Delhightful Part 2

As I mentioned, we had been invited by Sarah’s friends, Marc, Maxi and their two children Sebastian to come and stay. These guys were just great. It was so nice to be able to kick back and not think about things for a while. Marc has a keen interest in restoring old vehicles and was in possession of a restored Enfield. It is a beautiful bike and it confirmed my resolve to try and bring one of these bikes back to Australia. I’m in the process of researching how that can be done. If anyone has any advice it would be appreciated.

There was one funny story, not funny at the time but in retrospect I had to laugh. I was using Sebastian’s laptop to do some work on the blog, everyone else was upstairs watching some Dutch comedy (does that even exist?), right next to me was a cold beer waiting for the conclusion of my tasks. I finished the final sentence, reached over to grab the golden beverage and proceeded to spill the beer over me, and unfortunately the laptop. I quickly turned the laptop off and over. After a while a turned the machine back on. I thought everything was ok, then when I started to try and type, I found that a couple of important keys weren’t working, among them the ‘space’ bar. Now you could probably get by on a computer without some of the keys working even if its a letter like Z (unless your American) but the space key is pretty important. So shit! Way to take the funshine out of my day.
It was interesting to note that my first instinct was rather childlike, the first thought that crossed my mind was ‘ Just pretend it didn’t happen’ but unfortunately being a 28 year old man this option wasn’t open to me. I was feeling really bad at this stage, just because of the kindness that had been shown to me by Marc and his family, I have been thinking that a guest should be a gift to his hosts, so that they will want to repeat the kindness to someone else, It also made me remember our previous ill luck. So i dutifully spoke to Maxi and informed her of what happened. They were really cool about it and thankfully we were able to find a solution. I think they still like me…maybe.

So we spent a few days chilling, Sarah got her hair cut, Doug said he didn’t like it. Marc and I talked about Enfields, politics and good books to read. Then it was time to move on, next stop Rishikesh.

He recommended two in particular, which I also would say a worth a glance. One was ‘The Argumentative Indian’ a history of heterodoxy (objective discussion against the excepted line) in India and what it means for present day India and the other was ‘City of Djinns’ which is one mans account of a year spent in Delhi. It was quite fascinating to find that Delhi used to be one of the greatest cities in the world, and it was only recently due to the decline of the Mughal empire, the British occupancy and partition that created the city that exists today, which from reading is almost unrecognizable from what it used to be. Have a look.

Enjoying Lunch - Photo Courtesy of Sarah Van den Daele