in which my roommate and i get an a+ for effort

Last night, I drank a liter of water that was fortified with W.H.O. approved rehydration salts, fell asleep and then slept like a baby. Woke up this morning, and my temperature was down to 98.1°F so I'm cool. This morning, I wanted to make up for lost time and by 10AM, my roommate Sarah and I were on the Metro and headed to the National Museum of Natural History. She had read about it in her Lonely Planet guidebook, which she got for cheap on Amazon. (This also means that her guidebook is from 2001. We decided to ignore that fact while making plans this morning.) We negotiated the price of an auto rickshaw like champs and told him to drop us off at the museum. Our first clue that something was amiss should have been the fact that the rickshaw-wallah didn't know where the museum was, but we told him that it somewhere near the Embassy of Nepal and the Mandi House Metro stop and he knew where those things were, so we got let out there.


Our second indication that things were weird was the fact that the sign on the museum was missing an "M." Also, we could hear construction on the inside. But there was a giant dinosaur outside of the building, so we knew that we were in the right place and were just way too excited to play with the dinosaur and take pictures with it because it's a life-size, huge dinosaur in the middle of New Delhi! You cannot say that it's not the coolest thing ever, because it is.

It's like Jurassic Park, but it's New Delhi and the dinosaur can't move.

The interior of the illustrious National Museum of Natural History.

But then we went into this so-called National Museum of Natural History, and we were confused. Like, immensely confused. Because there were dozens of construction workers doing all sorts of construction tasks. This includes hammering, jack-hammering and other things with power tools. But, according to the security guard at the front desk, the museum was still open. Just go up the stairs. So we did, and I regretted that decision the second we made it. I love natural history museums and this was definitely not a natural history museum. There was one "exhibit" that was open, but the room was really, really dark and I refused to go in because I am afraid of the dark. But Sarah did. She said she didn't learn that much about natural history or anything. We left after about five minutes, before the construction workers could harass us or a loose beam could fall on our heads or something. That's what you get when you listen to a guidebook that's over a decade old, I guess. (You should also check out the website of this museum. It's pretty high-tech, all things considered. But I do not regret going to the National Museum of Natural History because I took a picture with a dinosaur.)

But we weren't going to be deterred! "Off to Connaught Place," we triumphantly said. We walked down a beautiful tree-lined street, past the Embassy of the Islamic Republic of Iran and strolled into Connaught Place. But it was Sunday, so most of the stores were closed. And we tried to find this market but totally got harassed by a guy who was definitely paid by some store to bring tourists to this back alley place. And then we found an Indian tourism office and asked for a map, and he showed us a map of Delhi and started writing in pen all over it but when we asked if we could take the map with us, he refused to give it to us, which just didn't make a whole lot of sense. And then it was lunchtime and we were hungry and wanted to eat somewhere "hygienic," which led us to McDonald's because we figured that a Western food chain had to be relatively clean. I maintain that it was a cultural experience because I got a vegetarian McSpicy Paneer sandwich and fries. The McSpicy Paneer sandwich was fried Paneer with this really great sauce, but it was definitely too McSpicy for my taste. This led me to start craving frozen yogurt and, lo and behold, we found a frozen yogurt place!


The fro-yo wasn't that good. They didn't have "original" flavor yogurt, as we fro-yo connoisseurs like to call it. Instead, they had four flavors: chocolate, blackberry, blueberry and green apple. The machine with chocolate and blackberry wasn't working though, so there were really only two flavors. We took the Metro back to Lajpat Nagar, and I bought a really Western-style tank top from some store (but it was on sale for 419INR, which is really a good deal for this tank top).


So the moral of today's story is that we really, really tried. We did a lot of things and went a lot of places and didn't get put in too many dangerous situations and bargained and pleaded and used a smidgen of Hindi and didn't get violently ill from McDonald's or Cocoberry and navigated our way through Delhi without getting run over by a bus or a horse or a bicyclist or a scooter and I don't have a raging fever anymore. All in all, I'm calling today a victory, and I don't care what anyone else has to say about it.