Lime Soda

10, 000 Steps and a Chicken Biryani

2010-08-03T10:01:00.000-07:00

Junagadh. Not much of a city. But, if you are willing to climb the necessary 10,000 steps to the top of Mount Girnar, just 6 km north of the city, it can be a gateway to heaven. On the rainiest day of the season ,when Gujarat received a whopping 11% of it's annual rainfall, we opted for the "lavish people's" private bus from Bhuj to Junagadh. This is the first time we have taken a private bus, as opposed to the GSRTC spine compressor (state bus) and it is a whole world apart. The big attraction for most people is usually the AC, however those who had to wade through knee deep water to get to the bus in the pouring rain probably didn't enjoy the arctic breeze. The fun part for us was meeting a really nice Gujarati family whose children spoke very good English and were thrilled to finally have a chance to meet tourists. As the 12 year-old boy said with great excitement "I can't believe that I am talking to Foreign!"

Needless to say, the next day was neither bright nor sunny. It was, however, the day we had scheduled to climb the mountain so we pressed on undaunted. Mount Girnar is a popular and normally rather crowded, pilgrimage site, but on that day a big diaphanous cloud was enveloping the mountain and there were very few people in sight. The mountain is a holy site for both Jains and Hindus, and it is recommended that one starts climbing the 10,000 steps leading to the temples at the top at dawn to avoid the searing mid-day sun during the strenuous ascent. Approaching the foot of the mountain, we should have probably been forewarned by the rain poncho rental stall. Or by the fact that it started pouring so hard we needed to run for cover at the nearest chai stall. Or by the fact that we couldn't actually see that there WAS a mountain. After much debate we decided to continue. For a mere 5 rupees each, we rented some pilgrim's staffs and with our rain coats and umbrellas at the ready we felt up to the excursion.

The 10,000 steps are conveniently numbered for the benefit of the weary pilgrim. It might seem like a good idea, but there is nothing more disheartening while you are huffing and puffing up the mountain to realize that are only on step number 750. In the beginning, the numbers come every 50 steps, but towards the end, when you really need the encouragement, they numbering mysteriously stops altogether. It was like being in some sort of medieval legend where one is involved in a soul-searching quest against the elements.

At 1,000 steps there was a band of aggressive monkeys who demanded bananas to let you pass onwards. Luckily, some fellow pilgrims had the golden fruit and we were permitted passage. At about 1500 we stepped into the cloud, and could not see more then 10 meters ahead for the rest of the journey, not until we finally emerged back at the bottom of the mountain, some four hours later. Climbing a series of jagged cliffs, after 5000 steps a group of Jain temples emerged through the clouds. This gave us a good excuse to rest for a bit and explore the milk-white temple complex, looking especially mysterious with their misty halls and bits of cloud blowing in through the open windows. At 6000 steps the gods really seemed to test us, when we walked on a high, narrow, ridge with an abyss on either side. The wind started gusting in earnest and the rain began to blow sideways, soaking us to the skin.

At 7500 we stopped at a little shrine, and were rewarded with hot chai served to us by ash-smeared sadhus who ominously warned us "Make haste and do not tarry at the top, or you will be stranded on the mountain overnight." At 8000 steps the wind was blowing so hard that we decided that this was no longer fun and thought we should turn around. At this point we met three other intrepid pilgrims (jaded young Indian men) who insisted that the end was near and pulled us through the last 2000 steps, by telling us that there were only 700 left. Perhaps they were right, as at that point we had to go down about a 1000 steps before going up again to the final pinnacle. The view must be really gorgeous from the top, but we really couldn't see any of it. At the top, we did a quick darshan and circumambulated a three headed dattatreya while reciting the names of our parents. This god is a great invention, three gods, Brahma, Shiva and Vishnu all in one go. We were deemed worthy, rang a bell twice, and were instructed to proceed to the double gate and go left to receive some prasad, or an offering of food. It is cooked by young sadhus and is given to the pilgrims once they have reached the top. It was a simple meal of chapatis, dal and kichidi, served on the floor on plates made from dried leaves, but after walking the whole day in the rain, or perhaps because of the spiritual context, this was one of the best meals that we had in India.

We were planning on making an early start the next day and leave Junagadh before noon. But as usual in India, we got sidetracked. We planned nothing but a quick visit to the Mahabat Maqbara, a group of 19th century Muslim mausoleums, now doubling as a cricket pitch for the local kids.

On the back to the hotel, Boazcoldrink". Full of curiosity, we followed them in to the house and were promptly invited to sit on the newly installed swing in the living (and only) room. They were busy painting and were obviously very proud of their newly renovated house. Coldrink consumed and seven albums of family photographs later, we were invited to eat something. Or, considering that none of us really had a language in common, that's what we think we were invited to do. After some polite refusal, but in reality, extremely tempted by the thought of finally having a home cooked meal, we finally agreed to eat a little something. To this there were many smiles, much head nodding and the repeated mantra of "chicken biryani, chicken biryani!". Sounded good to us.

We presumed that some one would scoop a bit of biryani out of waiting pot and we would be on our way. But not in India! A boy was presently dispatched to get some chicken, onions started to be peeled, spices started to be ground, and, naturally, Kim was poised with the ever present food notebook to write down the recipe. Two hours, more photo albums and a large plate of gulab jamun and jalebis later, the biryani was served. We can never get used to the local custom of serving the sweets before the meal, because, as your mother has probably warned you, eating sweets before the meal does indeed ruin your appetite. Besides, what can you say to your children? "If you don't finish your jalebis, there will be no chicken biryani for you!".

Writing down a recipe that you have never made before while the watching three women simultaneously cook is not easy. On top of it all, there was a small language barrier, although Kim speaks "Indian Cooking Language" quite well. Here is a short, funny excerpt from her secret notebook. We promise to refine the quantities and process and share it with you on Lime Soda Cooks, our cooking blog.

