Living Like a Refugee

I guess I should mention that our stay in Delhi has been on a Tibetan refugee camp. But it's probably not what you think. This isn't Darfur or Gaza. It's actually a pretty nice place. And it's considerably more affluent than the rest of India. That doesn't mean I get a hot shower in the morning, of course. The Tibetans aren't really in to the shower thing. They use a large bucket that they fill with hot water and a scoop to pour the water on themselves. When we have actually had a shower, Tamding still used the bucket. I'm not a big fan of the bucket, but at least the water is hot.

You might be wondering about the affluence here. There are two reasons for it. First, refugees are often fairly affluent to begin with. Only those who have enough money to travel can be refugees. The really poor people have to live through any conflicts because they have no money to pay for the travel. Consider the refugees of Iraq. They are mostly doctors, engineers, lawyers and the like. The other reason for the affluence is that there is quite a lot of sympathy in the world for the Tibetan people. So they get a lot of outside assistance. And they put it to good use, too. They are smart enough to buy educations with the money they receive.

So Delhi was nice. It's a much cleaner city than most of India. They actually have emissions control for automobiles and nearly all of the streets are paved. They limit the cows to the slummy parts of town and they actually seem to have some sort of garbage pickup. So Delhi smells a lot better than the rest of India and isn't as dusty. It's almost as nice as Bangkok. If you want to do the short tour of India, I'd recommend going to Delhi and then doing the day trip to Agra.