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August 03 Remembering IndiaIt's been a year and a half since our trip to India. Time hasn't done much to blur my excitement about the country as a tourist destination, at least the parts I saw. Salwa and I were reminiscing last night about funny things that happened.
The trip was logistically complicated, with a couple of nasty airline connections. One of these was in Mumbai, between flying back from Aurangabad and flying out to Udaipur. We had something like six hours between the flights, in the middle of the night. .
Mumbai airport - at least the part we were in - has very little seating, and isn't a great place to stay overnight. Salwa arranged a cheap hotel in Mumbai so we could take a nap and have a shower. As we left the terminal, we ignored the hawkers and went to the official taxi queue. When our turn came, we got a pubescent driver in an ancient taxi that shuddered every time he coaxed it into gear. We told the driver where we were going, and he nodded and off we went.
It was getting close to midnight, but we could still see clusters of people here and there sleeping on the sidewalks or walking slowly along. There was still plenty of traffic on the main thoroughfares. Each time we came to a traffic light, the driver would beckon to someone and talk to them. They'd confer briefly, both staring at my wife and I, and then break off as the light turned. The first time this happened we wondered if something sinister was at play, but by the time it because routine, we realized it didn't have anything to do with us, per se.
On the back streets, the driver went more and more slowly and then stopped. It turned out he had no idea where our hotel was - or even *what* it was - or where to find it. I'm not even sure he knew where he was either. My wife dug out her maps, but they were of marginal use because the labels were in English. Another half hour of driving lazily around, and the driver did manage to find the place, thanks to the generosity of many other taxi drivers.
As we got our luggage out of the back of the taxi, our driver asked for 720 rupees. His meter read 17 rupees, which was then supposed to be multiplied by a time-based number on the chart mounted next to it, for an actual total of 350 rupees. We laughed out loud, and Salwa made it obvious she knew how the price was supposed to be calculated. We gave him 400 rupees, and ignored his request for another 50 beyond the 50 tip we'd already given. I guess they're used to people who don't realize they don't have to give whatever the drivers ask for.
Our hotel was the ISKCON Guest house, at the Hari Rama Hari Krishna Mandeer temple. Hari Krishna's are a constant source of jokes in the US, but the hotel - attached to the temple - had a reputation as being clean and cheap. The lobby was beautifully set out in marble, but the room itself was spartan at best, with rough linen sheets, and a bathroom with basic fittings. The shower, for example, just sprayed onto the floor and drained into the middle of the room. We managed to catch a few hours sleep, and had a cab called to get us back to the airport for our flight to Udaipur, which went much smoother: everyone knows where the airport is.
The moral of the story is, sometimes sleeping on an airport floor is a better idea than hoofing it out in the middle of the night when you don't know the language, the area, or the hotel you're going to. Even so, it was an interesting experience.
March 06 Polyphasic sleepMost people have never heard of polyphasic sleep. The idea is, it's possible to condition yourself to sleep in many small chunks rather than one large one.
I've seen discussion of three types of polyphasic sleep schedules, each of which requires a daily routine:
The interesting thing about these schedules: I've seen dozens of reports of people trying them, but only two reports of anyone succeeding. One of the more interesting ones is blogged here. The whole idea is quite enticing: apply a significant amount of discipline to your sleep schedule, and you'll get 5-6 hours of extra time to do with as you will. Whether it can work in practice is completely a different question. December 30 Memories via YouTubeI'm finally well after fighting a cold for a week. It was one of those cotton-in-the-head colds that keeps you from being able to think. Yeck.
To entertain myself, I spent time looking at old videos on YouTube. I have to say, this is one of the things YouTube is best for: I love music videos, and watching some of my favorites from the last 30 years is a great way to burn a few hours!
I used to watch Tiny Toons religiously. One of my favorite episodes was a series of small music videos written to tunes performed by 'They Might Be Giants.' The two that I remember the best are Particle Man and Istanbul, check them out if you're a TMBG or a Tiny Toons fan!
On the traditional music video front, there's Sensoria by Caberet Voltaire - it's held up surprisingly well. Safety dance doesn't fare quite so well, but is still entertaining. That got me thinking about Scrubs, which brought up the following two Turk segments: Turk doing a bit of safety dance himself, but even better, when Turk follows up The Todd trying out for a hospital music group dancing to Poison.
