I Went to India and It Wasn’t Funny

I took two Xanax and a Malaria pill and I was unconscious the entire time

I’ve traveled around the world and it took me a long time to get the courage to visit India. I love the culture shock of third-world countries, but India isn’t another country, it’s another planet. I’m sure that having only lived in New York, LA, and Miami that Alabama would feel like another planet to me too, however, while I only had one person willing to go to India with me, I had zero willing to go to Alabama.

I went to India with my mother. I won’t bore you with the details of the 14-hour flight, the three-hour layover, and the next three-hour flight, which brought us to Delhi at 3 am. I took 2.5 Xanax and a Malaria pill and was unconscious the entire time.

Old Delhi

Our first stop was Old Delhi, a dirty, chaotic, surreal, claustrophobic nightmare with insanely narrow streets and too many people/taxis/scooters/bikes/stuff. Everything was crumbling and there was rubble and garbage everywhere. It was a maze of lanes overhung by a tangled mass of electric wires, all of which were one earthquake away from being nonexistent. I felt like I was on an old dilapidated movie set about to collapse. In a word: harrowing. In two words: filthy and harrowing.