Getting to Know Gurgaon

I was up late last night researching potential travel opportunities for this weekend and the opportunities are boundless -- the forts of Jaipur, the Golden Temple at Amritsar, white water rafting on the Ganges River in Rishikesh, seeing the spiritual city of Varnasi, going on a house boat in the backwaters of Kerala -- all these experiences and more a stone's throw away. So many opportunities, so little time! I was debating all my options, but after too much contemplation, decided to spend the three day weekend here in Gurgaon and Delhi. Travel seemed logistically complicated (especially alone) and there's still a lot I haven't seen in the Delhi area. I want to experience what it is like to live here, not just from the perspective of a tourist.

"Are you feeling well sir?" the staff at my house asked me today. This is because I slept in to eleven o'clock, which is uncharacteristically late for me. After a nice breakfast and lunch, I was invited to go to the Amby place mall with Gautum and his friends. Gautum is on a two year assignment with Google in India, working with the Media Partnerships team. He speaks fluent Hindi. Neela, his friend, joked that there is no reason to go to a mall when she didn't need to buy anything and that all malls are the same. I felt otherwise. I had never been to a mall in India before and was actually excited to go the largest mall in India. At 1.8 million square feet, this is probably the largest mall I've ever been to.

Most of the stores at the mall were very similar to what you'd see at an American mall and just as expensive -- brands like Calvin Klein, Lacoste, Nautica, etc. There was one Indian store called Fab India -- kind of like the Indian equivalent of the Gap. I had fun going there and bought a couple khourtas for myself to bring back to the states. I had fun just browsing around in an environment that felt safe where, unlike in the city, nobody was being too high pressure. I spent about twenty minutes playing a keyboard in the music store, and nobody bothered me for playing even though I had no intnetion of making a purchase.


Afterwards, we went to a smaller outdoor mall, called Galleria Market, where the stores were local. We sat down to have some chaat (the Hindu word for appetizers or light snacks.) I had a glass of fresh-squeezed Mosambi juice. Mosambi means "sweet lime" although it tastes nothing like lime; it's more like a sweeter orange. It's a popular fruit here. Gotam asked them to bring me the fruit to show me what it looked like, and he told me the staff must have thought he was crazy, as it's the equivalent of asking to bring an orange.

Tomorrow, I've asked a driver to come in the morning and am going to be more adventurous with getting back into exploring Delhi. I'll close this blog post with a video I took last week showing my commute back from work. The Hindi music in the background, the traffic, the endless malls... This place is very different from home. This is Gurgaon.