shows only beautiful parts, but hides the ugly reality. It is good to show the positive side of the place, but if you organize a trip it is really useful to know what else to expect in order to be prepared and not to be disappointed in the end. This is why I will tell you about my trip to India in the most honest way, exactly how it was. Let’s start with what to visit while in New Delhi, India.
Our trip itinerary was New Delhi, Agra, Jaipur and Goa.
New Delhi
I am coming from a small country, relatively poor, compared to other European countries, my family was never rich and I am not a spoiled girl visiting 5 star hotels only. I was prepared that this trip might be challenging for me, especially in terms of hygiene, but I was absolutely open-minded and ready to embrace the adventure.
Many hotels offer airport transfer and it is really useful when you travel to an exotic destination like India. The hotels that we normally choose are mix between good quality and affordable price. When we chose where to stay we picked only hotels with 8.5 to 9+ rating in Booking.com. Not because we are pretentious, but because we wanted a clean safe place where to be able to get proper rest without feeling uncomfortable. And we have selected perfectly! All the hotels were nice and clean (except the last one, but I will tell you more about it in the end). If you go for the expensive ones, of course you can find extraordinary service, but this way of traveling is not for us.
Our hotel in New Delhi was nice, the problem was the location. We stayed at The Prime Balaji Deluxe Hotel. Delhi is a huuuuge city, there are 27 million people living there. Yes, this is around 4 times the population of Bulgaria! We were planning to go to Agra really early in the morning, at 6 a.m., so we decided to pick a hotel close to the train station. Not the smartest choice ever as we realized afterwards. When we arrived the weather was not really good, it was hot, humid and about to rain. Well, in this season is always hot and humid, but at least it doesn’t rain every day. Not this day though. We were super hungry so we decided to go for a walk and find a place to eat while sightseeing. Being white and blondish in India makes you the number one attraction wherever you go. You will think – well, it is nice to get all that attention, but not really. We knew that it is not the best idea to wear very short revealing clothes, but it was so hot that it was impossible not to wear dress or shorts. I will be honest, the initial cultural shock for me was tremendous, I didn’t feel safe, nor comfortable walking around being watched like this. Maybe it was some kind of self-protection instinct, but I didn’t like it. The train station area is really dirty, crowded and smelly. The traffic in India is crazy! Most of the cars are tuc-tucs and drivers are definitely out of this planet!
For a non-Indian person will be deadly to drive there. There are no rules, everybody is making dangerous turns whenever they see a free spot, even though they have to pass perpendicularly in order to get from the most left part to the one in the right, imagine this on a road where there are 10 tuc-tucs driving one next to the other. Crazyyyy! But I should admit that I haven’t seen a single accident, it was an organized chaos.
The first day we walked a lot. We went to the famous Chandni Chowk market where you can find millions of stuff. Because of the weather it was muddy and very difficult to walk. 
Here was the first place where I wanted to cry. I couldn’t imagine how I will be able to survive 10 more days in this country. 
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to offend anyone, my post will get more positive soon, but here, at this market I was about to take my stuff and catch the next flight back to Europe. I’ve been to places where you can see poverty, where people don’t have almost anything, where it is dusty and dirty. Here it was another level. 
People can buy things, they have big variety of products. But they don’t respect the nature, they throw out their garbage on the street, the food is decomposing everywhere, the plastic packages are covering the streets.
There are parts of the city that look like a gigantic landfill. It is not about being poor, it is about the respect that you have to the nature, to the environment and to yourself.
We saw a parade of traditional Indian dances and music and it was super interesting.
I found courage to take my phone out in order to film it. Another not really good idea. Suddenly one woman came towards me and grabbed my hand really strong trying to make me give her money for the performance, but my cousin was paying attention and saved me. It was kind of scary! I was more careful after that and tried not to take pictures of the locals as I know that sometimes people don’t like it.
In the next moment it started raining and it made our “amazing” experience even more special. The rain was really heavy and the canalization in New Delhi doesn’t work properly, so all the dirt from the market started floating around and the streets became rivers in minutes.
To help you visualize the experience, imagine walking on a street, your feet are covered in “water” to your ankles, the color of the water is black and you feel different things touching your feet, you are wet to the bones, the humidity is 90% and the smell of fried who knows what is killing all your senses. Yes, I was literally about to cry and go back to the hotel and never go out until the end of my trip. Unfortunately I didn’t know how to go back, so I had to continue.
Finding a place to eat is a hard task in India. We had our vaccines before we went, but being extra careful is needed, because our stomach is not used to their food and stomach problems are really common thing when you travel to India. Eating street food or in a dirty restaurant is really bad idea if you don’t want to spend your whole vacation in the toilet or worse – in a hospital. As it was our first day and we were not aware of how it works in India, we were extra picky and couldn’t find a place to eat for hours. Until the end of our vacation we ate in places I couldn’t even imagine, but you have to adapt to the current situation. Hopefully no one from our crew had stomach issues during the whole trip! And it was actually delicious and spicy, reeeeally spicy! This day we found a pizza Hut restaurant and ate there. On the next day we found a cute Italian/Mediterranean restaurant. 
