It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood...

27 Apr 2013

Last week I gave you a tour of our house in New Delhi. Like concentric circles from a pebble hitting a still pond, today I move out to our neighborhood. I actually debated trying to do something on the greater Delhi area first, just to give you context. Our neighborhood is so quiet and peaceful (even with a train track less than a quarter mile away) compared to most of Delhi, I would somehow like to help you appreciate that difference. I can’t quite figure out how to do that with words and a few pictures, so I guess you will have to visit and see for yourself.

Anyway to our neighborhood: we live in an area, a colony o

r nagar as they say here, named Friends Colony West. This is not to be confused with Friends Colony (no East that I’ve been able to find) or New Friends Colony. It is a fairly well established neighborhood. There are many large, beautiful homes. Most of them, like ours, actually house more than one family. Actually, in our case, we are the outliers. The second and third floor flats are occupied respectively by a brother and sister. The owner is a man about my age who now lives out of the city on a farm. Whether it is an actual working farm or a large home in the country is not clear from the ancient record. I have picked up the fact many families with means have more rural homes, estates really, that they call farms.

Anyway, I am going to take you for a virtual walk around our neighborhood. Last week I showed you the front of our flat. This is the whole building from the street.

You will notice there it is gated, every home or complex in our neighborhood has a separate gate with a guard that keeps watch on things and opens and closes the gate as needed. Here is one of our guards and the driver for our neighbor the brother. He really has nothing to do with us but I wasn’t sure how to ask him to step out of the picture. My Hindi is really bad at this point.

So, moving out to the street, this is what you see if you look right from our house…

and this is what you see if you look left.

Directly in front of our house is a little fenced and gated park. There are these parks in the median of each of the roads in our neighborhood. This is ours here:

In London, and I am sure other cities but I always associate them with London row houses, there are what are called key parks. They are locked parks for the use of the people who live in that immediate vicinity. These neighborhood parks are like that, except there are no gates with keys. Rather, one enters the part through a mini-maze like this.

I guess you can say these are a-mazing parks rather than key parks. Sorry. Living in India has not fixed my warped sense of humor or love of puns. I can’t wait until I can make puns in Hindi!

Well. Moving on. We live as you may have been able to tell from the pictures above on a dead end street. If you walk towards the open end of the street, you enter into what is really the central road in our neighborhood. This is what you see when you look right…

and this is what you seen when you look left.

Here is a shot of the a-mazing park in the median of this central road. You will note that it is lusher than our little park.

That may be because it is cared for so well. This sign is posted on the fence to the park (in only one place that I could see; I’m not sure exactly how effective that would be for a park that runs probably a half mile in length). I am sure, however that the prohibition on card playing has helped keep the park so green.

Walking further on I snapped these pictures of flowering trees. The first looks like a bougainvillea but I am not sure it is.

The orange in the second picture does not do the vibrancy of the original justice. It was practically flaming in real life.

At the end of the a-mazing park is this little playground. Those of you with smaller children (yes, I am looking at you Beverlins, Browns, and Cliffords; Maude too, although she is hardly small anymore) will be glad to know there is a place close by for your kids to burn off a little energy.

Bill Griffiths these two pictures are for you, though any other bird lover is also invited to look. This one has to be a cousin of a crow. Their calls sound like the cawing of a crow to my untrained ear.

This one is quiet and seems pretty non-descript. Except when they fly you can see they have beautiful white patches under their wings.

I didn’t see on this walk the smallish birds with the florescent green heads and stout beaks. I would like to know what they are. Likewise, I would love to know what the bird looks like that sounds like a howler monkey and wakes me every morning. If I find THAT bird, the outcome may not be pretty! I might be deported for bird-icide!

Well that’s it for this week. I hope you enjoyed the walk around our neighborhood. If you have things you would like me to write about, I am open to suggestions.

Namaste.