Sitting in a coffee shop in New Delhi, in Connaught Square. Just had some delicious chocolate ice cream brownie dessert.

We were supposed to meet at 10 this morning, well, Anh came up to wake us up at 10 this morning. Nate had abandoned us. Way to go, Nate. So we went downstairs, talked a bit about the area, a woman working at the hotel came over and warned us about all the issues with people lying to us about train tickets and trying to get us to take alternate transportation. Very, uh, encouraging. Mikey and I headed back up, showered, and off we went. We stopped in the hotel tourist office, which was a little creepy initially (we were ushered into a back room), but good, we got a map and offered a lot of taxis and such but we assured them we were already all set. As we left, Mike got immediately followed by a beggar, but he did a good job, we got offered rides a million times, and the fact that most people speak better English here just seems to make them more determined. If you ever have trouble saying “no,” spend a couple days here, you'll get practice. On the upside, after we walked a bit, a helpful guy came up and started giving us advice, talking to us, not wanting anything from us, just chatting and giving directions. Nice guy. So we walked a bit, through some sort of construction district (all the stores were plywood, glass, hardware, etc.), the street was all carved up all over the place, more drivers wanting to give us rides, ran into David and Sigrid, talked to them for a bit, kept walking, eventually talked to another nice, helpful guy. It took a long time, a lot of trying not to get run over and not to get into any tuktuks, we finally made it to the tourist office at Connaught Square. The guy there told us how Agra was a horrible place, and how we didn't want to go to Connaught, and tried to offer us another taxi. Everyone here seems to think where they live is a horrible, awful place to be. It's odd. Or maybe they just mean for tourists. We told him we wanted to walk and see Connaught anyway, so off we went. We walked in a bit, saw some intimidating restaurants (the first place had this whole list of rules, the second place had The Door – if you saw it, you'd understand), a lot of American stores like Reebok and stuff. Finally we ran into some other people from our crowd, Swaffy, Zypy, Clay, Liz and Brenna. They were trying to find an adapter for Zypy's computer, she lost part of her charger back in Narita Airport. They suggested some vegetarian place nearby, we walked that direction, ran into lots of people trying to help us more-or-less-legitimately, including another guy from the tourist office, and eventually Mike and I ate at the Maharina. I'm not even sure what I ate, with rice, a tasty lime soda and some water. It was good, spicy. They didn't have a lot of luck with Zypy's charger (we met them back by the central park, which you have to pay to enter, sadly), but we were directed to somewhere else, which we didn't know where it was.

Also, purple hardhats.

People want to go elsewhere, finish later.

Tuesday, February 2nd, roughly 3-3:10 PM local time