First Trip
A special shoutout to Noah and Courtney, thank you for hanging out with me and getting me out of my rut and making me feel so cared for.
My friends Noah and Courtney are coming to India to visit me! Well… they’re coming for a wedding and I’m visiting them but it’s all the same to me. So the first challenge is making the trip timing feasible. I need to leave Delhi’s pollution sometime soon. I’m the guy on the flight who is coughing a lung.
Instead of our original plan for us to hang at my flat (which would have be dope), we opted to meet in Jodhpur, where the wedding is. Flights and hotels booked and I’m off.
Just as the trip started, I realized I had no idea how to navigate India myself. Although I’ve been to India multiple times, I’ve always been with family and have not ventured out on my own. Getting from the airport to the hotel in Jodhpur was the first challenge. Delhi is filled with Ubers and they’re generally safe. Jodhpur doesn’t allow Ubers, so I gotta get a taxi. Do I do a prepaid taxi, a prepaid auto or walk along the side of the road hoping someone will pick me up? Believe it or not, that third option was my first instinct. After hearing a few pricing quotes, I mustered up the courage to use my Hindi. I’m somewhat fluent in Hindi, but I’m not sure how it’ll translate to new cities and places where dialects and languages differ.
The next thing I had to decide was if it’s prefer to have the safety of a foreigner or the price of a local? More and more, I found myself prioritizing the price of the local. Although India is not the safest country on Earth, there is a certain comfort and hospitality of the people here. Being in tourist-heavy areas, I’m only concerned about pick pocketing and maybe a tourist scam. Nothing life threatening. As time goes on this trip, I get more and more comfortable traveling.
Since I’ve been in India, I’ve constantly been surrounded by my family - my grandma in my flat, my cousins upstairs and even my aunts that I visit/hear from regularly. Although my family has known me longer than my friends have, they haven’t really experienced life with me. The cultural, age, and life difference makes some conversations hard. I can’t trust that they’ll understand the scenarios I’m talking about, I can’t trust that this isn’t something that will come back to bite me, and there’s just some things that are hard to explain.
While hanging out with my friends, I feel a relief I didn’t expect. Being able to show off some of my India knowledge is good and all, but having friends to talk to, to connect with, and to have sanity checks from is invaluable. We spent so much time sitting around, ordering food, and catching up on life.
Within Jodhpur, I ended up being a lot more adventurous as host than I was alone. I speak the language and have been to the city before so I feel like I should have something to show for it. Maybe it’s a food that they have to taste or a souvenir that they wouldn’t think to take. While I didn’t necessarily deliver, my friends told me that I made the trip more comfortable to them. I’ll take what I can get. While they were at the wedding festivities, I had 1 meal, got lost looking for an auto and sat in the hotel. I was surprised that my version of adventure in Jodhpur was playing video games in my hotel. Travel is funny like that - you don’t always get what you want when you want it - but you roll with the punches.