1. Slice the onions. Chop the remaining 1/4 finer in step 3. Cut potatoes in quarters.
2. Mash the masala ingredients in a mortar and pestle.
3. Put the chicken in a pressure cooker and cook 10 minutes with about 3/4 of the onions. The chicken should be first cut up into little bite sized pieces by holding a knife upside down between your toes while squatting on the floor.
4. In a blender, grind 20 hot chili peppers, water, and maybe some cumin. (At this point the mother-in-law began to sort through about a cup and a half of cumin seeds....maybe for something else? She used about half a cup in step 7).
5. Cook rice in a uncovered pot in an undetermined amount of water.
6. Heat three ladles (yes, ladles) of oil in a really big pot. Add some of the remaining onions (but not all) add the paste from step four.
7. In the mortar and pestle (with what looks like about 1/4 of the former masala) grind 1/4 cup cumin. Pound lightly and add 3/4 cup water (Where did the rest of the original masala go....possibly in chicken? Or maybe in onions?)
6 Continued. Mother-in-law looks at daughter-in-law's potatoes and raises eyebrows. Cuts them all in half again. Then adds them and coriander and mint that were floating in the same water to the large pot with the onion. The water seems to have been added too. Break a cinnamon stick and throw it in with 3 cardamoms. Add the chicken mixture. Break in another cinnamon stick for good measure.
8. Cancel step 5, it was something else cooking in that pot. Take 4 drinking glasses of rice, wash it and add it to the big pot. Add 2-3 generous handfuls (not kidding) of salt. Put a plate on top. Cook.
9.Cut a tomato into chunks. Add it to the remaining onion (this did not become part of the biryani but became a salad later).
10.Fry some other onions until brown.
11.Try to figure out where the ginger went in?

Barfi: We saw this lovely bangle tree on our pilgrimage and decided to tie a bangle on to it in the hopes that some wonderful thing might happen to us. We have no idea what bangle trees are normally intended for, and hope that we have not incurred some sort of mixed blessing like "May you have 13 sons in the next two years". We welcome guesses from our loyal readers and will be offering prizes for the most entertaining ones.

The Dhow Builders of Mandvi

2010-07-30T00:25:00.000-07:00

In keeping with Lime Soda's line of handicraft stories, we thought that these guys deserved a blog post of their own. They were making the largest, possibly most impressive, piece of "handicraft" we have ever seen, somuch so that we made a special excursion to Mandvi to see them at work.

We arrived at the charming, colourful little port city of Mandvi after traveling in a bumpy local bus from Bhuj for two hours. Mandvi was once the main port of Kutch, and is today an important center for the forgotten art of dhow building. The monsoon was showing its full force that morning, and although we were thankful to be on the bus, we wished it hadn't been quite as leaky. As we entered the city and crossed the bridge over the estuary we were welcomed by the sight of about fifty boats in different stages of construction. In the cloudy noon light, with their massive hulls lining both sides of the river and empty bamboo scaffolding surrounding them, the sight was quite eerie, as if taken from an other era.

As we were tired and hungry, we decided to check into our hotel and grab a bite to eat first. We chose the Rukmavati Hotel as it was formerly a hospital, and more importantly, ad self-catering facilities. In fact, the hotel was so clean,that you could almost think it was still a hospital! Our room had a balcony overlooking the estuary and cooling sea breezes flowed through the open courtyard. After a long, detailed introduction to the town from the well meaning but slightly over anxious owner, we headed out with his home-made map in the direction of Mandvi's most famous thali place- "Zorba the Buddha". Don't ask us about the name, all we can say is that the food was excellent, one of the best Gujarati thalis of the trip, with around 20 different tasty items. We refreshed ourselves with a paan, which is great for digestion, but also an excellent way to pass the time if it starts pouring rain and the streets suddenly flood.

Once the rains stopped, we headed back to the riverside to explore the boat building. The name Dhow is used in India to describe a type of wooden boat originally used by Arab merchants to carry goods between the Arabian peninsula and India. Historically they had up to three lateen sails, but now the boats built in Mandvi all use motors. As work was already finished for the day, we had a chance to roam around the site and even to go inside some of the boats. The area looked like a massive lumber yard, with enormous beams lying in piles surrounding the boats. Walking along the river you could see how the boats were made, from the rough skeleton to the final finishing, sanding and tarring. Some of these ships towered to a height of a three-storey building, and climbing on their rickety bamboo ladders and scaffolding was a heart-stopping experience. It was worth it, however, as from the height of the deck of one of these finished giants, you could see the entire shipyard and all the way out to the open sea in the other direction.

The next morning we came back when work was in progress and were able to find out more about the building process from some of the workers, who are still predominantly Muslim. Apparently, all boats start with a drawing made by an "architect", although none of them look like they do. The skeleton and ribs are made of naturally curving tree trunks, helped into the right form by the workers. Then the hull is constructed around the skeleton, with planks and beams made of Malaysian-imported wood of up to 15-20 meters in length. The workers were hardly using any heavy machinery - most of the work of shaping and fitting was done with little adzes and hand-held drills of type one might use at home to hang an IKEA shelf on the wall. The planks were first individually hand fit into the right place and then attached to the skeleton by means of meter-long screws.

While the work was in progress on the boats it looked like complete chaos, with jumbles of wood and bolts sticking out at odd angles, large groups of men hanging around "supervising" the one or two who were actually doing something and bus-length tree trunks being transported on flimsy looking handcarts. Once finished, however, the boats were sleek and perfectly symmetrical, worthy of braving the strongest storms of the Arabian sea. It is an amazing feat of craftsmanship - being able to construct such huge vessels with predominantly medieval techniques in the early 21st century, and still be in Business. Apparently, what was once a dying art has turned into a booming industry in the last ten years, and it looks like once again, the little port town of Mandvi is going to be on the map of commerce.

