I had to change another 100 USD bill but got the best rate ever since I came to India (I claimed the rate).
Back in Delhi I completed my sightseeing by visiting India's biggest mosque, the Jami Masjid. The attentive readers of my diary can probably already imagine by whom it was built: Shah Jahan (the father of the Taj Mahal). It is a red and white mosque which is large enough to accommodate 25,000 worshippers. It may not be as perfect as the Taj but it is for sure an exciting building. The Jami Masjid is located in Old Delhi which originally was called Shahjahanabad; what else?
I must say that Delhi feels surprisingly pleasant today,completely different from when I arrived here almost 2 months ago. Away from Old Delhi and Paharganj (where all low budget travellers stay), the city is very leafy and quite clean. Even Paharganj has a chilled feeling today. Maybe this is because of the sunshine.
I went to a restaurant called "Banana leaf" for lunch where I had sort of a rice pancake with thik coconut cream. It was delicious and filled me up although it looked quite small when I was served. Unfortunately, I made the mistake to bump into a coffeeshop right after lunch and had a strong double espresso and a warm chocolate cake with vanilla ice cream and chocolate sauce. I felt sick after this coffee break.
The shopping spree is a bit difficult, as I have a lot ofexcess money (due to this morning's change) but all things here are too oriental for my taste; too overdone; kitsch (so far I only bought the book "Holy Cow").
Well, and then I wanted to tell you about two more peculiarities, which I haven't mentioned so far:
Indians line the eyes of their babies and toddlers black to make them look even cuter.
Indians count differently. 100,000 are 1 lakh and 10,000,000 are 1 crore. This makes reading newspapers a bit tricky. The number twomillion fivehundredthousand are written like this: 20,50,000 or 20.5 lakhs. And how would you find the number twelvemillion threehundredfourtysixthousand? Right, it is 1 crore 23.46 lakhs or 1,23,46,000. Confusing? Yeah, I agree!