I've said it before, I'll say it again. The internet is my favorite thing ever, the universal library. It's hard to believe the days and nights I spent as a kid waiting to record snippets of my favorite songs from the radio onto cassette. Now literally everything in the world is available online, you can find it instantly, sample it for free, and buy it to keep it. Life is good :)
December 24 Just another day...It's been *ages* since I've written on here. As it's the holidays and I'll have a bit of time on my hands (once I get my computer working again), I hope to remedy that situation.
A side note. Most of my blog posts are written with search engines in mind. Sometimes this can work against you. We went to Sharm El Sheikh recently, and I was curious whether our favorite hotel really had broadband yet or not. I searched, hoping to find information about it. Unfortunately, the only relevant article I found was from myself, talking about how I *hoped* they would have broadband soon. Ah, the irony :)
August 08 William Gibson, reluctant futuristI just read an excellent interview with one of my favorite authors, William Gibson. While I can't give him credit for me getting into computers, I can certainly say he helped me think about them in a different way, and to stretch my electronic horizons beyond games. The guy is amazing, and has a quite unique perspective on being human, as well as our near future.
If you haven't read any of his books, you might want to give them a try. Certainly no cyberpunk enthusiast can claim to be such without knowing their roots. Neuromancer was the seminal start, but his latest books - although not necessarily sci-fi as such anymore - are also quite engaging. July 22 Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. RowlingWhile not so rabid a Harry Potter fan that I dragged myself out of bed at midnight to get the book, I did have it by 10am the next day. Mostly I wanted to make sure I read it before I tripped across any spoilers in the press or other places. For example, when the last one came out, a nitwit was running around WoW yelling "* dies at the end!" (with a name instead of *). This is no doubt the same sort of fellow who enjoys making people angry in games, griefers they're called.
But I digress.
No spoilers in this blog entry, out of deference to those who have yet to read the series or this book in particular.
The Harry Potter books, for my money, have ranged from very good to excellent. This one definitely weighs in at the 'excellent' end of that scale. Rowling always intended seven books for the series and this is the seventh. It's a fitting conclusion for the Potter series, though I have to say I'm sorry to see it over with. It choked me up more than once. It's always hard saying goodbye to characters and a world you've come to love.
The book is as big as any of them - 759 pages in hardcover. It starts strong and stays strong. There were a few hundred pages near the end of the first half where it wasn't as engaging (though still quite good), but I couldn't manage to put it down for the last half. Like the other books before it, despite its size it's quite a quick read.
Here's to Harry Potter! If you're into it and haven't already bought a copy, it's well worth full cover price. July 20 "Made by hand"It used to be that "made by hand" was a mark of quality. In many ways, for the older generation, I guess it still is. Recently, though, I've come to question whether this is still warranted.
As little as 30 years ago, mass production techniques were relatively coarse, with questionable quality control. The marks of mass production were plain on most items: prominent seams on plastic items, off-center joins on assembled pieces, shoddy stamping and finish on metal items. Nothing a bit of post-production finishing couldn't have fixed, but nobody bothered.
From my perspective, things have changed quite a bit over the last few years. Even cheap consumer goods appear to be made to a high spec. Even if they're not incredibly robust, they're good looking: they meet the objectives of their assembly.
Now, rather than equating "made by hand" with high quality, I tend to read it as "not popular enough to be worth mass producing, your quality may vary." Undoubtedly there are marvellous things being produced by artisans and labelled "made by hand." I'm equally certain that for every one high-quality product, there's a hundred low-quality one whose main selling points are uniqueness and quirkiness rather than quality.
I'd argue, however, that even the uniqueness is an artifact of the number of pieces being produced (not many people can have one) instead of an explicit personality imparted to each piece. It's human nature, and certainly capitalistic, to produce goods as quickly and efficiently as possible if you're making many of them. You do this by finding a routine or groove and sticking to it.
The next time I see "made by hand" on a label, I'll remain suitably unimpressed, and wish the manufacturer enough success to move to an automated assembly line :)
June 29 WoW: Back in the saddle, againI've been travelling a lot for work recently. In the last four months I spent 41 days on the road, and I'll be taking another week-long trip sometime soon.
