anton

I'm still in Delhi, and by christ I can't wait to get out of it.

I'm staying in a marble building three storeys above the city. The place has character, and cold, clean water, but that's all I can really say about it as a place to live temporarily. Although, I suppose, I'm appreciative of the fact that it's height means I'm far from the dirty, ugly streets below.

Delhi is a filthy, foul-smelling testament to much of what is wrong with humanity. The area I'm staying in - the old British district - continually serves to dish up the worst of India. Boring markets where there's nothing worth two bucks to buy; thousands of cars with a predictable disregard for the sanctity of human life; and hordes of people who exist solely to harass me.

I can ignore all that, for the most part. But on the few occasions I've found the strength to leave my room, I've been confronted with men lying in gutters, their fingers crudely cut off, stumps badly forming. I've seen legless men sitting in the middle of the road, hoping for spare change or a quick death. And I've been forced to hang around a bunch of fatcat tourists, mainly American, who walk around in shorts and dorky Nike shorts getting ripped off at every turn, and paying back India by being a personalised, face-to-face manifestation of gross cultural imperalism.

Whatever though, right? That's all part of the experience. Sure, and I can't wait for it to end.

But for the past two nights, and for the next two, I've been doing my best to shake the blegh-in-the-stomach that has predictably hit me. I'd no doubt be a little chirpier - a little more able to see the good things here! - if I didn't feel like throwing up fairly often.

So, I mainly lie in my small hotel room, reading letters by Hunter S. Thompson, and watching bad movies on HBO Asia. The isolation is starting to creep me out. My only contact in the past few days - bar two walking trips around the city - have been with a random German guy and the staff of the hotel, who seem hellbent on trying to rip me off as much as possible.

Ah well. This ugliness has only gone on for two or three days, and it'll be over soon. You take the bad and the ugly with the good. And India, at its best, is everything amazing about the world. At it's worst, it makes me want to punch myself - and humanity - in the face.

Thanks for the comments on the last entry. Having half-consistent access to the Internet for the first time on the trip is good, and hearing from people who aren't asking me for spare change is a rare pleasure. Plus, I can read the news, making India feel a little bit less like the insular, myopic wasteland of international news it seems to be.