Delhi Slicer

HTemp: 38c

Rain:  0.3"

`-$:  44.99

We arrive in Delhi around midnight, tired and ready to sleep.  It is nice to be in India.  Our bags take forever to show, but the shuttle is there, traffic moves (but who are all these people on the road at this hour?) and the hotel is in our sights soon enough.  And then the guards.  And the barricades.  And then the engine/trunk search.

Welcome to Fort Hyatt.

The view from our hotel window.  They say Delhi is like Los Angeles...

Stranded along a highway and set back from the road, the Delhi Hyatt is its own compound with its own rules for access, designed around the multi-national business visitor.  No one wants an incident.  We go through a hand bag check and a metal detector.  The luggage will be brought up separately.

Only three of four bags arrive.  There's a problem.  "Why do you have knives in your bag?" the nice woman who checked us in asks.  How do we explain that most of our belongings are weeks from arriving in India and what we've included in our four bags are items we needed immediately? And having a few kitchen knives, pardon the pun, made the cut?  The truth does not bring the bag and so it sits in lock up until we check out.  So much for cooking in the room.



Bathroom Break

A nice touch in Delhi Airport's otherwise non-descript modern, endless shed of a terminal, are the bathroom entrances.  Besides the usual stick man/woman signs, there are floor-to-ceiling outrageously glossy and perfected photos of Indian youth representing the corresponding sex in the doorways as you enter.

Each restroom has a different person but each image is as universal as the previous one.  It's a nice Bollywood touch to a usually drab environment.