Day 1

I arrived in Delhi at 3:30 am on March 9th, I had expected the city to be asleep but to my surprise it was still alive. When I landed I saw the sky filled with smoke and stepped into the new climate; I was overwhelmed with the smell of smoke, trash, and warm musky air. I was picked up from the airport by Amita and Prany, who have become my family while I am here in India. We set out on the six hour drive to Jaipur. During the first hour of the drive we roared with speed through the desert road but along the road,  on the opposite side, we saw three accidents. Each was an enormous decorated bus that had tipped into the middle of the road. After a short distance we were stopped by the worst traffic jam that I have ever seen. All the cars were driving on the same side of the road and the the street had lost any sense of order. Busses, motorbikes, and cars were all sounding there horns, which each had a different tone, in hopes that it would make some difference in moving the cars ahead of them. It seemed like miles of cars at a stand still in front of us. Our driver moved to the shoulder which was even backed up and traffic moving in all the wrong directions across the road. After two hours of barley moving traffic we started to move again, now the sun was starting to rise. We drove through several small villages on our way into Jaipur, along the road were huts with shops and people sleeping on the side of the road. There were camel carts and women carried baskets atop their head. When I arrived in Jaipur things were in the same manner at a larger scale. The streets are full of madness with cows and camel pulling carts along side cars, bikes, motorbikes and rickshaw taxi's. When I arrived at my new apartment I went to sleep and woke up to realize that none of what I had seen was a dream. I was/ am in India.