4th September

Had my long lie today. It was fantastic. I didn’t feel like doing anything this morning so lay in bed until Amanda got me up, and then, once dressed, I went back to laying in bad reading a book. Eventually I felt bad about my laziness, and I went up to AIM café for a change of scenery and some lunch, as I just did not feel like curry today.

My legs are in a complete state. I have all these weird little spots all over them and they just keep cropping up. It reminds me of impetigo, but it hasn’t spread anywhere else, and they are like actual spots, not blisters that crust over. I don’t understand it at all. It might be because we are sweating all the time or something.

 Having spent 6 hours in AIM, we went back to the hostel really briefly to drop our stuff off and then went straight back out to Connaught Place for a film. There is an Odeon in CP, so we thought we would turn up and see what was on. There wasn’t anything on until half ten though, and it was Final Destination. There is another cinema in CP though, called PVR Plaza, and it had Love Aaj Kal on at half seven. Love Aaj Kal is the film that Lauren’s favourite tune, Chori Bazari is on the soundtrack of. The cinema was above a restaurant and bar complex called Piccadelhi, which was completely kitsch and awesome. It had London metro signs outside, and then you walked through red phone boxes into a little square thing that has a black signpost like the London tourist signs and a London bus stop! There was a small English-style pub that could have passed for one, except the floor was not nearly sticky enough. It was really well done and made us feel very nostalgic for London, especially as Amanda and Stephen are both from the metropolis.

Love Aaj Kal itself was absolutely amazing and I am going to buy it and bring it home and force everyone to watch it in Hindi with me. There were great dance routines, there was a mad carnival scene, it was even set in London mostly…sigh…fantastic in every way. Chori Bazari wasn’t the only good song on offer either: there was a great one about twisting at one juncture, and there were dance moves and everything. It was so weird seeing London in most of the scenes, particularly when everyone apparently spoke in Hindi. Delhi also had an odd quirk about it, as it was very clean and generally an awful lot more cosmopolitan looking than it actually is. We mistook it for San Francisco at one point it was so clean looking. The whole film is hilarious. It is about a guy and girl who meet at a club and start going out. They decide to break up though when she gets a place restoring temples in Delhi and he gets a contract working for Golden Gate Inc. They both pretend it is fine and start seeing other people (the guy seeing this hilariously bimbo French girl) but soon all begins to fall apart. They decide to meet once more, and there is a song and dance number and you think they will get together, but no. Then girl decides to get married to her boyfriend even though she is really unhappy. She gets a divorce soon afterwards though, and the guy realises he has been an idiot and travels to Delhi to ask her to take him back. Which of course she does. Running alongside this is the flash backs of the match maker, an old Sikh man with many brightly coloured turbans, who has also had to go through many trials and tribulations to get the woman he loved. It is all very nice an lovey-dovey, and I have to say Sikh man is an old smoothie.

After the film we went to Parana Ganj and went up to Metropolis and persuaded the men in the kitchen to make us a pizza to share between us. Lauren thinks she has Delhi Belly again, which is not good and does not bode well for our train journey tomorrow. We are planning on going to Agra to see the Taj Mahal. Amanda and I have already decided we are not going to eat anything in Agra as everyone gets poisoned there, even the Indian girls, but Lauren and Stephen think they will be fine. I think I would rather be hungry for 24 hours than sick for a week to be honest. We will see how Lauren is though. We might need to rethink if she is too unwell, which would be a great shame.