How do you usually know about a story? Mostly from a movie or on the Internet? It's not that difficult to find gorgeous pictures of India on Google. However, you should always tell yourself that not to trust the pictures online because they might have been edited with so much "MSG" in them. You should try not to expect too much to avoid any disappointment. Read on to discover the reality of India now!
1. Pollution Issue in India
Expectation: Pollution? It should be fine. It couldn't be any worse! We're from Hong Kong!
Reality: We couldn't even breathe and just keep coughing like forever.
Everyone knows that India suffers severe air pollution and we thought it would be similar to Hong Kong's until we landed. Our advice is to take as many facial masks as possible with you, or you could get ill seriously eventually. We couldn't even see the view clearly from the Tuk Tuk that we took, how could the driver can drive us to the right destination?
2. People and traffics in India
Expectation: How busy could it be? like peak hours at MTR in Hong Kong?
Reality: Here's nothing like anywhere in the world.
Taking Tuk Tuk everywhere in India is super convenient like grabbing a taxi in a cheap way. They could be seen and found everywhere, literally everywhere. Everyone would walk into the traffics so basically the traffic lights were totally useless. Even all sorts of transports, especially small vehicles like motorbike and Tuk Tuk, they would just go through all the possible gaps in between people and the traffics. For the first few days we thought we were gonna die but we managed to adopt this Indian culture at the end.
3. Henna Services in India
Expectation: Chilling in a shop and doing our henna like we were doing our nails.
Reality: Someone would always approach to you and said, "Henna? Come!", and you would find your seat on the road after you went through a crowd.
Henna is probably one of the things that you should do when you come to India. We were imagining ourselves doing our henna in a fancy shop. It didn't really have to be in a posh one, but at least somewhere indoor? We still can't believe that we literally did that randomly on the street, sitting on the road and having looked by every strangers. It's a bit weird but the experience was fantastic and we would love to do it all over again!
4. Curry in India
Expectation: We're going to eat the most authentic curry in the world! YAY!
Reality: Can we just stop for a little bit? Can we eat something else for our breakfast?
How can you resist to have the most authentic food in the origin? Basically we had curry every day, everywhere, even as breakfast. We didn't expect that our hotel would also offer curry as breakfast... So one day we thought maybe we should stop by McDonald's for something else instead of curry, which we ordered a veggie burger, but you know what? It was curry favoured.
5. Shopping in India
Expectation: Shop till we drop (all our money).
Reality: You wouldn't expect things in India could be that cheap and you just couldn't find a way to spend all your moment at the end.
We love shopping, especially in India! You could find anything you want here! We even bought the whole set of an Indian tradition clothing, handbags, accessories and scarf. And we also found a very pretty Indian-style-inspired modern dress as well. We literally bought loads but we still had lots to spend. Eventually we had to shop for the last round in the airport just to "drop" all the spare rupee.
6. Indian Architectures in India
Expectation: See photos across the Internet.
Reality: OMG! The picture can't do it justice as it is so gorgeous! We were so impressed.
You know the pictures are for reference only. We knew this since we were young. The architectures in India were so gorgeous while the picture can't do it justice. However, the pollution was too severe which made Taj Mahal not as pure and white as before. This is very sad and we wish the pollution would be less serious when we visited India again.