It's India, Jase, but not as we know it...

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I've only ever been in one other purpose-built city, and I have to say, it was equally as odd. Or rather, Chandigarh seemed to me to be as equally as odd as the first purpose-built city, Canberra. Originally designed by two American architects, and finished (after one of the original architects died in a plane crash) by a Swiss architect, the city has wide open roads, lined, no less, by trees, situated on a grid which intersects at roundabout after roundabout. The separate areas of the city are labeled as "sectors", numbered in a logical and coherent order, with corresponding road signs. We even found a supermarket! It's not an India Jason or I were (or are, for that matter) familiar with, and it was ever so slightly unnerving. Even the people in Chandigarh don't behave in a way we've come to expect; for one thing, drivers didn't use their horns instead of indicators or their eyes, and for another I don't think we were photographed even once. And it was lovely. It didn't feel like India, but it was still lovely.
We'd come with the sole intention of seeing the "Rock Garden" (which was certainly worth the 9 hour bus journey to get here), which we saw in a couple of hours during our first morning, and found that, after we'd seen that, there wasn't an awful lot to do. We headed over to the High Court, at the suggestion of the guidebook, to see the interesting architecture, but found ourselves siphoned into an office for "protocol". Three men were ordered off the sofa they were sitting on (including a General, in uniform) so that Jason and I could sit down, and we were then witness to many unnecessary sheets of paper being handed back and forth across the room, accruing signatures as they passed, until finally we were handed a sheet of paper giving us permission to take photographs. Something we hadn't asked for, but having permission felt somewhat compelled to do. So we did. And that was Chandigarh.
The guidebook asserts that tourists are often split over the city; some love it, some hate it. We neither loved it nor hated it, but we certainly are split over it; it was lovely, but it was too easy, too clean, too organised, and much as we've (ok, I'VE) complained about India lacking these things, when we finally found them, it didn't feel real.

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