I woke up early. I suppose I must have slept quite a bit since leaving Turkey. I dare say I spent a good proportion of the flight asleep and I'd had a snooze soon after arrival and then had been to bed early. So it was no surprise that I woke up early. It wasn't very early. It was 8.00am. I washed and shaved and went downstairs to the restaurant for breakfast. This was a Hotel after all and so I expected to find the restaurant busy with other people eating breakfast.
Not a bit of it. When I got down there all I found was all the staff fast asleep lying all over the place in impossibly uncomfortable sleeping positions stretched over the chairs and benches. Someone must have been awake because I did order something to eat. I thought I would have a couple of boiled eggs with some toast and tea. Simple enough, I thought. Wrong again! My boiled eggs took 45 minutes to arrive and the reason, I discovered, was that upon receipt of my order the Chef immediately put on a pan on the boil with about 5 dozen eggs in it. By the time my eggs arrived the Hotel had come to life.
I had business to do. the small amount of cash I had got at the airport wasn't going to last long and in order to get more I needed to go to the Canara Bank where i was to pick up the first lot of the money I had instructed Barclays to send for me to collect.
Barclays had told me that I could collect it from the Chandni Chowk branch so after my (disappointingly hard boiled) eggs I headed off there. The Chandni Chowk branch of the Canara Bank was guarded by an elderly Sikh man armed with a shotgun but I was able to persuade him that I had business at the bank and he let me in. The place was not what I had expected. It wasn't exactly a bank branch as such and all I remember now is that that the interior was dark and the people working there were doing everything manually. I saw no computers or such like just people working with large ledger books. I explained my business and was told I was actually at the wrong place. I was given the address of another office at the All India Women's Conference Hall. So this was a false start.
I went back to Paharganj and walked up to New Delhi Railway Station where I made a reservation for the train to Jammu. I had a vegetable biryani at the Metropolis for lunch and then headed to the other branch of the Canara bank to collect my money.
The LP Guide was right on the money about what to expect. It advised that whilst it was possible to have money "wired" to Indian banks you had to be careful and quite persistent to get it. All of this, remember, was nearly 18 years ago and before the emergence of India as the economic power it is now. Indeed at the time of my trip the Indian Rupee was not traded in the money markets. The advice in the LP Guide was that if you had money sent to a bank in India and went to collect it you would almost certainly be told that it had not arrived. The book said that in fact the money almost certainly would have arrived but the person dealing with you would simply tell you that it had not and send you away. After you left the bank your money would be transferred into the employee's own account and over a few days you would be fobbed off while it earned him a few rupees in interest. Even a few rupees of interest was worth having. The bank staff could count on the fact that it would take days for you to establish contact with your own bank and have it confirmed that the money had indeed been sent and had arrived. When presented with the evidence that the money had been sent it would mysteriously appear.
This branch of the Canara Bank was much more modern than the one in Chandni Chowk. I announced my reason for visiting and was ushered to a desk to wait for someone to help me. When the cheerful chap arrived I told him that I had come to collect money sent by Barclays. Without batting an eyelid but with an apologetic slight wobble of the head the man told me the money had not arrived. I couldn't believe the guide book had been so accurate. I kept my cool and politely explained that I would have been more inclined to believe that the money had not arrived if the man had taken the trouble to establish my name. How could he know that my money had not arrived if he didn't even know who I was? I gave him my details and asked him to make sure. The money had arrived and after a bit of form filling I left the bank with some of it in cash and the rest in travellers cheques.
I headed back to the Metropolis and spent the evening in and around the "hotel". I should say that in my research I have noticed that the Metropolis Tourist Home & Restaurant appears to have changed beyond all recognition. The LP's website review is of a hotel that I do not I remember staying in. There are even pictures of rooms that, quite frankly, I would not have imagined possible in 1990. The place is now classed as mid-range but when I was there it was definitely a budget backpackers place. I feel I must establish my credentials by confirming that I was not staying in a comfortable or plush hotel. No way! There was no rooftop bar and only one restaurant which was more of a general sitting area with tables and benches along the walls.
I remember that as I flew into Delhi I got talking to a couple who said they were going to stay in a more classy hotel about 10 or possibly more times more expensive than the Metropolis. I think the guy must have been called Dikkan. I met him again a couple of days later and he told me that he and his girlfriend had been woken in the night by rats running along their balcony! I didn't see anything like that in my cheap and cheerful hotel proving to me, at least, that paying more doesn't necessarily guarantee that the hotel will be better.
I spent the afternoon leaning out of the window of the room pointing my K1000 down the street trying to take a few representative snaps. These pictures show "the view" such as it was. They aren't particularly good pictures I'll admit but I had only been in the place one whole day and I felt a bit conspicuous out in the street with a camera and was uncomfortable pointing it at people. The long lens was handy, if a little difficult to stop from shaking (hence the fact that at least one is out of focus).
I remember the auto-rickshaws that were parked just outside the hotel. The fact is that Connaught Circus was quite within walking distance but whenever you approached these guys for a ride they would announce that the price was something quite ridiculous like 100 rupees. I would argue that this was far too much and offer say 20 rupees and they would say "OK, get in, 80 rupees". After some more bargaining you might get a better price and set off but by the time you'd finished all the haggling you might have been well on your way on foot. In fact the hassle used to be so intense that I think that I gave up even bothering to attempt to get a ride in them.
It is probably a sign of how much time I spent at the window that the apple seller above seems to have managed to sell off a fair amount of his initial stock while I was peering up and down the street. Then again, he probably isn't the same guy. I think there were two of them. The first one pictured above's stall can be seen on the extreme right of the picture below.
As evidenced by these photos there were a lot of cows hanging about in Paharganj. they began to blend in after a while. They are sacred or holy animals in India and after a while you hardly notice them.
My notes tell me that the Thali I had for my dinner cost 10 rupees (about 20p). I have to say that it was hard to know where might be good to eat and if I recall it properly the place I went was up some stairs. I remember thinking the food must be good because as I was going up some well fed cockroaches were coming down.
