Two Mandirs, Some Monuments and a Lot of Cake

This was one of our speciality "Emma and Michaela's insanely jampacked full of exciting things" days. We kicked started the day by visiting two different mandirs, which couldn't have been more different!

The first was the Jhandewalan Hanuman Mandir - a building easily recognisable by the huge monkey statue covering the building! Sadly, it was covered in scaffolding today so we couldn't really see it, but the entrance was still clearly visible. To enter, you had to walk barefoot over the tongue, and into the open mouth of a fanged beast! Inside, it initially looked quite similar to other mandirs we had been in, with a main shrine in front of us. One of the people working at the mandir asked us to follow him, and we entered into another shrine room. This one was very shiny, as every patch of wall and ceiling was covered in mirror tiles, which were reflecting the flashing light bulbs surrounding the shrine's statue. Before we knew what was happening, he was saying some sort of prayer or blessing for us - it was quite long and complicated and involved asking for the names of our parents, Michaela's boyfriend and our homes, wafting peacock feathers over us, tying red string around our wrists and giving us rose petals. We later found out (correct us if we're wrong!) that the red string is called "Kalava" and it is tied onto the wrists of anyone attending a prayer ceremony, and is worn to ward off evil. After this had all finished, we went to have a look at a bit more of the mandir, which is where similarities with other mandirs stopped! 

Our hands with henna and kalava!

No photos were allowed inside, so we will do our best to describe this bit. The stairs to the floor below looked as though you were entering a sort of dark cave created from moulded plastic. Once into this cave, there were some more shrines and plastic sculpted monsters and beasts, some of which were depicting different scenes. This whole basement level had naturally occurring spring water slowly flowing through it too, adding to the cave like feel and making our feet very wet! As you wandered around this strange world of monsters, passageways to further sections were like the entrance, found through the mouths of beasts, as was the exit. It was a very interesting and different place, and really fascinating to see such a difference from other mandirs.

The slightly scary entrance to the temple

The next Mandir on our list was the Laxmi Narayan Mandir, located a short walk from the first one.  This was a huge mandir, painted in bright yellow and red, looking very vivid in the now glorious sunshine. It was very busy, with crowds of people queuing up to go inside, and escaping the heat of the sun to walk around bare foot on the cool marble floors was a welcome sensation! Inside the mandir,  it was even bigger than it appeared from the outside, and from the back of it you could see the mandir gardens stretching into the distance, with shrines and sculptures dotted throughout. It was a very calm place, with sparse shrines scattered throughout the building, and lots of stone cut out windows, letting the light and the air in.

Front entrance of Laxmi Narayan Mandir

 We also found our way into the beautiful gardens to admire the building as well as the life size elephant statues! This mandir was the one which Mahatma Ghandi had famously declared as being a place where people from every caste were welcome to come and worship, which along with the stunning architecture, was one of the reasons that we wanted to visit.

 

Michaela next to an elephant, sadly just a statue

Emma outside the mandir

Feeling quite mandir-ed out for one day, we made our way to Bengali market, which had been recommended to us for two reasons. The first was to try something called golgappa, which are small puffed up spheres of crispy dough, that are then stuffed with things and served up with various sauces. Ours were stuffed with spicy potato and chickpeas, and served with some sweet and spicy sauces...they were very tasty! The second reason was the infamous Bengali Sweet House...and being a sucker for all Indian sweets, we really had to check out what all the fuss was about! The selection was amazing, and we finally ended up with a several different kinds of burfee and of course some more carrot halwa!

Bengali Sweet House counter

Our golgappa

To try and walk off the food, we headed down to India Gate. We tried to visit here a few weeks ago, but because of preparations for Republic Day, we couldn't get through. Today all the gates had been taken down, so we were free to join the multitudes of tourists admiring the site and taking endless touristy photos. However, as well as the obvious sights there seemed to be an added photograph opportunity, which was photos with us! Although we were now used to being asked for people to have their photo taken with us whenever we went to a touristy place, it had never quite been as crazy as today! On several occasions we were surrounded by a group of about twenty people, all jumping in one after another for their photo with us...it became impossible to get anywhere! We tried to escape and made a run for it, only to be mobbed by another group a few minutes later! Earlier on, at the less crowded side of India Gate by the canopy, Emma managed to capture the now very regular sight, although on this occasion there were just a few people wanting our photo.

