Mughal Garden

The lovely dahlia here is from my balcony, not from the garden. I would like to show you some of the wonderful garden, but I cannot.
Nothing but ourselves was allowed into the garden.
No cameras.
No phones.
No food.
No water bottles.
No pens.
No chapstick.

All I had in my pocket when I went to visit the Mughal garden of Rashtrapati Bhavan was my keys and some money.
I searched for information about whether or not there would be a place to deposit anything before entering, thinking surely there must be dozens of people showing up with their belongings and needing somewhere to put them. I even called the tourist department in Delhi, but I couldn't find evidence of any such possibility, other than one article that mentioned "depositing" your things at the entry gate.

The gardens are opened once a year during February and March when the flowers begin to bloom. Otherwise they, and the rest of the Presidential residence, remain off limits to the general public.
There are over 250 varieties of roses--not to mention all the other kinds of flowers--in the gardens. And right now, they are wonderfully in bloom.

For there to even be 250 varieties of roses, people have come up with some unique names, which lead to some confusion in one of the articles I came across. It gave a list of some of the famous international visitors to the gardens, and Abraham Lincoln was on the list.
Huh?
Abraham Lincoln was dead long before Sir Edward Luytens was even born, let alone designed the Rashtrapati Bhavan and it's surrounding gardens.
Yet when I was there, I noticed that Lincoln had been to the garden--the Lincoln rose, named after him.
The Christian Dior rose, too, another of the famous people like the article mentioned.

Haha. These are the distinguished visitors--roses.
Ya, the roses are pretty nice, but don't believe everything you read online.

Shopping cows

There are cows at the mall.

The absurdities of real life--stranger than fiction.

Get weighed

Do you need something more to do when you visit India gate?
Here's an option: get weighed.

The sign says, you can "come get weighed now for only 2 rupees".
What a deal.

I wonder if I could stop by to weigh my luggage when I'm on the way to the airport...
I wonder if--like so many other things--they would deliver their services and come to me to weigh my luggage....hmm...

No toll

I find it slightly obnoxious when there are highway signs with so much information on them that it's impossible to read them in the less-than-a-minute-before-you-pass-them time frame.
This one just might win the prize.
It's the complete list of who is exempt from the national highway toll.

Well.
There's a reason for why it pays to be a V.I.P.
Highway tolls.

I don't know what to think of that. Especially as it's posted, to point out to all the rest of us that we are not cabinet ministers, chief justices, foreign dignitaries, awardees of Param Vir Chakra, or on-duty fire fighters.

Something about this lacks common sense. Or humility.

Perhaps it's a way of limiting abuse of the system. As in: "If you're not on the list, you're not getting by for free."
It seems that anyone with a "government vehicle" wants to get through, and some of those government convoys can be long.

Signs along the road: interesting food for thought.