Travelling for work is a good way to get a lot of stuff done, but it's also a great way to burn out. Two trips ago, I worked both for my work time, and during my entertainment time: work was too accessible, and there was too much to do, so I did very little EXCEPT work. As a consequence, I was exhausted when I got back to Cambridge.
My next trip out, I did two things for my mental health: stayed at a hotel further away (and a little more pleasant to spend time in), and re-enabled my World of Warcraft account. Despite the dangers of addiction, I figured having something to tear me away from work would be a good thing. And it was.
Now I'm back in Cambridge, and I'm still playing. I've managed to keep WoW from being the huge time sink it used to be, thanks to a bit of moderation and the fact that my wife isn't playing this time around. Still, I play a couple hours a day, in the time I'd normally be playing other games. Which is a shame, because I've got six XBox-360 games waiting for attention. Ah well.
WoW is still an amazing game. They added a large expansion 'Burning Crusades' since the last time I played, and it looks amazing. So much more to see and learn! I'll be extremely interested to see how much longer it remains the dominant MMOG. June 11 A Job I LoveIt's Monday morning, and I've managed to drag myself into work at a reasonable time. It's been a rough couple weeks as the stress and the number of things to do build up. Ironic, since I've got a job I love.
What do I mean by 'a job I love'? Four days out of five, if I was independently wealthy, and among my many options one was coming to my job and doing what I do for no pay, that's what I'd do. I believe strongly in what I'm doing, it's intellectually challenging, and I feel like I'm working to change the world (albeit in a relatively trivial manner). It's a good feeling most days.
One of the challenges of a job like this is the danger of investing too much of yourself in it. In my case, I've got no kids or external obligations pulling in any other direction. This makes it easy to get sucked in. Setbacks in the job start feeling like setbacks in real life. When something big doesn't work out, I'm devastated, and spend days or weeks moping around both at work and at home.
Last weekend I explicitly distanced myself from work. I normally check email a dozen times a day, I didn't touch it for two days. Instead, I played games, mowed the lawn, made cookies (a few of which actually got cooked instead of being eaten as dough), and watched a dozen 'lost' and 'house' episodes. By the end of the weekend, I actually felt human again, ready to come in and do what needs doing this week. And maybe, just maybe, enjoy it.
Beware the job you love: if you wind up hating it, you'll have only yourself to blame.
June 04 Good work, Armadillo!Despite my lack of faith in the space program - and the validity of space travel as a national goal, vs other priorities - I've still kept an eye on the private groups working on building a private rocket. The group I've been watching the longest is Armadillo Aerospace, run by John Carmack, more famous for his work on Doom and Quake than his space enterprises.
Up until the X-Prize was won, he updated his site every week with progress his team made towards a viable rocket, through a variety of fuel and engine technologies, and vehicle shapes and goals. After the X-Prize was won (by someone else), the updates dropped to once a month.
Even so, I find myself looking forward to each status update, and checking his site repeatedly as the right time of the month rolls around to see what's happening. It really paid off this week, when I was treated to a movie of their spacecraft taking off, flying up 50m or so, and then landing on a separate concrete pad after about 2 minutes of flight. It doesn't sound like much, but a controlled vertical rocket flight of this magnitude is something I haven't seen since the DC-X met its end famously many years ago, and it's an amazing achievement, especially for a small (if well funded) group of amateurs working only on weekends!
If you're interested, check out Armadillo's news update, or just go straight to the movie.
Congratulations Armadillo, I'm looking forward to seeing how you do at the XPrize-Cup lunar lander challenge this fall! June 03 Crackdown, Perfect Dark ZeroOver the last week or two I've been sick, which for me translates into being less motivated than usual, and spending a lot of time either re-watching things I've already seen, or playing computer games.
I finished two games this weekend, Crackdown and Perfect Dark Zero. Both I'd been told weren't very good. In both cases I disagree with that perspective
Crackdown
You're a genetically modified cop cleaning up a city that's fallen to gangs in the near future, through any means necessary. I enjoyed this game quite a bit. The city is huge, with a lot of interesting details. The graphics are fairly realistic, though with a comic-style interpretation. Gameplay is challenging without being ridiculous. There's a lot of different activities to choose from: basic puzzle solving / timing (climbing up and down buildings, rooftop races), driving (more races), and good old shoot 'em up. I thought this was a great game, and I may dig it out again sometime to play it a bit more.
