Delhi in 5 hours!

So on our (Kids and mine) last day in India, we met up with my parents in Delhi. They offered to keep the kids for the day at the hotel and hired a driver and guide for L and I to tour around Delhi.  The kids loved this, as K put it, they swam from breakfast to lunch and then from lunch to dinner.

So L and I put what we would see in the guides hands and pretty much left it with we need to be back at the hotel around 3, you can pic what we see.

First we arrived at the largest Mosque in India  Since L was in shorts they provided a wrap to put around his legs and I had a frock to put on. Shoes needed to be removed and left outside. During special prayer days there can be 20,000 to 30,000 people in the mosque.

After the Mosque the driver arranged for us to take a Rickshaw (bicycle not auto) through the Old Delhi market. WOW. At one point in an alley the width of say 10 feet, there was a car, two motorcycles and our rickshaw trying to get through. The car was going one way, and the other three of us was going in the other direction.  The market was interesting for several reasons.  Each section of the market seemed to be dedicated to a different type of store, there was a paper section, a book section, a wedding section (sari's, fabrics, lace, etc).  There were tight quarters, there was a mess of electrical wires, there were monkeys.  And the noise!!! Wow!! We've mentioned before that there's a lot of honking, but usually we were buffered being in a car, not in the rickshaw, wow was it noisy.

A view of the market from the Mosque. 

Snack time for the monkey among the crazy amount of wires. 

Next we headed to the cremation place of Mahatma Gandhi.  There is an entire park around that area now, and various other Hindi Politicians have been cremated in that park.  Cremations are no longer performed there.

After that we headed to Humayun's Tomb. The former mogul Emperor is buried here along with his family, his general and his wife, his barber (he has his own tomb - he was the only one allowed near the Emperor with a sharp instrument so he was a very trusted person) and about 150 graves of other people that no one knows who they were.  The Emperors wife built the tomb, and left lots of room for smaller tombs at the base of the overall tomb.  All the arches at the base of the tomb hold 2 to 6 graves in each.   First Persian influence, there are gardens made up of 4 quadrants all around the Tomb.

The upper level housed the mogul emperor, his family and general
The lower level houses the graves of the unknowns.

Built in the red sandstone and marble that is prominent in many structures. 

One of the rooms in the upper level of the tomb. 

As Delhi is the capital of India, the foreign embassies are there.  There's one street that has all the embassies on it, along with a couple of roundabouts.  Apparently whenever a foreign dignity is in town they decorate that road and the roundabouts with the flags from the visiting country and India.   The Governor General of Canada was visiting India so the road, the roundabouts and the area near the government offices were all decorated with the Canadian and Indian flags.