56th - photos

Sunday in photos

We met up with Michel at Nehru Place metro at walked to the Lotus temple. This is the first glimpse we had of it from the ground. I go past it everyday on the metro.

And out second glimpse of it. At this point I thought it was going to be a very peaceful experience.

We thought we were near the entrance here. We were way off. We walked around to the other side and an epic queue greeted us. It was quite disheartening, despite the fact that it appeared to be on the wrong side of the road. Luckily it was, and we finally joined the right queue and it entry was free.

Once inside I left Izzy and Michel in the queue to hand in the bag with our shoes in and read the pamphlet about the Baha'i faith. Though not convinced enough to sign up I agreed with most of their principles.

Once they'd joined me we queued up again to go inside. We were told that we should be silent and that the temple is a place for people of any religion to pray and meditate. It was very calm inside, like a church, but there was a lot more light and I couldn't stop admiring the internal architecture. All of the petals continued inside, it wasn't just a domed roof.

After we'd done our silent reverence we came out at the back of the temple. It was a lot less official here and we got to put our feet in the water and became celebrities just because we were white. It still feels odd.

A guy getting really into taking a picture of the flowers. This was in the fourth queue which was to get our shoes back on the way out.

When we left the Lotus temple we wanted to see what the massive queue was for. We walked past the biggest queue I have ever seen and got to (what seemed like) the smallest Hindu temple in Delhi. I filmed walking past just the part of the queue which was undercover and it lasted 5 minutes. The queue outside and behind that was at least twice as long.

Shoe wallah

My nightly grammar-correction session with Sidak.

The Punjabis that were visiting Raju. This is the only time he will accept that Izzy and I drink alcohol as all of his friends drink whiskey. I had a whiskey and soda with them and it wasn't half as bad as I suspected. So I had another.

Sidak had been bugging us all day about going to the park with him. When we got there it was the smallest, least green, urban park and I was very disappointed. We played cricket for what seemed like 10 minutes and then left. This photo was taken by Sidak after I'd made him, very carefully, put the strap round his neck. I hadn't changed it back to auto mode. He didn't seem to care.