Day 2

In spite of the heat, we headed to the Lotus temple, built for the B’hai faith in Delhi. We tried to visit the visitor’s center before we were turned away and told to visit the temple first. We walked the 500 yards to the temple, where we removed our shoes and hopped across the hot stone floor. We went into the temple interior, which was much simpler given the complex design of the exterior, and where you could pray to any God. After paying our homage to whomever we chose, we exited admiring the pooling system surrounding the temple and forming the lotus. However the ground was so hot we quickly retrieved our shoes and went to the visitor’s center where we watched a movie with excessive detail about the temple construction. Rapidly losing attention, we loaded back into the car and hung the white flag because we were not getting out of that car again. We had our driver take us down Rajpath, seeing the Parliament, the Ministry of Defense, and Presidential Palace, as well as India Gate. Our driver tried to take us to DilliHaat to go shopping, and wasn’t too pleased when we refused to get out of the car. He did finally let us go home to Hotel Alka, where we all crashed out for a little bit before heading out to dinner at a posh sizzler restaurant where we ordered about five times the amount of food we could actually eat. Which, according to Sherry, was good but waaaay too spicey. Becky also noticed the Mafioso out front. On the way home we got some yummy ice cream and chai at the South Indian restaurant by our hotel.