Hooray! I finally can get photos off my camera… Heres what happened. Ive been a bit of a tourist lately going around seeing the wonderful historical sites in Delhi. I’m now gonna bore everyone with computer stuff, but too bad. I had brought an SD card reader to get the photos off my camera memory card. Unfortunately, after trying in vain it seems all the computers here in India are way too slow to read from my SD card reader, which meant: no photos for everyone.
Yesterday, after visiting the Red Fort in Delhi, our driver went missing and we went back to the car and found him in Chandi Chowk markets. He told us that his phone was broken and led us into a labyrinth of street hawkers, screaming merchants and eventually to a mobile phone repair…well i guess you could call it a “store”. He went upstairs and there were 5 guys in this tiny room (no more than a meter wide) with soldering irons hammering away at his phone. Deep in this jungle of narrow lanes and alleyways, was the most amazing sight of thousands of merchants selling the most craziest electronic gear out on the street from mobile phones, dvd players to speaker systems. The entire whole market could probably make the next iPhone (its probably where the fakes come from). I thought I would try my luck and see if they would had a cable for my camera but I didn’t have much hope as it was a very specific and obscure Fuji adapter. A Sikh man with a white turban examined the camera for 5 minutes, spoke to some others in Hindi, made a few calls and told me to wait here while he walked off into the jungle with my camera. Our driver had already come back happy with his phone repaired, and so I was expecting that it was the last time I would see him or my camera again, but then round the corner his white turban appeared with my camera and a cable which fitted perfectly. I wasn’t really in a strong bargaining position after that but I got what I wanted and it didn’t work out to be very much converted back anyway.
Chandi Chowk markets
Our driver then led us to another corner of the markets. Being foreigners, we were the novelty of the town. The guys at the shop kept asking us things back home, checking out our phones and trying to flog us NOKAs and other unheard of brands of mobiles. One of them kept haggling me to sell him my camera. I managed to bargain for a 32GB USB drives for 400 rupees (less than $10), which would cost about 7 times more back home. Ok, yes, its a fake Kingston but its still pretty good… so I think.
The most surprising thing was, they both worked perfectly (actually the USB drive is a bit corrupted), and I can now show photos. So without further ado, you can compare what really happened to the pictures to my poor descriptions.
Stop moderating your posts, dude. You want to free Tibet, but won’t free your own blog. How sad. Anyway, the photos are really cool! Definitely shows an interesting glimpse into what you’ve been experiencing. Here’s a comment for you. Continue the blogging!