Perfect Dark Zero
Despite being a 360 launch title (and therefore presumably rushed), I thought the graphics, sound & story were outstanding. There are 14 episodes, with the intro episode being a guided walkthrough. The game controls are fairly nice, and there's a wide variety of gadgets and weapons. In some places the action feels a little too tightly scripted. In others, it's all but impossible to guess what you're supposed to do and which way to go: intuition simply doesn't help. There's no map, so you basically sit there waiting for the system to hint you (which fortunately it does, by putting a flashing path towards the next place you're supposed to go). I felt like the gameplay was a bit uneven, which is a real shame because everything else about the game is marvelous.
I tried the online play for Perfect Dark Zero. It was fun enough, but I wound up in a capture-the-flag game that was still going after two hours, despite the fact that my team had 5 captures so far. I shrugged and quit out, and lost all the fine statistics I'd earned. Ah well. Unlike Crackdown, I don't see myself going back to play through Perfect Dark Zero again.
May 21 What has John been up to?Wow! It's been almost a month since my last entry. What can I say, life has been busy! That's not to say I haven't had free time, but what free time I've had has been spoken for.
Work has been fairly busy. On top of that, I've been heavily addicted to XBox-360 gaming, and getting my gamerscore up. Since the last time I blogged about games, I finished three
I've been doing some reading too. I got back into the 'Black Company' series from Glen Cook. I read books 4 and 5, and went back for #2. I enjoy the writing style, the characters, and the stories. They're all a pretty short read, but still worth picking up. Hopefully I'll get a chance to write a bit more later...
March 27 Schoolhouse Rock - revisitedOne of my happiest sets of memories from childhood is being plonked down in front of the television in my pajamas, watching cartoons all Saturday morning. These days I can look back and make critical comments about their quality, but back then, it was paradise.
In between cartoons, they'd cshow ommercials for every type of toy and sugar-coated food known to mankind. And, occasionally, they'd slip in something educational, masquerading as a pure entertainment cartoon. Called 'School House Rock', these were short cartoons each set to a single song. Some presented Math, others grammar, and still others science or history. The songs were catchy, haunting me to this very day, 30 years later.
If you haven't seen any of these mini-cartoons, it's impossible for me to describe just how engaging they were. But, I can at least give you an idea of their educational content. Here's a quote from one:
Imagine this set to a song that runs through your head for 30 years. One thing's for certain, I'll never forget what 8 times 5 is...
The songs on grammar were equally catchy ("Lolly lolly lolly, get your adverbs here," "Conjunction junction, what's your function? Hookin' up words and phrases and clauses"), though I have to admit they didn't soak in quite as thoroughly. I'd still have trouble telling you the difference between an adjective and an adverb.
If you're also a child of the 60's or 70's, and have fond memories of School House rock, you can actually buy it as a 2-DVD set. I picked it up a few days ago and have been listening and singing off-key for two days solid now.
 Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to work my way from 1 to 12 before I leave for work...
March 24 Catching up is hard to do...I'm finally starting to catch my breath! A lightning trip out to Munich Monday & Tuesday was my last significantly distracting commitment for a while. Now I can focus on enjoying myself a bit, and getting back to Life As Usual, whatever that is.
I've still got every intention of taking some excerpts from my India notes and posting them. Maybe next week. I think the most strenuous thing I'm going to do today is go see 300. It looks purty, hopefully it won't be awful.
After working non-stop for a few weeks (OK, a month or two), it's really hard to get out of the work mindset. If I'm not working or sleeping, then I'm staring vacuously at the screen feeling like I *should* work. Well, not today! Movies and reading (and silly internet movies) are the order of the day.
I've been reading Glen Cook's Black Company series. I read the first two books many moons ago when they first came out, then picked up the fourth one a few months ago after a hiatus of more than a decade. I finished it on my trip to Munich, and was hungering for the next in the series. Imagine my delight when I came home and found out I already have the fifth one, just waiting to be read! I really like the stories, characters, and writing style. I also finished part 1 of The Naked God by Peter Hamilton. The series is good, but BIG, and takes a bit of discipline to get through. I've finished 2-1/2 (or 5, depending upon how you count) books in the series, already around 3,500 pages of reading, and am looking forward to reading the conclusion. There'd better be a big payoff for this much reading!
