Delhi

Made it.

After an inauspicious pre-game trip to Melbourne--during which my 1.5 hour flight from Sydney became a 13-hour odyssey that included a delay, a cancellation no one knew about, another delay, a mechanical problem that forced us to switch planes after having already boarded for an hour, two more hours sitting on the runway in the new plane, then torrential downpour in Melbourne which cut the power of the restaurant where we had been waiting an hour for sashimi that could no longer be served because the fridge was down--after all that, I am here.

Bare first impressions after a morning stroll down Chandni Chowk, and already I can't help but continuously compare things to China. My mum told me recently that sometimes she just can't believe we all come from the same world, that we are all human somehow, that for whatever reason these Delhi sidestreets popped up they way they did, utterly different from hutongs in Beijing or alleyways in London.

It's baffling. But comforting, too.