Today we intended to explore the city center, which I gather is like a large, crowded marketplace. However, early this morning police forces broke up a demonstration in New Delhi of supporters of Baba Ramdev, a yogi who is speaking out against government corruption and demanding many things, including the return of "black money," or money from bribes held in offshore bank accounts, and the death penalty for corrupt government officials. This event spurred smaller protests around India, and one of them held up our driver for two hours. Ajay recommended that we not go to the city center today, as tensions were running high; we will go in later weeks.
Instead, we went to the movie theatre. All the afternoon movies were full, so we bought tickets for an evening showing and went back later.
For lunch, we went to Kobe Sizzlers, a restaurant next door to the guest house; the food is excellent and cheap. For dessert, we got the house specialty, the Brownie Sizzler. This consists of a brownie with vanilla ice cream topped with chocolate sauce, all on a fajita-style hot plate. When it arrives at the table, the waiter pours the chocolate over everything, and it steams and sizzles on the plate - it was excellent.
After lunch we walked around a bit more, and almost got caught in another thunderstorm. According to the news today, the monsoon is here, and we can expect a lot of rain in the next several days....
In the evening, we went back to the movie theatre to see Pirates of the Caribbean 4. The movie was nothing special, but the system was interesting. For one, there was assigned seating. In fact, all of us bought our tickets back to back but ended up scattered across the theatre; next time we'll have to do it all in one purchase. Also, the snack bar was a bit different - you could get popcorn and soda, but you could also get tea, coffee, and club sandwiches. Finally, before the movie started everyone stood and they played the Indian national anthem, accompanied by footage of Indian soldiers in a snowy mountain range. I'm not sure if this is a regular feature of the theatre experience or if it was "we support our troops" advertisement of some kind, after the anthem ended a message was displayed briefly that gave thanks to the soldiers and their families.
We recently heard from Ajay that he would not be able to make it to meet Robert and I at Virgo tomorrow, so we will spend the day with Ray and Jose at the hospital. I'm not sure how much use we'll be, but it should be interesting.
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