Date: Thursday, November 1, 2007 10:50:51 PM
Topic: As of 11/03, Friday

We're here, after 5 days of travel. A lot of the travel was actually in the US. Our plane left out of San Francisco on Wednesday night, and we decided to drive from Tucson. I have never been to San Francisco before, so I got to be a tourist in 3 countries in 2 days, since we had a layover in Hong Kong and decided to check it out a bit.

I haven't been here long enough to make any intelligent observations about India. I know that Chandigarh was designed after independence, and was intended to be India's most modern city. Le Courbusier, famous modernist architect, designed it in a top-down sort of way. It's gotten shabby in 50 years, but it is advertised as 'The City Beautiful' on its sign, and I have to agree that it is a rather nice looking city under the surface neglect.

We got to Delhi in the middle of the night and I didn't see much of it. I don't think I'm ready to see it, to be honest -- what little I saw was daunting. Everything was filthy, including the air. There is still a smell of burning here in Chandigarh, but in Delhi it was like I was in the middle of a fire. It was pretty strange to think that the last city I had been in outside of the airport before that was Hong Kong -- they were worlds apart.

We spent about 4 hours in Hong Kong. We took the bus to the city center and wandered, checking out the sheer swanky commercialism of it all. We also visited the park in the city center, and that was pretty nice.

That's it for now -- I have to sleep of some of this jet lag. We'll be here in Chandigarh for the next few days while we plan our Himalaya trip.