Back to goofing off for me. I hope your weekend is as carefree as I intend to make my own :) March 14 AhhhhI'm back in Cambridge. While I was away, the seasons changed. Tulips (or some other flower only my wife can identify) were blooming in the backyard, the grass has started growing again, and no longer do I need a wool jacket to ride into work! It's a beautiful scene to come back to, and we're entering my favorite time of year for the area.
There's definitely something to be said for being back at your own domicile after being away, sleeping in a strange bed in a strange room. Away from the rigors of work and safely ensconced in the cocoon formed by my loving wife's watchful eye, I'm starting to feel like a human being again. Well, as long as you don't count my screwed up sleep habits. But that I can live with.
It should be a good few weeks coming up. I have a few responsibilities to wrap up for work over the next two weeks, and then I can start concentrating on doing work for my PhD again, something I'm really looking forward to! Who knows, maybe I'll put together a paper based on results from the last two weeks, maybe I'll make progress doing new research. Ask me in a month :)
For now, I'll kick back and revel in being surrounded by familiar things and back in the company of my wife.
March 10 Too much workI CANNOT believe how busy the last two weeks were. I was on a trip for work. I was expecting a relatively leisurely trip, with time to visit the family, do a little shopping, and kick back.
Ha.
The last two weeks is the third hardest I've ever worked. I clocked 174 hours of work time in 14 days, or more than a month of regular work time. At the end of the last day I finally achieved the goals I'd set out to, but only just. I always look back on these times afterwards with a mixture of pride and confusion. Did I accomplish anything that mattered? Will I remember the results in a year? A month? A week?
Ah well, it's done. I can only try not to do it again.
For completeness sake:
The second hardest I've worked was two years ago, in about the same role I play today, finishing integrating a complex piece of research directly into a complex piece of product code. A set of changes which, after they were done, the product team promptly decided they didn't want anymore, and tossed into the bit bucket. There's a lesson there: nobody ever appreciates something that's free nearly as much as something you make them pay or work for. If you want someone to take care of that new home or car they've just been given, make sure there's at least a token amount of their blood and sweat to lose if they don't. Anyways, I worked for a month straight, some weeks more than 80 hours.
The hardest I've ever worked was near the beginning of my career, when I took over a very cool application a friend had started, but decided he didn't want to do the work of bringing it up to the specifications required to ship. I took on this task, and did a lot of very icky, nasty grunt work, putting in around 120 hours (of honest work) in a single week. I slept between 4 and 5 hours a night, all the rest of my time was at my desk, or occasionally the vending machine or bathroom. OK, I did go home a few nights, so I guess 10 minutes each way driving for those nights. The experience sucked. I don't recommend it. But at least I met my goal and the app shipped.
The last two weeks are behind me now, and I hope the next time I bitch about how hard I work, it'll be for the FOURTH hardest I've ever worked.
And now, back to unwinding... :)
February 18 Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter - XBox-360A year or so ago, I saw Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter (GRAW) on an xbox-360 at work. That was enough to convince me to get a 360, something I'd been resisting for almost six months. The game looked amazing. Set in Mexico City, you're fighting your way through a variety of scenarios, leading a strike team.
Normally I don't like squad games: it's distracting to have to tell the AI what to do, and inevitably they don't do a very good job. On top of this, I had to direct other vehicles, such as tanks and helicopters, telling them where to go and what to attack.
GRAW is an excellent first-person shooter. But, it's also a thinking game. You have to proceed carefully, or you wind up dying, or having critical people on your squad go down, decreasing your chances of success.
It took me a long time to get the hang of GRAW, I picked it up and put it down several times. I finally concentrated on it this weekend, finishing the last third or so of the game. It really is a beautiful game, though perhaps not the belle of the ball anymore, with all the great titles that have come out since.
A couple tips, if you decide to play GRAW:
If you like first-person shooters, especially ones which require strategic thinking, I highly recommend picking up GRAW. India ItineraryOur trip to India was my most memorable in years, perhaps ever. Because of its sheer size, we didn't see much of the country. Still, I would bet that we saw more variety than most natives, if my experiences with foreign tourists in the US hold true. You're much more motivated to wander for wandering's sake when you're a visitor somewhere rather than a resident.
