April 1-3. Sweating out India.

I stay in Delhi a few more days and feel weak. It's time to rest in the room and dream of more active times. There is really not much to say about these idle days. Yeon is visiting her friend in Hong Kong, and I just stretch on the mattress sweating out whatever harm the unfamiliar microbes may have caused.

March 31. Four hours of buses, taxis, rickshaws to get to the wrong place.

I bring Yeon to the airport, and she discovers that her camera is gone. That means: no pictures of the white tiger and no pictures of the Taj Mahal. Eventually she has become the victim of pick-pocketing, and I don't need to warn no more. Main reason to go to the Taj Mahal: taking a photo with the Charity Travel t-shirt in front of it, so that our readers can see how good you can combine charity and travel. Ah, let me just do the charity part, I get tired of touristic consumption.
How we got to the airport? Read about that on her blog. It took us more than three hours to get to the wrong place, and then we were struck by the lightning of luck and someone brought us to the airport by car. We spend the night at the airport together, and I return to our host's place in the morning after saying goodbye.

March 28. All about Krishna.

Sight-seeing. The Red Fort is enormous and so is the line in front of it. Please can we not get in? Okay. We walk to the large mosque nearby and are refused in. Prayer-time. The call for prayer is too loud and scares us away. Allahou-Akbar. We go to the zoo to have a calm green walk and see creatures incapable of fanaticism. We like a termite-sucking bear and the white tiger. It is beautiful to see the white tiger taking a bath, it's like he is leaning on his elbows and looking around leisurely.

March 27. Monosodium Glutamate English.

There must be an internet place, the kind of thing you and I are used to: wireless connection over coffee in a well-lit designed atmosphere, no strings attached, other than the astronomous beverage prices, but we star-gazers are willing to pay'em. I read about some candidate places in a glossy online magazine and the language they use makes me vomit. I WANT TO BAN MONOSODIUM GLUTAMATE-ENGLISH. The smoothened and sweetened use of terms coined in glossy magazines, surviving as the stronger memes in the babble of metropolitan wannabees because they ressemble their own simple-mindedness. That sentence is admittedly not entirely free of it, so I have to be self-critical. But I AM self-critical, you see?

There is a place called Oz or something, nicely decorated with a big picture of Sydney's skyline, that offers what we look for in a climatized space. We do our job and go home. We skip a dance-show that we thought to have dinner at a local eatery. Paneer cravings is what I will take home from this country, physiologically speaking.

March 26. Inspiring people.

Our host Kaushik flies to Mumbai today to give a lecture about device driver pre-installing optimization. We say goodbye and move to our other host near central Delhi. It takes us a long time, but when we finally get there we feel very welcome. A big blue backpack signalizes the presence of another couchsurfer, but Cecelia from France is not much of a talker and unfortunately shuns us. I don't see her doing Charity anyway.
We just hang out and wait for nothing to happen. Maybe the Greenpeace people call and we could do something together. Wrong. This should not affect our project. We have slowed down too much now. We need to get back to the initial vigor and grace of moving from cause to cause while accumulating energy. Pfft. There is a guy here whom they call Pinky, he reeks of alcohol and brags about houses in Amsterdam, the UK, Finland. He divorced his wife in Nepal, and travels to Norway on his French passport. Actually, he is ruling the world. He is not inspiring and I need inspiring people right now. I want to learn something.

March 25. Greenpeace.

A cause. Our host knows about greenpeace and helps us find out where their office is by calling their headquarters in Bangalore. We are finally given an address near Hauz Khas, a southern suburb of Delhi. We take a minibus and find a rather sober office, something that usually makes me feel good about an ngo. They welcome us and we explain our story. We will make a donation even though greenpeace doesn't normally accept cash donations. There is a way to get some offical letter of intend from the local bank and I sit and with a few hours for this document to be issued. Just to make a small donation. But we succeed, and talk about campaigning or fundraising activities we can take part in. They say we'll keep you posted there might be something. They will repeat this later and they will promise me twice to send me an email with the location so that I could join in. They've never send them. Shame on those people, o how I want to crush them between thumb and indexfinger like clots of snot. But I care too much about doing something good that I have time to waste on unreliable people. Anyway, I think they are enthousiastic campaigners and our donation will be used in a good way to help protect the Olive Ridley Turtle, make people aware about genetically manipulated foodstuffs and the risks of nuclear energy.

March 24. Delhi? Gurgaon!

We arrive in Delhi only at 5pm since an accident has caused our train to be seven hours delayed. Our couchsurfer now lives in Gurgaon you see that is a satellite town south west of Delhi. An autorikshaw takes us to the Radisson hotel where we are picked up by Kaushik, a very nice guy who is still working for Microsoft but really wants to turn to magic by the end of this year. We have a great evening getting to know each other.

I recognize much of the things I read in the "white tiger".