Most of these boats are pre-ordered by wealthy people in the gulf states. It takes a team of 40 builders about two years to complete one of these bigger boats, which would be able to carry up to150,000 tons. Actually, this doesn't really mean much to us, as we have difficulty visualizing 150,000 tons of anything, but let's just say that when we moved to Montreal, the entire contents of our house and workshop inside the container were around 8 tons. Once the wooden structure is finished, the boat is then towed across the ocean to its buyer, where it is them fitted with its engine(s) and electricity - apparently this is much cheaper to do abroad than in India. By now, the price of a boat is the question that must be on your minds. Well, let's say that instead of buying a house in Montreal we could probably have afforded one of these babies... but then it would probably not have a motor, and we'd be stuck living is the (not very nice smelling) estuary in Mandvi.

Barfi: One of the things that was very difficult for us was the fact that a lot of tribal peoples don't particularly like to have their photos taken. On the other hand, nor do they try to take yours discretely (or not so discretely) with their mobile phones. The bull in this photo also took offense to having his photo taken, calmly walked up to Boaz and head butted him afterwards so that he would get the hint.

Touching the Untouchables

2010-07-25T22:39:00.000-07:00

There was no mistaking the train to Bhuj. When half the female passengers are wearing exciting, rather large, heavy-looking tribal jewelery, and their dresses are embroidered with a million tiny mirrors, you know you are heading for an adventure. Bhuj, a medium-sized city, is the heart of Kutch (a.k.a Kachchh) a vast, semi-desert area which is home to myriad communities of tribal people. According to the state of Gujarat, Kutch is home to to 15 million people, of which 11 million live in 949 villages, only 60% of which are accessible by paved roads. The relatively flat grassland has always been good for grazing and attracted nomadic herders from Sindh, Afghanistan and beyond. Rabari, Jath, Harijan and Ahirs are but few of the distinct groups who have settled in Kutch and maintain their unique lifestyles, traditional way of dress and, of course, handicrafts. The area is mainly known for fine embroidery, but weaving, metalwork, block printing or wood carving are some of the other crafts that are masterfully executed here. Considering that our house is already a self-described "Ethnic Depot", we were thrilled by the thought of all of those handicrafts awaiting us.

Our key to this treasure trove of wonders was Mr. Pramod Jethi. A local celebrity, and curator of the 18th century Aina Mahal (Mirror palace) Mr. Jethi is a one man tourist information office and an endless source of information about the area's history and traditions. We spent many hours in pleasant conversation with him, eagerly absorbing all of encyclopedic knowledge of all things Kutchi. From embroidery to architecture, his family history to current affairs, Mr. Jethi is a fascinating person, and a wonderful story-teller.

Through him, we hooked up with Kishor and his all-terrain auto-rickshaw and headed off into the Indian "Wild West". Our first stop was in Badaroi, a village that is half Rabari and half Harijan. We first had a saucer of tea (why wash more cups than you need to) and watched some local old men play a game with black and white pebbles and pieces of chipped pottery on a game board conveniently drawn in chalk on the bench of the bus shelter. We had a great time watching the parade of moustaches and turbans, while they were having even more fun looking at two westerners trying to sip scalding tea from small, generously filled saucers. It all looked so elegant when they did it, but really, if you ever plan on coming here we recommend trying this at home (preferably in the bath tub) before doing it in public.

We were then abducted by a group of Harijan women who insisted we had lunch at their house. They were very impressed by Kim's Indian attire and promptly invited her for a trial by fire of Indian-ness - by testing her chapati-making skills. She was invited to sit on the ground in the yard , surrounded by at least half the village and prove her domestic worthiness by making a round of chapatis on a wood fire. They seemed impressed by her rolling technique, but laughed at her lack of control of the wood fire, and the fact that the smoke kept getting in her eyes. Harijan, or "Children of God" is the term coined by Gandhi for "untouchable" or "scheduled" castes. The Harijans of Kutch belong to the Meghwar tribe and, like pretty much everyone else in Kutch, are know for their beautiful and unique embroidery. After a simple lunch of chapatis, a potato dish and a deliciously fire-y mango pickle, we got down to the usual business of mehendi (this time for real), bindis, comparative jewelry and another saucer or two of tea. They definitely won in the jewelry competition, as their nose and earrings were solid gold discs the size of quarters and their silver anklets weighed at least 2 kg and looked like they had been hammered on for life.

Refreshed, fed, and decorated in henna, we pressed on. We stopped at some other villages, visiting a wood carver who was producing beautiful geometric designs without ever using a ruler and two groups of women doing intricate Ahir embroidery that takes months to complete.

As the heat of the day finally dissipated we came to our last stop, the block printing workshop of Dr. Ismail Khatri. The Khatri family have been in this line of work for the last eleven generations. The name "Khatri" means "Master of colours", and these people are indeed the masters. Using only vegetable dyes and intricate developing and fixing processes, they produce the most amazing, colourfully printed fabrics. Entering their large inner yard we were shown an series of large bubbling cauldrons, vats and tanks containing dyes made of indigo, pomegranate peel, madder root and henna. Off to the side, a large barrel contained a dangerous-looking cocktail made of rusty old pipes, water and jaggery (unrefined cane sugar). This was iron oxide, used to make black through a chemical reaction.

Our guide for this tour was the 27 year old Sufiyan, who, together with his brother, now runs the business. The real magic, however, happens over six long tables in a cavernous back room, where the fabrics are pinned and hand printed with remarkable precision. There are at least three different blocks for each pattern, and they need to be placed exactly over the same place on the cloth. To do this they first mark the entire length of cloth (about 10m) with a line by using an ingenious system of twanging a chalk loaded string pinned to two end points. This is their point of reference for the entire printing process. After completing the actual printing, the visible colours are still surprisingly monochromatic- different shades of beige and brown. The transformation of this into the rainbow of colours typical to Ajrakh printing comes through the natural reactions of the various dyes with a series of mordents and fixers, a process involving up to sixteen different washes.