Most of our trip was spent in Rajasthan, a state in the North of India, but we visited a few other states as well. The places we saw include:
There are many wonderful things about India, and I can't wait to go back, though I suspect it will be a few years before I see it again. I'll have much more to say about it later.
King Kong: XBox-360When I told Thore I was playing Kong, he grinned and asked. "So, have you started watching the game yet?"
As it turns out, this is a perfectly legitimate question, at least for the first half of the game. King Kong is beautifully rendered. In some places - especially when Kong or a T-Rex is involved - I had difficulty believing I wasn't watching a pre-rendered clip from the movie. But no, I was able to adjust the camera position and angle. Amazing!
I wish I could say the same thing about the game play. For the first third of the game I was literally following instructions from the other characters and walking through sets with little to do. The game is a mixture of puzzle and combat, but both are pretty straight-forward, and sometimes separated by long walks.
When Salwa saw Peter Jackson's King Kong movie, she expressed mixed feelings. She plopped down on the couch, exhausted from her three-hour stay at the theater, and said "I'm sure there's a good 1-hour movie in there somewhere." That sums up the game nicely. A few of the fights and puzzles ARE interesting, but the game itself is marred by too many segments where you just follow instructions, walking through a nicely rendered tunnel or jungle scene without anything real to do. Worse, the game has many bugs. For three different chapters, AI didn't trigger the completion sequence correctly, and I had to quit the episode and re-start.
Should you play Kong? If you're a fan of the movie, it's like getting to play the movie as well as watching it, which I suppose is the goal. If you're addicted to gamer points, it's an easy 6-8 hour way to earn a cool 1,000 points just by finishing the game. If you're looking for an exciting game, though, you're better off sticking to others. I don't want my time back, but I'm not going to be replaying this one either.
February 14 Delhi, IndiaOur trip to India could be functionally divided into two categories: Delhi, and everywhere else. We only spent four days in Delhi, but the look and feel of the place was completely divorced from anything else we saw.
First a disclaimer: Delhi is a HUGE city. The people we asked there thought it was around 25 million people. We saw only a tiny fraction of the city: New Delhi near the capital, Sunder Nagar, roads to and from a few attractions, and the Bazaar in old Delhi. So, my impression is formed completely from what cannot be a representative sample of sites. Still, it's what I saw, and so what I'll describe here.
After the rest of India and what I'd seen in films, I expected Delhi to be a dirty, cow-filled concrete jungle with mud streets and not a patch of green in sight, with choking blue haze arising from a 24-hour wretched stream of traffic. For the parts I saw, nothing could be further from the truth.
Delhi is the capital of India. The portion of New Delhi which houses the capital buildings is very well planned. A broad green avenue with parks the size of football fields on either side, flanked by canals, leads perhaps two miles from a giant arch monument - the India Gate - to the presidential palace. The scale of the capital buildings, and the size of the parks around them is more impressive than any other capital I've seen, thanks to its sheer scale. It's newer and lacks the dignity granted by age, but it was impresive, and I found it a stark reminder that I was looking at the capital of a country of nearly a billion. Billboards scattered throughout Delhi declare 'India - Poised' and I believe it. This is a country which has the resources and people to do anything, and will come into its own as a superpower in the next few years.
The roads themselves are smoothly paved, has a mixture of traffic circles and traffic lights, and people actually seem to pay attention to them. Obeying lanes in the road is still a little too much to hope for, but at least the authorities are trying to instill the habit. I didn't see a single cow for my entire stay in Delhi, and only one or two stray dogs, so animal distractions while driving were at a minimum. Most roads we drove in New Delhi were several lanes wide and lined with trees, and traffic flowed smoothly.
There weren't many obvious homeless in the areas we visited. Several neighborhoods are set up as Enclaves, think of them as subdivisions with only a few entrances, gated and guarded at night. The only homeless I saw in Sunder Nagar weren't technically homeless, they had set up blue tarps roped against a wall across from a park, and had small fires burning. The park had a small public toilet and a water tap to its side which was getting a fair amount of use. I saw perhaps a half dozen people lounging near the tarps, though I couldn't tell you how many people were inside. Anyways, I suspect it's harder for homeless to make their way into and reside in such enclaves.
