December 15 - 31 - Down Time in Delhi

We now have down time to work on photos so we are staying pretty close to the hotel and Tara’s home. 

December 18 – Ride in Old Delhi 
On our walk over to Tara's home (just around the corner from our hotel) we saw this vendor on the street.  He had something he was keeping hot on the back of his bike.  

Tara had clients come in and we decided to join them for the Old Delhi/Street Food lunch tour.  We have done this several times and always enjoy it.  As usual the street scenes were a visual feast for the eyes (and less enticing for the nose).  We didn’t really bother with photos as we have taken so many pictures on our past visits.  We did get a quick snapshot of some monkeys though.  That is always fun.

December 19 – Cancelled Cruise

Today we were to fly to Calcutta for two days of sightseeing before boarding our river boat for a cruise on the Ganges River. That isn't happening. The unrest is building in some parts of in India and there is talk that there may be an "All India" shutdown coming up. After much consultation with her contacts around the country Tara recommended we cancel.

The  cruise company is continuing with the cruise and won't reimburse us.  Fortunately, Tara managed to get them to agree to give us a credit towards a future cruise with them.  However, we don't know if our travel insurance will cover the flights (to and from) or the hotels and guides that we cancelled.  But given what is happening we won't quibble if the money is lost.  

There have been no demonstrations were we are at but parts of Delhi have had massive demonstrations today.  Another group of Tara's clients left this morning for Jaipur (I think) on what is normally a five hour drive.  After 4 hours they still hadn't made it out of Delhi.  Pretty bad.  Meanwhile we are sitting in a warm, safe hotel room and are comfortable and safe 

Smog is really bad in Delhi.  Somewhere in the "Hazardous" range.  It is that high a lot in Delhi and the larger cities in India.

December 20 - Productive day on the internet

The evergreen hotel was sold out for a few nights, so we moved to a new hotel.  Our new hotel has very good internet and we both worked away trying to get things done.  Mary got caught up in posting photos on the blog and Paul worked on movies.

December 21 - Future Trip Planning

Today was a very quiet day in our hotel room.  A lot of time was spent working on our 2021 tentative trip to Australia.

December 22 - Back to Evergreen

Today we moved back to the Evergreen.  Everyone was very welcoming.  They all know us know.

We finished our 2021 draft itinerary for Australia and sent it on to Tara.  We are having dinner with her tonight at her house and will start preliminary discussions.

December 23 – A nose to the grindstone day

Really slept late this morning.  In fact, we got a 9:15 call from the kitchen wanting to know if we were coming down for breakfast.  We decided to pass on breakfast and will just eat an early lunch.  We spent quite a bit of time today further culling photos and doing other work.

We took a break at lunch to go down to the local market.  There are a lot of small shops and restaurants there.  

We ate at Kent’s…had veggie burgers and really good fires.  We haven’t had a lot of fries in India but every time we have they have been very good.  Really crispy.  The milkshake was pretty good too.

December 24 – Afternoon at the Salon

We got a lot of work done this morning and then headed out to the Central Market for lunch. After lunch Mary went to a nearby salon for an oil head massage, a facial and a haircut (trim).  Feels like a new woman.

December 25 – Christmas

We spent the day working on photos and actually got caught up with culling and editing and loading photos into the blog.  We might end up leaving India with having totally completed and published the blog.  How unusual.

We had a light lunch in our room so as to keep the momentum going.  And we had veggie chow mien for Christmas dinner…tasty but not very festive.  

We thought we’d splurge on Gulab Jamun (translation - Rose Berries...little balls of fried dough in rose water) for dessert, but they were out.  So no festive splurge.  And it was too cold to go to the nearby Baskin Robbins for ice cream.

December 26 – Day after Christmas
This morning we tried making a Skype call to the kids.  It is Christmas eve at home.  It was a tech fail.  So we finally connected for a voice call on WhatsApp.  It was good to get to talk to everyone.  Sounds like they all had a very good Christmas.  Jessica and Chloe made Grandma Hanley’s homemade egg noodles and apparently they were a hit.  Sure wish we could have been there.   The next two years at least we plan on being home for the holidays.

December 27 to 30 – Worked Long Hours on our Photos

It has been cold in Delhi so early on we rarely ventured out of our hotel.  However, we decided we really needed to get out some so we started walking down to the Defence Colony Central Market for lunch most days.  We also had dinner several times at Tara's home.

Right after Christmas Tara's sister, Sheeba, from Toronto Canada so we had dinner a couple of evenings with her.  Otherwise these days have been pretty quite.  The up side is that we caught up on all of our photos and blog entries for India and Iceland (which we did almost 6 months ago) and are almost done with the Faroes.  We are basically almost caught up. 

December 31 – Flying to Singapore

We were up very early and had our luggage down in the reception room by just before 6:00 am.  Shyam arrived shortly after and we were on our way to the airport for our trip to Singapore.  It is still cold in Delhi so we are looking forward to warmer weather (hopefully not tooooo hot).