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Foreigners NOT Welcome: Indian Street Food Ahmedabad

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A Norwegian vlogger goes hunting for Gujarati food in Ahmedabad and ends up ordering Chinese noodles instead.

Harald Baldr landed in Ahmedabad with one instruction ringing in his ears: try the Gujarati food. So he headed for Manek Chowk after dark, the jewelry bazaar that flips into the city’s best-known open-air food market once the sun goes down. What he actually walked away with, at least on his first order, had nothing to do with Gujarat at all.

• Baldr traveled to Manek Chowk in Ahmedabad, the jewelry market that transforms nightly into a dense street food court.
• Despite being told repeatedly to try traditional Gujarati dishes, his first order turned out to be Indo-Chinese Veg Manchurian from a stall serving Punjabi and fast-food items, a mix-up rooted in his lack of Hindi and Gujarati.
• The video’s title, “Foreigners NOT Welcome,” is deliberately provocative — the footage itself shows crowded-market chaos and curious vendors, not actual hostility toward outsiders.

Manek Chowk After Dark

By day, Manek Chowk is a jewelry bazaar. By night, it’s something else entirely — rows of carts and stalls packed shoulder to shoulder, smoke rising off tavas, and a crowd thick enough that moving from one vendor to the next takes real effort. Baldr’s video leans into that transformation, framing the market as the reason to come to Ahmedabad after dinner rather than before it.

He wasn’t wandering in blind. Locals had pushed him toward Gujarati staples specifically, the kind of thali-adjacent street snacks the region is known for. That’s the setup the video keeps circling back to — a traveler with a specific culinary target, dropped into a market that turned out to have its own agenda.

A Language Barrier, Not a Wall

The trouble started at the ordering counter. Baldr doesn’t speak Hindi or Gujarati, and Manek Chowk at full volume, at night, mid-rush, is not a forgiving place to figure that out. Menus are shouted more than read, stalls blur into each other, and the fastest way to get fed is to point and hope.

That’s exactly what happened. Instead of a Gujarati dish, Baldr’s first order came back as Veg Manchurian — an Indo-Chinese staple, not a regional specialty — from a stall that was actually serving Punjabi and general fast food. It’s a common enough mix-up in Indian night markets, where multiple cuisines get crammed into a few square feet of stall space and the “local” food is easy to miss if you don’t know what you’re looking for.

He came for Gujarati food and left with Indo-Chinese Manchurian — a mix-up born of noise and a language gap, not a locked door.

The Title Versus the Footage

“Foreigners NOT Welcome” is the kind of headline built for clicks, and it doesn’t match what’s on screen. The video shows the usual texture of a busy Indian night market: vendors curious about the foreigner filming them, a crush of customers, and the ordinary friction of getting fed fast in a crowd — not systematic exclusion or refusal of service. Baldr gets his food. He just doesn’t get the food he set out for.

That gap between the provocative title and the actual footage is the real story of the video — night markets like Manek Chowk are loud, multicultural, and occasionally confusing for anyone who doesn’t speak the language, foreigner or not. Viewers looking for the same kind of chaotic street-food immersion elsewhere in India can find a similar culture-shock angle in I Went Drinking in Mumbai’s Worst Slum, or a comparable market-hopping format from a different country entirely in AMAZING Street Food in CHINA.

Baldr never says whether he circled back for the Gujarati dish everyone told him to order. The video ends with him still working through Manek Chowk’s stalls, Manchurian in hand, proof that the loudest night market in Ahmedabad doesn’t care what you came for — it feeds you what’s closest to the front of the line.