India by Aidan

Today was our second day in India, though it feels like our two hundredth, or at least our twentieth. Delhi is a bustling city, and that’s under-exageration. There is no obvious rule on the streets, and the number of pieces of litter probably outnumber the number of mammals. No street corner is complete without a dirty street stall, and to the extent there are streetlights, they are surrounded by beggars and merchants.

In the past two days we have visited four monuments, at least two of which are World Heritage sites. On the first day, we went to the Red Fort and a mosque. At the fort, one of the things that I noticed was that there were sandbagged gun emplacements and guards with machine guns. At the mosque, the sheer amount of pigeon poop tends to be the first thing I think of.

Today, we went to a famous abandoned mosque and the first Mongol tomb in India. At the mosque, the tower from which the priest calls people to prayer is facing the wrong direction. All of these towers are supposed to face west, towards Mecca. At the tomb, I was impressed by the fact that the barber got his own big tomb structure.