Food

Well, you may all be wondering why I haven't written about the food. Well, here goes. The food in India is incredible, delicious, interesting, fun to eat and more! Here is a usual breakfast that we get at our hotel. It is served buffet style. You start with juice (watermelon juice this morning) and then there is the usual cornflakes, etc. Followed by some fruit or cold salad items. Then an array of Indian and American dishes - everything from scrambled eggs and bacon to kegari and samal, paratha and idly ... you got all that, didn't you?

Here is Hannah's plate from this morning. I've forgotten the names of all the things, but the yellow 'soup' is like a very thin dahl (that's the Hindi word, and I can't remember the Tamil word right now). The 'donut' isn't sweet and has some vegetables in it. The yellow stuff at ten o'clock is called kegara, I think, it is like a thick cream of wheat porridge, very sweet, cooked with butter, sugar, pineapple and cashews. Below is my plate. I've put the split pea stuff onto the samal which is rice and vegetables, spices and whole peppercorns. I have a dosa (a kind of bread that looks like pancake, except I think this might be a different one with a different name)and above that is some lovely papaya. I've eaten fresh papaya every morning since we got here ... yum!

Lunch is provided by our OM leaders. In typical (and rather embarassing) fashion, our hosts eat rice and vegetables from a communal pot while sitting on benches in one room while, in another room, we eat a purchased luncheon. When Hannah and I each asked separately why this was so, we were told that it was their way of honoring us. Surprising to some of our team, this very special lunch also happened to be the same thing every day! I picture it, with one modification, below:
The bread is paratha, which is similar to a tortilla except that they have about five different things that are similar to a tortilla but all just a touch different from each other. Then there is a little bag of spiced chicken pieces - usually cut into small chunks, bone still in, that would equal about 1/2 of a drumstick. Then there is a little bag tied up with string (Isaac calls them the lunch bladders, naughty Isaac!) that has a nose-running hot and spicy soupy dish, sometimes with pieces of meat in it. This is always followed by a banana except for today when we got the tasty fruit salad. After five days of this, some of the group were becoming a little disgruntled and so the lunch runner surprised everyone with .... Pizza Hut personal pan pizzas!

(here's where the picture goes - I was so shocked, I forgot to snap a pic of the Pizza hut boxes)

They are served with ketchup here. Personally, today, I was glad that we went back to the Indian lunch. It is very tasty and I had the opportunity to sit across from two lovely Indian doctors and quietly emulate their eating skills; they can consume the whole meal only touching the food with their right hands!

Once we go back to the hotel, we can choose what we want for dinner from the restaurant. Some have found pasta alfredo, or something like that - it has spinach and a white sauce and is very good, some choose fish dishes, or one can partake of the buffet with is full of all kinds of Indian flavors and dishes. The other night I ate fish and mutton and calamari - all cooked into lovely sauces, some mild and some spicy - along with rice and pasta dishes with vegetables. Of course, even ordering American dishes off the menu can have its own surprises. Here is Amber's 'hamburger' from last night. It was a ham and cheese sandwich on a bun! (In front of it is a delicious fish bhiryani (I'm not sure where that h goes) that I had, it was in inbetween not-too-spicy one. Hannah's meal isn't pictured, it was a ragingly hot beef dish loaded with black pepper. Wow! The wait-staff were very impressed that she wanted to try it!

All in all, we have been well taken care of; I doubt I'll come home any lighter! God has made such great flavors and it is fun to see what other cultures have done with them!