Day 1: The sim-card odyssey

Wow, what a first day in India! 

After we landed at Delhi International Airport in the morning we took a taxi to our hotel in Gurgaon. We thought it would be a short ride, but boy, we were wrong about that. The traffic in India is totally crazy. We ended up in a traffic jam in which six of the available three lanes were used. It was loud, hot and just completely insane because there seems to be no traffic rules at all. When somebody sees the slightest space somewhere they just honk like crazy and try to slip in. There is hardly any car without visible signs of this creative driving habits…

The next problem was that our driver has absolutely no clue where to find our hotel. So we ended up asking multiple people on the road about the right direction. Yet we got the feeling that everybody said something else so it took us quite some time to finally get to our hotel. But in the end, we arrived. Our hosts welcomed us with coffee and water and after signing some papers we first took a nice nap since we were quite exhausted from the short night in the plane and the long taxi ride.

After we got our well deserved rest we took course to meet the only goal we had set for this day: buying sim cards for our smartphones in order to stay in touch with everybody during our trip. At this moment we really didn’t know what an odyssey this simple task will turn into. But first things first. We asked our host where to find a store in order to buy sim cards. He told us that there is a store near the hotel and that he could guide us there. So we took a walk with him. Once we were there it turned out that the store doesn’t sell prepaid sim cards and that we have to get to another store in a bigger mall in the town center. But first we had to turn back to the hotel because some of us forgot the photocopies of their passport. We then decided to take an uber to the mall. Once being there we found out that we need real passport photos for the sim card registration. But of course there was no photo studio in the mall but in a local store around the corner. So we walked there and actually managed to get some really nice passport photos. The photo guy even was so nice to make us looking younger than ever by using his pretty impressive photoshop skills. We were quite happy and thought that we finally had everything to buy a sim card. But again, we were wrong. The not quite as nice lady in the phone store told us that the registration with the phone company would take two days and that we would have to come back to the store two days later. Well, that’d be an impossible task since we had to flight to Jodhpur the next day. In the end we realized that we wouldn’t get any sim card today and we sadly abandoned our quest.

We continued this interesting but also pretty exhausting day with a meal at an Indian hipster bakery. The freshly made sandwiches and the self-made ice tea were really delicious – but that was the least we could expect for the German prices we paid for the food. And since we were still a bit hungry we ordered two chicken pizzas on top on our way to the hotel. After finally arriving at the hotel again we ate our pizzas and even managed to make a short video teaser for all the things to happen during the upcoming Rickshaw Run before falling asleep.

https://www.facebook.com/toobrokeforbreakdown/videos/271448133447266/ 

Take a look and come back tomorrow for another insight into our little adventure if you like.