The height difference made for an interesting photo!

The canopy on one side of India gate used to house a huge statue of King George V, which was removed after India gained independence. It has remained empty ever since, but actually looks quite pretty like that. India gate itself was built in 1921 and commemorates the 70,000 Indian soldiers who died fighting for the British army in World War I. Following independence, it also became the site of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, known as Amar Jawan Jyoti which means the flame of the immortal soldier.

The empty canopy

The upside of all the photographs was that we managed to get a few photos of the two of us together outside India gate, getting some of the people to return the favour!

Us by India Gate

From India Gate, we walked down Rajpath - the long, wide street that the Republic Day Parade had gone down. India Gate is at one end, and the other end is the President's House and the Parliament Building. These grand buildings with beautiful well kept gardens, built during the rule of the British, stood in stark contrast with most of the rest of Delhi. Right in the middle of the junction leading to these huge buildings was a little platform, where a women in a white policeman style helmet and white gloves was directing traffic!

The government buildings and the police officer directing traffic

We had a few errands to run, boring things like changing money and so on, so we headed to Conaught Place to do those things, before walking from there up through Janpath - one of our favourite markets. As well as being a nice thing to do, this walk did have a purpose.

Before coming to Delhi, we had been told by a friend that whilst we were here, we had to pay a trip to the Imperial Hotel, just for a drink or something, as it really was an experience and well worth seeing once. Having looked it up in the guidebook, it became clear very quickly that it was not somewhere we would be staying (very very expensive), but the guidebook did recommend a very reasonably priced and very tempting sounding afternoon tea! We decided right at the start that to celebrate our midway point of being in India for a month, we would treat ourselves to this, one month in, as a little taste of home and sampling this apparently amazing place!

The Imperial Hotel was opened in 1931 and was Delhi's first "luxury hotel". As you may expect it has an incredibly colonial feel to it, and today still is home to a large collection of colonial art and artefacts. We walked up to the entrance feeling quite scruffy after a day traipsing round the dust of Delhi, but we were greeted like royalty, with the staff all bowing and greeting us with the Hindi greeting "Namaste". Not being totally comfortable with all the Indians bowing at the two Brits, we bowed back also saying "Namaste", which was received with smiles and compliments on our henna!

The driveway up to the main entrance of the Imperial

 Inside was another world. Chandeliers hung from the ceiling lighting wood paneled corridors, and inlaid marble floors. As you went in there was even a Chanel store! As we walked up the corridor desperately trying to look like we fitted in, we went past fountains, huge pieces of colonial artwork, an amazing looking pastry shop and gleaming carved mirrors. We stopped off at the bathrooms, mainly just to see what they were like, and we made the most of the individual fluffy hand towels and luxurious moisturiser, still not quite believing that no-one had stopped us or tried to kick us out yet!

Main corridor in the Imperial

We finally made our way to the atrium where we were seated for afternoon tea. Whilst we took in the huge, airy room, complete with water feature in the centre and a glass roof, two stacked cakes stands appeared, packed full of tiny sandwiches, éclairs, cream cakes, chocolates and right on the top a scone with jam and cream! We felt utterly spoilt and indulged...especially when, after finishing the delicious sandwiches, they bought us more of our favourite sandwiches before we could move on to the cakes! It was all delicious. There was a token onion bhaji in there so that we remembered that we were in India, but especially eating the scones, we were briefly transported to summer in Britain!

The Atrium, complete with mood lighting

Michaela's first flush Darjeeling tea

Our cake stands!

Us with all our goodies

It was a nice treat, and a great building to see, but we both agreed that lovely as it was, it wasn't really a very authentic Indian experience. We loved it as a one off, but we were actually glad that we weren't staying there as we thought that we might have missed out on the real India, full of noise, dust, people and character.

Emma experimented with classy photo modes for our classy location!

Emma looks sophisticated