Shopping? Already?

We had a driver pick us up from the airport last night to take us to the hotel. This is quite common here. In fact, there is the huge parking lot just outside the arrivals hall that is dedicated to hired car parking. Huge, but not huge enough, as there are always more cars than available parking spots. The result is that the cars end up parked bumper to bumper, two or three deep. The Indian solution to this problem is for the drivers to leave their cars with the brakes off and the transmission in neutral. When a driver needs to move his car from somewhere in the middle of this pile, he simply pushes one or two (or, in many cases several) cars out of the way until he has a path to the exit. Its sort of like those sliding number puzzles.

Carol did all of the planning for our first day of exploration in Delhi. Much to my surprise our adventure consisted entirely of shopping. Not quite true: as Carol patiently explained it to me, she was just "checking prices" so that she would later know what to pay when she got serious, later in the trip. So even though she didn't actually buy anything today, the net result for me was the same: no interesting photo ops. We did have some fun trying to get back to our hotel from the downtown areas where we spent the day... maybe I should back up. We started off deciding that we would not pay the hotel's exorbitant rate of $30 for the use of an air-conditioned car and driver for the entire day, but instead use taxis and tuk-tuks to get around. Getting downtown was easy - an hour in a taxi to go 10 miles cost us $4. It was when we tried to get back that it got interesting. Indian taxi and tuk-tuk drivers have always been an entrepreneurial lot. With the recent severe down-turn in the economy, they have become a bit more desperate and aggressive. After experiencing the less-than-honest navigation skills to two tuk-tuk drivers in our inter-city travels, we decided to call it quits for the day. We ended up in a rather serious negotiation with one driver and his agent (did I mention that all the best taxi drivers have agents?) over the cost of getting us back to our hotel. The bidding started at $12. Thanks to Carol's superior negotiating skills, that she honed in the small craft villages of West Bengal, we got the final price down to $5. Carol would like to add at this juncture that I totally wimped out during this critical process. I like to think of it as delegating responsibility.