Delhi was originally intended to be a shopping stop for us. Salwa had taken down the names of many markets, such as Sunder Nagar market, Pandara Market, and a half dozen others. Despite being described as large shopping complexes in literature, each was little more than a U-shaped strip mall set along three streets, with anywhere between a dozen and 60 small shops (it sounds more impressive than it was). The shops were nice enough, with a different focus for each Market area, but I wouldn't have bothered going to any of them - except perhaps Sunder Nagar for trinkets and antiques.
The Bazaar in Old Delhi, on the other hand, was quite impressive, and more reminiscent of the style of market I was expecting. Pedestrian-clogged sidewalks ran along the narrow streets surround the bazaar, lined with small shops, and the inevitable touts - this time roaming touts rather than aggressive shop owners - trying to entice us in to look at silks, ties, saris, and so on. People really seemed to want to sell Salwa a sari wherever we went.
Here and there as we walked the Bazaar streets, we saw a small path perhaps two or three feet wide leading between a few shops. We decided to explore one of these, and were instantly transported to another world, lined with small shops with their proprietor sitting quietly inside or drinking Chai in front. Each was the size of a bedroom, and filled with swaths of fabrics in cubbyholes and leaned against the walls. The path between these shops was so small that we could only walk single file, and had to stop and turn sideways to get out of the way of people moving the other direction. After a few minutes of wandering and a couple of twists and turns, we were hopelessly lost, and had to ask several people for (often contradicting) instructions on how to get out. Still, it was one of the more fascinating parts of our visit to Delhi. Perhaps most remarkable, we saw hundreds - perhaps thousands - of shops, all of them selling fabric. Occasionally I looked up as we were walking in the warrens, and was able to see a glimpse of sky between the eaves of shops to either side of the path. Imagine a huge parking lot chocked full of small sheds crammed together to make a maze, that's what it felt like we were traversing.
Guide books and user accounts were full of warnings about non-stop harassment from touts. For everywhere we went in Delhi - even in the Bazaar - it simply wasn't a problem. Sure, we saw a bunch of touts, but each we just ignored or said 'no thanks' and they left us alone. The most persistent was a cycle rickshaw driver near Juma Masjid who really, really wanted us to ride in his rickshaw. By the way, the Mosque itself is a few hundred years old, but feels a bit run down. You can get a decent view of old Delhi from the minaret (which costs 20 rupees apiece to climb), but in my opinion it's a sight to be seen if you happen to be in the area, rather than one worthy of a visit in its own right.
The most interesting building we saw in Delhi was the Baha'i temple in south Delhi, built in the shape of a lotus. It's clad in white marble, and reminds one of the Sydney opera house. We were allowed in for free, and spent a few quiet minutes reflecting and enjoying the architecture. It's set in broad green gardens, carefully manicured with the trees shaped into perfect green spheres and ovoids. I'll post a few pictures of it. Another thing we noticed when we looked in Delhi - we were able to occasionally see signs of women, though it was still quite rare. This was a surprising phenomenon throughout India, we saw almost no women, other than an occasional village woman between cities, or very rarely a girl on her way somewhere. I would say less than 5% of the people we saw in Delhi were women, significantly less than 5%. Outside of Delhi - ignoring villages on the road between places - less than 1% of the people we saw were women. It makes me wonder how my female Indian friends managed to get an education and the experience which lets them compete in what even in the US is predominantly a male occupation, computer programming.
One other site we visited was the Swami Narayan Akshardham Temple and Culture Center. This is a huge complex constructed in New Delhi, and we had imagined it would primarily be a cultural center with lots of information about India. It has a huge parking lot with many tour busses, giving the impression of a large, well protected theme park. After navigating security and some queues, they sell tickets for an animatronic show, a movie, and a boat ride through India's history. As it turned out, the complex's emphasis is on being a temple belonging to a specific religion, and the first two attractions told the story of the Guru who the temple is founded in honor of. It was worth seeing for 125 rupees apiece, but if you go, make sure you understand you're going to be treated to the story of the life of the founder of this sect, and the (attractive sounding) basis of the religion, rather than any real history of India or the Indian peoples.
Delhi was an interesting place to see, but if we had to plan it over again, I think we would have only spent a day or perhaps two days in Delhi, and spent more time elsewhere on the trip. Delhi is a big city which, though enjoyable, has nothing truly unique to justify diverting time from India's other splendid cultural and world heritage sites.
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