We wanted to try local food, but the places we found in New Delhi were not the right choice to experiment. Some of the meals we had in the hotel, it was easier to eat there than to look for a place in the city.
My post will become positive after leaving New Delhi ( I promise!), but to be honest there are some parts of the town that are definitely worth visiting. 
The Red fort is one of them. 
This place is stunning! I think I found the key to survive in India – using tuc-tucs to transport you from one place to another and stick to the touristic places as much as possible. 
In other circumstances I prefer to avoid the touristic places, but here they are the only part where it is clean, smells normal and you can truly enjoy the beauty of the monuments.
Maybe to some of you I sound spoiled and silly, but when you visit India, we can share and compare.
Going back to the Red fort, it has magnificent architecture, gorgeous gardens and magical vibe, it is quite big and you can spend some hours inside.
I love taking pictures and I do it a lot. But here, we realized that for most of the local visitors we were more interesting than the environment. 
People were following us, some of them asked to take picture with us or of us, other were taking them without asking, third were taking selfies with us in the background thinking that we don’t realize that we were being photographed.
It was ok in the beginning, I understand that seeing other cultures is interesting and exciting, but at some point we were quite annoyed by all that stalking. So if you go there, be prepared to be photographed a lot.
On the way to the Red fortress there was another improvised market, where people were selling primarily animals –goats, chickens,etc. You can imagine the smell… We saw a lot of cows as well.
As we all know, they are saint in India, so people treat them differently.
To me, they looked like homeless dogs, they were walking around without owners, eating from the garbage, crossing the street, sometimes even sitting in the middle, then the whole traffics stops and waits until the cow decides to move. Pretty funny.
Another beautiful place is the Mosque Jama Masjid .
Before going inside you have to take off your shoes, even though you aren’t entering the mosque, but the square in front of it, you have to step barefoot. 
They also give you clothing, we had our own scarfs, but they didn’t allow us to wear them, it had to be provided by them. 
The place is quite unique, I really liked it.
Beautiful area is the one around India Gate. 
Gorgeous green gardens, small river running across the area, kids playing in the river, many flowers and happy people walking around.
There were monkeys running freely, some of them looked quite aggressive and didn’t like being disturbed.
There are tuc-tucs everywhere, it is easy to find transportation. But never accept the first price they give you, it is normally 3-4 times more expensive than it actually is, so negotiate, negotiate a lot, because there is no fixed price, after several rides you can calculate more or less how much you are supposed to pay for the ride.
The Lotus Temple is another place of contrasts in India. 
It is a beautiful temple in the shape of lotus. Definitely recommended! 
It has enormous gardens surrounding the temple. Another proof how contradictory is the Indian reality.
New Delhi is a gigantic city. There were other things that we wanted to see (like Swaminarayan Akshardham) , but we had only two days there (I was happy about it) and it was hard to visit everything as the places are quite far one from another.
Our next destination was Agra. We chose to use the train. Buying tickets online from India is a challenging exercise. First, it is hard to select the ticket, because they have 8 classes. The website also provides photo material, so you can see how it looks like and believe me, looking at those pictures you might think twice if you really want to use this type of transportation. It also takes a lot of time to receive a confirmation, if you receive any, so patience and tons of exchanged e-mails is the key for success. Book your tickets way in advance, because it is hard to find available tickets.
They have special amount reserved for tourists only, but the country is so crowded, that if you want to be sure that you will travel, buy it as soon as possible. We went to a tourist agency to double check if we really have the reservation and also to help us find the number of the train and our seats. As you can imagine the train station is gigantic. Our train was at 6 in the morning and there were hundreds of people sleeping on the floor in the waiting room, expecting their transportation. The train surprised me positively. We picked the VIP-est class possible, the ticket costs around 20 euros, our wagon was super clean and spacious. It is mainly used by tourists and wealthier Indian people. The rest of the wagons were extremely crowded, people didn’t even fit inside, some of them were traveling outside, holding themselves to every type of handler they could find. During our ride, which was around 2h-2.5h they served us food four times!
Another thing that happened on our way to Agra shocked me a lot. We saw plenty of people squatting on the rails, at 2 meters one from another with a bottle of water next to them. Initially we couldn’t figure it out what they were doing exactly until we saw it! They were pooping! They were pooping on the rails! Afterwards we saw that they also do it next to the roads, outside, where everyone can see them not even hiding in the bushes! First, it was disgusting, second, I was really curious to understand why they do it in such a public place when for instance women are obliged to cover their bodies and heads. I read an article saying that more than 70% of the people in India don’t have private toilets at home and they are forced to do it outside. Why in public – women are frequently victims of rapes this is why they tend to go together and to places where they can see if they are being attacked from distance, this is why they choose open spaces. It is so sad that we are in the 21st century and these things still happen and nobody does anything to stop it!
We finally reached Agra – the home place of Taj Mahal.
More you will read in my next post…
See you soon!