A Day in Delhi

* Wake at 7:00 a.m. and realize you caught a cold from being crammed in a sleeper class compartment with approximately a zillion people and twice that many germs on the train to Jaipur last weekend.

* Go downstairs to the hot breakfast prepared by your fantastic, adorable cook Louis.

* Drink tea and take Sudafed + multivitamin + vitamin C + ibuprofen.

* Take a bucket bath and get dressed

* Check email

* Shove books in bag, check to see you've got coins for the bus, walk out the door

* Walk out of the neighborhood to the bus stop, wait for the 500, jump on the moving vehicle because bus "stop" is a figurative term

* Perform contortionist maneuvers to squeeze your way into a seat when one becomes free, look to see whether the windows have glass

* If it's Tuesday, accept the sweets that one of the conductor/ticket guys hands out as an offering to one of the nameless gods - because those offerings are probably the only reason the bus is still running

* Push your way to the front of the bus as you're going past the Parliament buildings, then jump of the not-quite-stopped bus outside the metro station

* Get patted down, have your bag x-rayed, get on the clean and pretty metro - yellow line to Vishwavidyala

* Walk to Ramjas College because it saves you ten rupees on the cycle rickshaw and class won't start on time anyway

* Hang around the college, where you may or may not have classes

* Walk back to the metro, stopping to buy momos for ten rupees from the lady by the metro station

* Take the metro to Patel Chowk, where you walk upstairs and find an auto-wallah to take you to Nizamuddin for no more than rs. 40

* Attend IES classes, where you'll most likely be kept late, just to balance out the fact that the professor at Ramjas probably showed up 15 minutes late

* Jump in an auto to go home to Neeti Bagh, stressing that it's NEE-ti Bagh, NOT Moti Bagh, which is approximately four kilometers in the exact opposite direction

* Arrive home in time for dinner and realize that you're too tired to write long blog posts

My auto-wallah today confused me. First he told me he was charging double what I wanted to pay, but he ended up driving alongside me when I started walking towards another auto-wallah parked on the side of the street. He took me where I wanted for the price I told him. However, he went a different way, and was going to the actual railroad station, not "YMCA, Railway station ke pas" (YMCA, near the railway station). I yelled "Bhaiya!" to get his attention - it means "brother" but is a vocative term used to address auto-wallahs, shopkeepers, etc. - and he looks at me through his rearview mirrors and says "No bhaiya." Not really sure why he said that, but I tell him to go left instead of right and he does. Then I told him to go right at the next traffic light, and as we're approaching the intersection, he says, "No right." I said, "Yes, right. That's where I need to go." And he smiles and says, "No right." And I said, "Yes. Turn. Right. Right!" And he does. When we finally get to the Y, I say "Bus, tik hai," which means, "That's it, that's fine," and he slows down, has this big grin on his face, looks at me and asks, "Hindi? Hindi bol?" (You speak Hindi?) I reply, "Thori-thori Hindi" ("Just a little Hindi...") as I'm getting out, and I hand him my money. He gives me correct change without trying to tell me he doesn't have any smaller bills, then shakes my hand and says, "Goodbye, friend. Good day."

I was confused. The whole time he was acting like I was this crazy stupid white girl who didn't know anything (even though I spoke to him in Hindi when I first asked if he's go where I needed to go), and then by the end of the trip I was his friend. I don't get it. But I finally got where I was supposed to be for a fair price and was riding in a brand new, clean autorickshaw, and my Hindi's getting better, no matter how amused the auto-wallahs act. Yesterday my auto-wallah was laughing at me and repeating everything I said whenever I said something in Hindi. I guess it's just that funny.

Tomorrow I'll write about Jaipur. I swear. Because on Friday we're leaving for Ajanta and Ellora, so I have to be caught up by then. (And it was awesome.)

Blogging's hard.