(Wo)Man the barricades!

As the French might well have said during the Revolution – “Aux barricades!”

Here in foggy chilly Delhi, we have our own unfolding drama about barricades, which is a little too long (& off topic) to go into here, but in a nutshell…

…because the Americans strip-searched an Indian diplomat over issues with her nanny’s visa, the Indians have retaliated here with a whole slew of punitive measures against American diplomats, the most visible of which being the removal of those ugly concrete barriers along all the roads outside the American Embassy and the American School.

To celebrate getting our roads back, 3 of us went for a run this morning in Chankyapuri.

Hey, it’s not like we were being crass opportunists or anything, ‘cos we have done a lot of our Couch to 6km training along those well-manicured streets.

Seriously, we did train there.

It’s just that today, instead of running as we usually do outside the Pakistanis, the Japanese and the Germans, we decided we would run outside the US Embassy.

Because we can.

Here are the girls (wo)manning the barricades, that have been dragged from the street and placed on the grass verges.

 Joanna and Sharmila gamely posed, while I was ready to sprint away (because now I can!!) in case we were challenged, but it was all remarkably low key:

In fact, as we jogged round the corner, there was another man standing in the middle of the street also taking photos.

So I followed suit, producing what must be some of the most boring pictures ever of Delhi, BUT when you realise that the normally slow-reacting authorities here bulldozed away the concrete barriers and removed the rumble strips, all in a day, and against the Americans at that…well, it is our own little version of one small step…

We got some of our roads back, which is good news.  Long may it last.

This used to be a speed breaker (below)

We talked the walk today rather than running it, I must be honest.  Our time was slow, but it was good fun, and the 3 of us pretty much set the world to rights.

 

And on a slightly more serious note –  the discrepancy between my 2 GPS devices was more marked than usual this morning.

Often there is a slight difference between mapmywalk on my phone and my Garmin GPS, but today was significant.  700 metres is quite a bit, whilst the 2 devices showed exactly the same timing, down to the second.

Your thoughts, anyone?