Diwali and Cricket

After an excellent time in Bombay, we flew to Delhi on the night of Diwali. We landed just as the sun was setting and were able to see all of the fireworks erupting around the city on our descent. When I say fireworks, you all will think of 4^th of July or New Years I’m sure. But the fireworks for Diwali were much more like I would expect it to sound if I were listening to hours and hours of bomb raids!! We took a taxi to the beautiful house of some of our other new friends, Sam and Laura. All of us went up to their roof top to watch the fireworks with their land lord. Probably upwards of six hours of fireworks displays happened in all angles and from all directions around us. The kinds of fireworks everyone was lighting were probably also banned in at least half of the states in America! We all said to each other that 4^th of July would never be the same now that we had seen how Indians do fireworks!

After the amazing festivites of Diwali, the whole town pretty much slept in for two days just to recover! (But not Tim and I! With our jet lag, we were typically awake all the days of this week so far at 4:30am just waiting for the city to wake up!) Monday night, we went with Sam and Laura to a cricket match! It was so interesting! Luckily it was the 20-20 which means the short version because these games can last up to 5 days!!! The match we saw, The Dehli Daredevils versus the Cape Cobras was only 4 hours luckily! The game was held in the stadium Delhi is preparing for the Commonwealth games next year. Some parts of the stadium have recently been rebuilt but some were still a little old-fashioned. Instead of using a computerized jumbotron to change the players numbers and information for all the fans, there was a huge board that people walked up inside and actually carried the letters and numbers out of the board one by one and replaced them with a new number! It was very interesting! This year is also one of the first years that India has had cheerleaders attending the matches! It was pretty surprising when we saw scantly clad ladies dancing to Black Eyed Peas in front of a crowd of pretty much only Indian men! We all kept wondering why in the world such an interesting and unique cultue like India would try to adopt some of the worst parts of American culture!!! The Daredevils won the match and it was really cool to be able to learn a new game and watch the sport Indians adore in their own stadium!!

We are finishing up with Delhi today and tomorrow and then tomorrow night, we are off to the mountains! We are taking a night bus to Himachal Pradesh and the home of the Dalai Lama! More from the Himalaysa!