First Day in Delhi - Jama Masjid

Delhi is enormous. Naturally, the first thing that overwhelms the senses is the noise - traveling on a road is always accompanied by a cacophony of sound, with everyone honking, yelling, beeping, etc. The next is the smell: to paraphrase a famous quote, I love the smell of fresh pollution in the morning. Even though all the buses and auto-rickshaws in Delhi have been converted to CNG - an impressive feat in itself - there's still a lot of pollution around. In fact, the next day I started coughing and haven't stopped since, even after coming back to San Francisco.

My first stop in Delhi was Jama Masjid - an incredibly beautiful mosque, the largest in India, with a capacity to hold around 25,000 people.
Tourists are allowed to climb the minaret on the right, and since I am a sucker for city views I went up. However, w0men are not allowed to go by themselves - when I went up to the entrance, there were two hapless Turkish girls waiting for a "male tourist" to escort them up to the top.

I found that rather ironic - they were wearing scarves, they spoke Arabic and were coming from a Muslim country - yet they needed a Jew to escort them to the top of a mosque. Go figure.
Before making it to the top we had to pass another hurdle - a 5-year old "shoe keeper" girl that was extorting extra money for passage. It's not that I care about the extra 10 rupees (roughly 20 cents), but I really don't like to be the "dumb tourist" that others can take advantage of.
After paying our ransom, we made it to the top to see pretty spectacular views of Delhi in the rain.

You can see more pictures of Delhi at the gallery.