My Neighborhood

We live in a part of Delhi called New Friends Colony. It's about the halfway point between the American School in Chanakypuri and the Ericsson office in Noida. New Friends Colony is divided into blocks and we live in C-Block. Your address is your block and house number, so we live at C-731. We live adjacent to the road that divides B-Block and C-Block, so we often take the B-Block entrance.




   The entrances to all the blocks are gated and have guards. We have a gate right on our corner that is locked 8pm to 7am. We have to come in via another gate if we come home after-hours or leave early in the morning. The locked gate means less traffic and a safer location.



We live just behind this gate. There is a little door on the side that we go thru to catch the morning bus because the gate is usually still locked when we leave. It says the gate is open at 6am, but it's more like 7:30am.



There are quite a few parks and green areas in NFC. There is a small walking park located about 5 houses down on our street. I walk there in the mornings after I take the kids to the bus stop.



It's quite shady!





Another view of the park





All the parks are locked to keep naughty children from picking the flowers. Also, it's too hot to walk in the middle of the day. Some people use the parks as shortcuts through the neighborhood, so the locks cut down on that, too.




There are several tiles depicting Hindu gods set into the walls of the park. This is Ganesha and his parents.


Our neighborhood has a mixture of new and old buildings. I've been told there was a recent change to the building ordinances which now allows buildings higher than 3 floors. Therefore, builders are tearing down a lot of the older buildings and putting up newer, taller ones that can hold more tenants. Typically, an apartment occupies one complete floor of a building. It seems like they are building or rehabbing a unit about every 4 or 5 houses along the streets.



A new, modern building next to an older one on our street.



Our building has 3 floors. The landlords live in an apartment on the ground floor and we have a 2-story apartment (called a duplex here) on the 1st and 2nd floors. In the US, we would say that our apartment is on the 2nd and 3rd floors. But here they are counted as ground, first and second. That actually makes more sense but we got pretty confused our first few days of apartment shopping.



Our apartrment building. The large balconies are off our living/dining room. The man you see at the top is the garder on our terrace.

Every home has a gated entrance and a guard out front. The guards keep uninvited people away and let you know when you have a visitor. They also check any service people who leave to make sure they didn't steal something. When we order pizza, the guard will come up with the pizza and bill, then we pay him and he gives the money to the pizza guy. It's pretty handy and helps cut down on the number of strangers in your house. Some expat friends of ours were robbed when they lived in Brazil and they believe the thieves may have been somehow related to repairmen who were in the house the day before.





This is our guard booth, just outside the gate.

 




Our gate

 



This is our driveway. It's hard to tell from the picture, but it's made of marble - like every horizontal surface here.

 



The door to our apartment building. It leads to an interior staircase that goes to the 2 units.

 



The staircase up to our apartment.



We have a total of 4 entrances to our apartment. There's the main door, the fancy door for company that leads into the living room, the gardner's door to the terrace, and an internal door to the terrace.



Main door on left, guest door on right.




Gardner's door to the 3rd story terrace.




Windows in the staircase.



The third story has a small garden terrace that overlooks the street in front of the house. Our washer and dryer are up there, too. There's also an external staircase that leads to the rooftop.



View from the terrace




View from the terrace, looking towards the park.



There are service alleys that run behind all the homes. Looking out my bedroom window, I can see the backs of the homes on the street behind us. Directly behind us lives a disgusting man who goes on his balcony to hack up phlegm and pick at his skin after he showers. It's quite a sight to behold. I just keep the curtains closed in the back.



View from my bedroom




The alley behind us