India

I left Kathmandu heading to Surat for a friend's wedding. I flew Spice Jet: they played Christmas music, and the flight attendants wore Santa hats for the Christmas Eve flight :). Along the way I connected in Delhi. At the suggestion of my friend, I restricted myself to luxury hotels for booking the airport hotel. I stayed at the Radisson Blu (5 star) and was super impressed. A level of service way beyond what I'm used to. Sadly I only had ~6hrs in the hotel each time.

Radisson Christmas morning

Surat is a giant city (metro pop 7million) and the 8th largest city in India. It's known for diamonds, food, and swearing apparently. I'm also guessing you've never heard of it before. It was certainly new to me when I was booking flights! Flights to Surat is another curiosity: it has only one or two flights a day total, despite its large population. Possibly because its close to Mumbai and Ahmedabad.

Once in Surat I spent evenings at the wedding activities, and tourism during the day. Except that there isn't a whole lot of tourism: places to go included the beach, science centre / museum, and mall. I did see the Indian Ocean though and there was a ridiculously ornate English cemetery. Felt just like Britain there...

Indian Ocean. I really wanted to wade in but there was a lot of mud to cross with low tide both times I came to this beach

Where am I again?

Ah, there's the oppulance of Empire. These are English tombs from 1600s. The basic graves from later are late 1800s.

It's worth adding a comparison between India and Nepal here. They share the same shops, crazy bike drivers, and general drive where there is room mentality. There is a sharp divergence in development though. India has smooth paved roads, highways, flyovers, modern buildings and malls. The electricity stays on and there is hot water. So too though is India much more unequal: for the first time on my trip I saw people living in tent slums. There were very poor dwellings in Nepal, but everyone seemed to have walls and a roof. This equality differences is borne out in the Gini coefficient (measure of inequality, 0=perfect equality with all income the same, 1=perfect inequality, one person has all the income). Nepal is 0.32, India 0.36. For reference Canada is 0.32.