We were so excited by what we had seen that we got invited back to visit again, an offer which we eagerly accepted, since we needed a good nights sleep to decide on all the different fabrics, scarves and other items we wanted to buy. We also got along very well with Sufiyan, and spent a rainy afternoon at his workshop watching the workers scurry to and fro to bring in all the cloth that had been drying in the field before the rain shower. Since we were stuck there until the storm let up, we ended up with more than twenty meters of cloth.

Sufiyan mentioned that monsoon time was perfect weather for chicken tandoori and invited us to join him and friends at their favourite road-side chicken stall. If you have ever traveled in India, the words "chicken" and "roadside" in the same sentence should send shivers down your spine. However, as Sufiyan and his friends looked rather healthy, we decided to trust our local guides. Once we got there, however, they didn't seem so sure if this was such a good place for us any more, and asked repeatedly if we wanted to eat in the car. Picture this: in the midst of a dilapidated neighbourhood, under a corrugated tin roof, is a guy with a large oil vat over an open fire on a four-wheeled pushcart, frying vivid orange morsels of chicken. Behind him, about 20 men are seated on plastic chairs, surrounded by cows, dogs, cats and a million flies, all waiting for a piece of the action. Now try to imagine a nice western lady amidst all that, and you can understand why the possibility of eating in the car was all of a sudden so attractive to our friend. Sitting at that table, with all those guys, however, turned out to be very comfortable. Because of our local friends no one bothered us, asked us our name, walked up and shouted "HI!" or pestered us for a "country coin". Sufiyan ordered plate after plate of the piping hot orange chicken, and even though we were unable to keep up with our hosts, we had to agree that this was a very nice way to pass a rainy afternoon.

Kutch and its people are so beautiful, that we went a little crazy with the photos. There is a lot more to see in our picasa album.

"Would you like us to arrest some one?"

2010-07-18T06:25:00.000-07:00

We have been really terrible about keeping you all posted in the last week, but we have been kept busy with a series of mis-adventures. As you can probably guess from the title, one of them required a trip to the local police station!

It all started while we were writing our last blog entry, which was done from a little cafe during a torrential rain storm that started about two minutes after we logged on. We were extremely pleased with ourselves for having avoided it and spent the three hours of heavy rains in the safety of the internet cafe. When we returned to our hotel, it turned out that our room was not as lucky as we had been. Just that afternoon the owner had told us that the week before the hotel had been completely flooded after the rains and we could hardly believe it. When we got into our room that evening we discovered our backpacks floating in about ten centimeters of suspicious looking water, thus destroying our plans for a quiet evening at home. It was the time to experience being a dhobi-walla as we had to wash every single item of clothing we had with us by handand string them up around the coutyard of the hotel. As if that weren't enough, we discovered that at some point during the last three days, half of our traveler's cheques and a bit of cash had gone missing. Traveler's cheques can be replaced easily... or can they? In India the answer is; we hope you have a backup plan.

For the benefit of our loyal readers we will enumerate the necessary steps:

1. Spend about an hour looking for an "All-India" STD (no, that's not a disease, it's a type of phone connection).

2. Locate a trusty-looking Indian guy who happens to have a quiet office nearby and ask to make a phone call on his mobile.

3. Call the "toll-free" (10 rupees/minute) hotline. It won't work, try the other number too.

4. Wait to get connected (20 minutes).

5. Talk the representative, answer lots of seemingly irrelevant questions, get disconnected.

6. Repeat steps 3-5, answering different irrelevant questions this time.

7. Try to spell "Flute Maker" three times while the other guy in the room yells on his second mobile phone.

8. get a confirmation number (repeated five times, that other guy is still yakking on his cell a meter away from you).

9. Copy your passport, your receipt for the cheques if it's not water-logged (or left at home) and send it along with a "Police Report" by fax.

Ah, yes, the police report. Now if calling the help-line seemed like a simple task, wait until you hear about acquiring a police report.

Back at the hotel, the helpful manager explained how this works. First, you take several sheets of paper and fold about a third of it over for "police comments". Then you write the report yourself (addressed to the "Police Inspector") in the comfort of your hotel room and head down to the station with it. The station is exactly what you'd expect a sleepy local police station in India to be. Two desks, a Sergent with a big belly and a glorious mustache, a friendly female officer, a very important "head inspector" who's never there, and about ten other guys that seem to just hang around minding other people's business. Oh yes, and one officer (the alleged "Head Inspector"?) sleeping on a desk in the back room. And by on the desk, we don't mean with his head on the desk, we mean he was lying on it. Needless to say, no one really spoke English, but the female officer was trying her best, and the moustatioed Sergent was smiling. A lot. Eventually they understood more or less what we wanted - just a stamp and some serious looking "Police comments" on our margin and we would be on our way. After much discussion in Marathi (none of which Kim could follow), a phone call was made, judging by the amount of "Sir", to a higher ranking officer, and the phone was handed over to Boaz. A mysterious voice (the Inspector?) asked " What would you like us to do? Would you like us to arrest some one? Should we visit the hotel and pick some one up?" Thinking of the nice Gujarati brothers running our hotel, we had to decline. Having this once in a lifetime chance, we really tried to think of some one we might like to have arrested, but no one in Auranagabad came to mind. Much relieved that no one would need to leave the station, everyone got down to the paperwork. Everything was copied into three different police logbooks in Marathi (providing much debate on how to transliterate our names and address on "rue Marie-Anne est"). While all this was happening, the moustached Sergent chased away three girls who had their phone stolen, yelling at them that he was a busy man with better things to do.

But enough about that... we still haven't faxed it because the number was wrong... we'll keep you posted. But this was just the start. The following four days were a series of mishaps. We had our fair share of stomach issues, managed to throw up in the garbage can of a UNESCO world heritage site, got on a train that took us back to Mumbai instead of Baroda, Gujarat, about 500km to the north, discovered that it is impossible to book any train tickets on a Sunday evening, spent the night in a tight, smelly, humid, overpriced hotel room. The stomach problems continued, but luckily we had bought the "econo-pack" of Immodium. To entertain ourselves in our dark hours, we were trying to come up with an entertaining name for the opposite of a laxative. We would love to hear some of your suggestions. We have been trying to reverse this bad Karma by giving some money to any and every Saddhu/deformed beggar/poor lady by the mosque or temple/child who's probably a part of a begging ring. It seems to have helped, because a few days later, we finally found our lost paradise.

