Delhi

I have to say that I've never felt more wary of being scammed than after spending a couple days in Delhi. Maybe people feel the same way their first time in Beijing or Shanghai, but I've never heard of anyone getting shit on their shoe in China.

For those who haven't read the boxed text in Lonely Planet about it (yeah, it has its own little section) it's where one guy distracts you while the other somehow drops a modest glob of poo on your shoe and then says--at least he did to me--"Oh, there's shit on your shoe!" Then he whips out his shoe-cleaning kit and offers to clean it off for 250 rupees. This sounds like a lot, particularly when you immediately suspect he's the one who put the poo on your shoe, when the original conspirator who distracted you comes back and says, look, pay him 100 rupees, that's how much it is in India. So you pay him 100 rupees. I mean, what choice do you have? There's poo on your shoe.

We're still trying to figure out where exactly they get the poo, with what they carry the poo around, and how they throw the poo on a shoe. I asked him where the poo came from and he pointed up at the sky. "Birdshit!" Without going into what you might call the color commentary, I guarantee you it was not birdshit. Bullshit.

I hate to judge a city by its scammers, and there were redeeming factors like India Gate at night (above) and the food and the buzz and the intense craziness and the Chicken Maharaja Mac. But really, what is up with the scammers?

Yum.

The tagline, in huge font on billboards all across Delhi: "Some love stories have blood on them."

Wasn't exactly what I was expecting of Bollywood: tortured moral-dilemma love story cum fundamentalist Muslim terrorist thriller set in the space from suburban to subway New York. It sure looked like they were saying some pretty deep things about modern Islam and racial profiling; I'll never know. But between the deeply deceived female lead pulling a bullet out of her lover's chest in the shower and a Muslim-looking-and-sounding man being pulled aside for a "random" search at a US airport, there was no real need for subtitles.