The lofty hill of Pavagadh rises 800m out of the surrounding plains. It is a jagged piece of rock with 5 plateaus believed to be formed when the toe of the goddess Kali fell from the sky. It is now a very important pilgrimage site, and people from all over central India come to pay their respects to the goddess. The mountain is covered with lush vegetation and teems with life. Swarms of butterflies (some the size of small birds) and huge dragonflies drift through the evening air. Gangs of naughty monkeys are lying in wait for travelers with exposed snacks and herds of centipedes make barefoot walking, even inside the hotel, precarious. The State of Gujarat's Department of Tourism was kind enough to build a neat little hotel in the middle of all this, with a balcony to see the view and watch the action. The highlight was a peacock strolling on the opposite roof first thing in the morning, just as the first rays of sun were cutting through the mists covering the mountain side. City slickers that we were, we didn't even know that they could fly...

We stayed there for one jasmine-scented night and the next morning explored the ruined city of Champaner, which lies at the bottom of the hill. The ruins, now a world heritage site, consist of several deserted pre-Moghul mosques. The site covers a large area, and some of the more remote mosques are quite hard to find and are hardly ever visited. After wading through through a labyrinth of small tracks in a wooded area, we finally found one of the more remote ones. e therefore were surprised to see a young Indian couple arrive on a motorbike several minutes later. They seemed to know exactly how to find it and were rather embarrassed to find other people there. The couple quickly disappeared into the darker recesses of the mosque. Now, that's what we call romantic!

Don't let the bed bugs bite!

2010-07-08T05:54:00.000-07:00

So we have decided to go back to India. What can we say, we are simply addicted. Given the choice between spending the summer in Montreal, looking for windows, electricians, foundation cracks and mould resistant paint versus going to India, we chose the less practical route and went to India. The new house will still be there in September. It's difficult to say WHY exactly we are addicted. While debating whether or not to come to India, we reminisced about all the things we missed about it. While trying to let practicality reign, we also came up with a list of all the things we weren't as fond of. Neither list was short, but we will share some of the highlights with you.

We will start with the smells. For everyone, India is an olfactory adventure, it's just that not everyone likes it. Landing in Mumbai, your nose is hit by the undeniable presence of the world's largest slum. We don't want to know what exactly it is, but for us this smell says "welcome to Mumbai". What we dearly missed is the way the streets smell when you go out for your breakfast first thing in the morning - a combination of incense, cooking fires and great food, with dark undertones of open sewage, rotting banana leaves and diesel fumes. It a unique mix, and believe us, we really did miss it.

The other thing we missed was "slow travel" India-style. Getting on a ramshackle bus together with eighty other people for a five-hour ride that covers about seventy kilometers. It may not be the most efficient way of traveling, but it's a great experience. Hawkers selling delicious snacks and drinks keep going on and off the bus, complete strangers become your best friends and everyone always cooperates in order to squeeze just one more person (and their belongings) into the over-crowded vehicle.

India is full of surprises, and the unexpected always seems to happen to willing travelers. Usually this ends up being fun, or at least makes a good story, but sometimes it can be downright annoying. Case in question: when stepping out into the streets of Mumbai on our first day we were amazed at how quiet the place was. Streets that are normally traffic-congested were bare and devoid of a single psychotic taxi driver, all the shops and restaurants closed and barred, and not a single street vendor to be seen. After much debate about which day of the week it really was (the result of jet-lag and a flight that spanned 3 calendar days) we realized that something was up. After reading the local paper, we learned that there was a general strike, organized by the opposition, to protest fuel hikes and inflation. Wary of Shiv Sena activists, most Mumbaikars chose to spend the day either at home or at a nearby hill station, rather than risk going to work.

Another thing with which we have a love/hate relationship is hotels. A mandatory feature is a ceiling fan that whirs like a helicopter, keeping you cool at night but often seeming about to fly off it's moorings. On one hand, hotels can be cheap and cheerful, relatively clean and run by very friendly people who give you good advice on local sights. On the other hand, if you get the wrong bed, you might end up being the feast for the resident bed-bugs and fleas, who are more than happy to have you stop by! On our first morning in India, Boaz was welcomed with an armful and a legful of tiny little bites that itched like anything. When confronted with the problem, hotel management sent a "boy" (who was actually a fully grown man of 40) armed with a large canister of isecticide to fight the little vermin. Despite half a bottle of nasty chemicals, the next morning was worse, prompting us to leave before spending another night there!

Kim has spent the last couple of months learning Marathi in her spare time. As her spare time was somewhat limited, her Marathi is somewhat basic, but still endlessly entertaining for the locals. "Mi marathi shikte" (I am learning Marathi) is her usual opening phrase, followed by "madji marathi tsangala nahi ahe" (my Marathi isn't very good). This never fails to reward her with huge smiles, free cups of chai, bindis, bangles and new friends. We spent our 8-hour train ride from Mumbai to Aurangabad making friends with a very sweet 12-year old girl and her parents, who proudly passed Kim's Marathi notebook around the whole car, drawing in a crowd gawking at the miracle of a Marathi-speaking gora (foreigner). If you are a tall, blonde woman, the downside to spending a long train ride with a 12 year old girl is that you are treated like an over sized doll. After everyone had done "mehendi" to one another with a ball point pen, tried on each other's jewellery, and had their nails painted a ghastly sparkly pink, we told a blatant untruth and claimed not to have any make-up with us...

For those anxious about our whereabouts, we are currently in Aurangabad (Maharashtra), exploring the world heritage sites of Ajanta and Ellora in the rain. Cave temples figure prominently on our "like" list, and it's a perfect pass time for a rainy afternoon. Today, we heard that there was a weekly market in town and asked our hotel owners for directions. They told us that we were mistaken, this was not "our kind of market" and would feature a plethora of colourful people from the surrounding villages, selling vegetables, livestock, kitchen wares and street snacks. What we should do instead was go to a different Bazaar, which was for "lavish" people (such as ourselves) where we could buy mobile phones, Benetton sweaters, and eat pizza. Guess which one we chose....you can see the photos on picasa.

Forgotten drinks

2009-12-06T19:09:00.000-08:00

Kim has a new hobby: inspired by a book found on an occasional prowl through the delightfully vast cooking section of the Bibiliothèque Nationale du Québec, she came across an interesting little book. Elixir et boissons retrouvés is a charming tome that has a wonderful combination of old-fashioned aperitifs, liqueurs, infusions and syrups, interspersed with charming old labels. If, like us, you have ever wanted to make your own Absinthe, Pastis or Crème de Cassis (and you can read French), this is the book for you. Our house has turned into a depository/laboratory/herbarium, with strange ingredients such as Artemisia, Winter Savoury, Gentian root, Angelica and dried artichoke leaves turning up in surprising corners of the house, or hanging on rustic-looking ropes, drying above the heater. You could easily mistake this for a witch’s lair...

Yes, we have always liked drinking strange things, as long as they are tasty. Cynar, the Italian artichoke aperitif, is one of our favourite drinks, so it was only natural for us to develop and invest in this new hobby. Making drinks at home is an unfortunately forgotten art, although it was once common in many places. We have friends in France who said that in their village people used to bring their surplus fruit to be distilled by the local distiller. We tasted some of their plum eau-de-vie and it certainly was good! Now, even France has been known to put a stop to this age-old tradition by requiring people to have licences for distilling. It is really too bad that such a beautiful centuries-old tradition can be so easily lost. Most of the drinks in this book, however, do not require anything as exciting, dangerous, blindness-inducing or - at least in Canada, blatantly illegal. All it requires are some simple ingredients found in most homes (or gardens/specialty shops), like red or white wines, eau de vie (or vodka if you don't have it), and whatever flavours with which you wish to infuse them.

The aperitif that we would like to share with you was inspired by (but doesn't actually come from) this book. It is for a rosemary red-wine based aperitif and it is, in our humble opinion, rather delicious. Actually we have a new blog policy that if we get more than two requests for a recipe we will blog about it, and we received several requests for this one. At the beginning, we were rather skeptical, and worried about wasting a perfectly good bottle of wine. But this concoction, when served to family and friends is sure to bring much praise and admiration. So, without any further ado- the recipe!

Rosemary Aperitif

75 grams rosemary
750 ml (1 bottle) of red wine
75 grams of sugar
one small glass of rum (approximately 1/3-1/2 cup)

1. Macerate (soak) the rosemary in the red wine for four days.
2. Strain, mix in the sugar and rum.
3. Put in a bottle.

Obviously, the recipe is simplicity itself. A few tips:
-It is best to get wine with a screw top, then you can use the bottle to store the aperitif.
-Do not macerate the rosemary in the wine bottle, otherwise it will be hard to get all the bits out. The best is to put it in a glass pitcher with a cover, as it may be hard to get the taste out of plastic.
-While putting it back in the bottle (using a funnel or something with a spout for pouring) don't forget that because you added the rum you now have more liquid than will fit in the bottle!
-The drink mellows out as it matures, the first few days it is quite strong, and after a week it has toned down a bit.

And if you were wondering who helped with the styling of "randomly scattered" rosemary in the the photo above, here is a hint:

A new home in Montréal

2009-09-22T20:07:00.000-07:00

We are really embarrassed: the last time we posted on Lime Soda was in December last year! But as most of you know already, we had an almost-good excuse for this as we spent the last 8 months or so planning and executing a trans-Atlantic move, and then recovering from it. Finally we are settled in our new home in Montréal and only have about ten small boxes left to unpack. This will hopefully be fixed with (yet another) "quick" trip to IKEA this week. That is, if we can decide what we want, and if they have it in stock, the two of which never seem to coincide.
After what seemed like a lengthy apartment search (but was in fact only about ten days) and after having seen some pretty scary basements, we happened to walk by our dream apartment. What made it our dream apartment was the kitchen. Eight or so years ago, this apartment was a pizzeria, and when they converted it into an apartment, they kept most of the original restaurant kitchen equipment. This translates into: a six burner professional gas stove, a huge oven, a wooden counter top big enough to sleep on, red walls and a griddle. The funniest thing was that the guy showing us the apartment, who lived here with his girlfriend, said "Everyone always gets so excited about the kitchen, but we never use it because we are vegetarians...". Can you imagine? We just had to have the place, even if it meant sleeping on the floor (or the counter top). We took it. It's called NANA PIZZA, and it sits 42 as the sign on the door still attests.

We know you don't really want to hear about the rest of the house, but we'll give you the quick tour just in case. There are only two other rooms, so it will really be quick. The place is the corner house on the ground floor and reminds us a bit of our place in The Hague -it's right on the street, in the middle of the action. Although, mind you, it is not as noisy as our Jaffa place. The apartment was described as a "loft-style" accommodation, which is a funny name for something on the ground floor, but basically means that we don't have that many rooms. Actually there is only a "living" room and a "working" room... After installing our good old high bed (lower than in Jaffa, but still higher than The Hague), closet and the yet-to-come IKEA bookshelf, this space is starting to look attractive. There is lots of light (and no privacy), atmosphere (smells from the open kitchen) and room for a crowd (sits 42, as we said). On the other side of the apartment, separated by a corridor and quasi-closing door is Boaz's workshop, painted sky blue and sh*&^%ty brown (not our choice). It's roomy enough for all of the nice big machines, and even has a little side room for wood storage and a small library.

We decided to inaugurate the kitchen after being inspired by the season's bounty from the Marché Jean-Talon, our local market. Every September, they start giving food away; tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, swiss chard, basil, huge bushels of crisp, sour apples, all are being offered for mere pennies. This is also the season to buy baskets of Blueberries - Quebec's pride, blood-red raspberries, and gr ou nd cherrie s that look like they were designed by a Japanese artist. What could one possibly do when faced with so many delights? Everyone knows that the season in Canada is VERY short, and in less than a month, all the local bounty will disappear and be replaced by sad, pesticide-ridden, imported fruit from Chile. So one must PRESERVE!!! This is a true market festival, with Italian old ladies and their SUV-ed daughters-in-law buying commercial quantities of beautiful Roma tomatoes to take home and, with the help of at least ten additional family members, turn into sauce for the whole year.

As you can imagine, we were unable to resist and rented a car to get our 20kg of tomatoes, 10kg of eggplants, 4kg of jalapeño peppers, 10kg of onions and many other negligible quantities of other things that just had to come home with us. After a long weekend in our new kitchen we turned it all into: Home made ketchup (4 litres), tomato sauce (8l), sweet tomato jam (2l), a huge jar of pickled eggplant, Jalapenos en escabeche and several cakes to last us while we are cooking it all.
After all this work, we sat down for a beautiful meal with friends, celebrating Rosh Hashana - Jewish new year. And thus, with an apartment that is almost livable, fully-stocked pantry and lots of good friends we embark on a new year in this new city. We wish you all a wonderful year, full of joy and good food, and sweetened by our Tomato jam (recipe below...)

Artusi's Sweet Tomato Jam
This is a great recipe, taken from one of our favourite cookbooks, Pelegrino Artusi's 1891 La Sienza in Cucina e l'Arte di Mangiar Bene. It is the granddaddy of all Italian cookbooks, one of those books we'd take with us if we got standed on an island somewhere.

You will need:

- 1kg ripe tomatoes
- 350gr (a cup and a half) of sugar
- juice of one lemon+its zest
- 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract.

Blench the tomatoes in boiling water for a couple of minutes, peel and seed them. Disolve the sugar in a pot with abour 1/4 cup of water to make a light sirop. Add the tomatoes, lemon juice and lemon peel. Simmer, uncovered until the jam thickens up and jells nicely on a cold plate. Add vanilla and can while still warm, but not too hot.

Home for the Holidays

2008-12-25T11:38:00.000-08:00

We know that you all miss our postings from India, and to be honest, so do we, so we thought that this year instead of sending everyone a photo saying "Happy Holidays" with a grumpy-looking cat wearing a santa hat on it , we would just make a new blog posting. As you probably know, we are no longer in India, but away for the holidays in Edmonton, perhaps a slightly less exotic destination, but never the less exciting if you, like some of us, grew up in a country that has almost no snow and where the temperatures stay above zero...

Boaz had been promised a plethora of exciting winter sports, from skiing to toboganning, snowshoeing and more. Weather, however, was most certainly NOT permitting as temperatures in the first week were hovering around -28c. A few short excursions outdoors and we quickly came to the conclusion that we would have to do some other exciting wintertime activities (like eating and shopping) until the temperature was more co-operative.

So, what do you do if you want to go out and it's minus 30 outside? Yes, you head out to the West Edmonton Mall, where it would take you 30 seconds to get from a cosy car to the balmy shopping-heaven inside. You can shop 'till you drop, you can take a submarine ride, you can play mini golf, visit the world's largest indoor water park, or, if you are like Kim's parents, just go do your daily fitness walks there - an activity called "mall walking" which seems to be very popular around this time of year. It would take you about two hours to walk the whole mall, a 7km circuit, or if you are jogging, slightly less.

Taking advantage of all the sales, we loaded our arms up with clothing and headed into the fitting rooms, where Boaz quickly found himself between a rock and a hard place when he had to give an honest opinion about some pants Kim was trying on. The basic conclusion, according to Boaz, who demonstrated a very Israeli honesty, was that he didn't like them and the cut made her "bum look big". Several of the ladies waiting around the change room all went "oooooooh" in shock and one of them said "I'm not sure Santa is going to come visit you this year". But what would you do? The pants really DID make her ass look big...(and Santa did come anyways).

Although we were excited by all of the sales on offer (40% discount at the GAP) the best activity for us was to go see Santa - or actually entertain ourselves by watching all the cute little kids that go to see Santa, sit on his knee, tell him what they would like for x-mas, recieve a candy cane, and have their picture taken in their best outfits. We had fun taking pictures of them and fun taking lots of other ones too, so if you like the photos on this post, we put more for you on our picasa album

Another favourite activity for these weather conditions is cooking at home and then stuffing yourself full to the brim on all the tasty things you have made. This year Hannuka is exactly at the same time as Xmas, which means twice as much eating. We had some family and friends over for latkes and jelly doughnuts, and spent the whole afternoon grating, chopping, mixing and, in the holiday's best tradition - deep frying. At home, we have a syringe-like pastry implement for stuffing the jelly into the jelly doughnuts, but here we had to improvise. Fortunately, there was a doctor in the house, and a quick phone call to the hospital and Kim's dad was able to bring home a variety of exciting surgical implements (don't worry, they were still in the sterile packaging). We decided to use the "abdominal irrigator" for the blackberry jam and the large veterinary-style syringe for the dulce de leche. Dad even got to help out, with instructions to inject 10cc of dulce de leche into each doughnut intravenously.

Intead of a present we are giving you a jelly doughnut (or Sufganiyot) recipe that we love - this one was given to us by Boaz's mom's friend Ety Avraham, so thank you Ety!

Happy holidays and best wishes for 2009!

Sufganiyot (makes about 16)

500gr flour

50gr fresh yeast or 8gr (one pack) active dry yeast

1/4 cup sugar

1-1 1/4 cup luke-warm milk

2 egg yolks

50gr melted butter

1 pack vanilla sugar

2 tbsp cognac or rum

greated peel from 1 lemon

for the filling: Jam of your choice or dulce de leche

oil for deep-frying

In a small bowl, melt the yeast with some of the sugar, cover and leave for 10 minutes in a warm place. In a large bowl mix all of the other ingredients and add the yeast and milk mixture. Knead for about 10 minutes until all the ingredients are well mixed and the dough becomes smooth and elastic. Let the dough rise in a warm place until it doubles in volume - about two hours. A nice trick for letting dough rise that we recently learnt is to let it rise in a big sealed tupperware (approximately three times the size of the dough).

Once the dough has risen, knock it back, and divide it into 16. Shape into balls, and let rise on a well-floured surface covered with a light towel. After about an hour you are ready for the big deep-fry. We suggest using a wok, as you need less oil to fill it. You will need about 4-5cm of oil. Fry the sufganiyot in medium-hot oil, about 2-3 minutes on each side. Fish them out of the oil, let cool slightly and inject them with the stuffing of your choice. Serve warm, with powdered sugar strewn on top.

A bit of India in Israel

2008-09-01T08:32:00.000-07:00

This post is not being written from a grubby internet cafe, but from the tranquil cleanliness of our own home. Sad but true, we are no longer in India. Our last days passed like a mirror image of the first ones. We spent the last three days frantically running around the city, shopping for all the things we saw on the first three days and planned to come back for. We sacked the kitchenware stores of Crawford market, bought our body weight in CD's and DVD's, purchased half of the stock of Fabindia (some of it, admittedly, as gifts) and made one or two (OK, three) last minute trips to different tailors throughout town.
Finally, satiated from shopping- or, more specifically out of time to shop and space in the suitcases- we decided to spend the last evening in Bombay as we had spent the first. We walked along Marine Drive, watched the sun go down in to the Arabian sea for the last time, and then went to have dinner at one of our all time favourite restaurants, Soam. There was a special "fasting menu" in honour of the several holidays, both Hindu and Jain, that are taking place this week. Now, the concept of a gourmet fasting menu might seem like an oxymoron, but the fasting concept is more about avoiding certain foods rather than not eating. Rice, wheat, and lentils seemed, from what we could ascertain, to be the main foods that were avoided. As you can imagine, this puts severe limitations on the average Indian diet. Fasting food, however, has been raised to an art form in Soam (and likely in many Maharastrian homes, in which we unfortunately were not able to partake). We ordered exclusively from the fasting menu, much to the puzzlement of the waiter, and it was certainly like no Indian food we had had before- no rice, no dhal, no chapattis- tapioca pearls, yam, and pumpkin figured prominently. We suspect that the waiter and manager came to the conclusion that we were restaurant reviewers because once they got over the fact that we weren't interested in the normal menu, they were very friendly and gave us a complimentary jar of chutney when we left...just in case.

After a very short "night"- two and a half hours- we headed out to the airport for our flight to Jordan. In Jordan, we ate in "Al Kuds" - the very same restaurant we ate in on our way to india, and then took the bus home. Crossing the border back wasn't easy or fun: there was having to stand in line at both Jordanian and Israeli sides of the border for about two hours, participating in a new Olympic sport called "the mass luggage- trolley slalom" and what was probably the worst: having to unpack Kim's bag (a one-way operation) because of a highly suspicious Ganesha bronze inside. We know that Ganesha is a "remover of obstacles" and helps you with traveling, but were not so sure after having to excavate him from the overly full knapsack, and then trying to repack the bag while being reminded that the whole bus was waiting for us.

So, we are finally home. We like to think we brought a bit of India with us, not with all the shopping we did, but rather in the way the things that we saw and learned in India have an effect on our life here. The cat was a bit suspicious and showed signs of needing affection on one hand, while being pissed off with us on the other, but after the first night he was more or less back to normal. He loves exploring all of the stuff (especially the bindis) that we brought back from India, with all its exotic smells. We seem to have acquired a whole new Indian kitchen, and are eager to experiment with all of the new recipes we got. Cooking is strange to do after two months away, the first time we made coffee we managed to get it all wrong! Washing dishes is also strange to do again, we certainly didn't miss that the way we missed cooking. We have also been enjoying using our washing machine, no need to wring things out by hand anymore.

Everyone who sees how much we enjoyed India asks us when we will go back. Of course we would love to return to India, but it doesn't look like it will happen in the next year or two. It might take a bit more time, but we are sure we will, we still have to learn the second part of the piece we started with our Mridingam teacher, have a few more states to explore, and after all, there is the matter of the two rupee coins in the Shiva temple in Mahakoota (see our trip to Mahakoota if you don't know what this is all about). We promised to come back when we have children and pay Lord Shiva our respects and thank him, so really, we have no choice. Hopefully the little ones will enjoy India as much as we do. It has been really fun writing our blog, and we want to thank everyone who read and commented and participated, writing it was certainly one of the highlights of our trip, all the more so because it let us feel very connected to our friends and family even though we were on the other side of the world. We still haven't decided what the future might hold for Lime Soda... we might use it to post some recipes after we try them out, or just to keep people updated on our lasted adventures.

Happy Birthday, Lord Krishna!

2008-08-24T22:10:00.000-07:00

Everyone needs to have a birthday party, and in India people celebrate the birthdays of their favourite deities with all pomp and due festivity. We were really upset that we will be missing Ganesh Chaturthi - the elephant god's birthday, which will be celebrated by millions in Mumbai next week, about three days after we come back home. Therefore we were very happy to learn that Krishna Janmashtami, the celebration of Krishna's birthday, was taking place this Sunday, on our first day back in Mumbai.

After a long trip up here, including a long cab ride to the Kochi airport, a late-night flight, another long cab ride to downtown Mumbai and a lost wallet (Kim's) at 1 am, the beginning of our Sunday morning did not look very promising. There were all of the annoying phone calls to make after losing your wallet (bank, credit card), all of them long, expensive, international calls that had to be made with a terrible connection on a street corner, plus the added issue of having to worry about our finances on the last leg of our trip, just when we were ready to start shopping in earnest (the rest of the shopping was just a warm-up). The first bright spot of the day presented itself as little spicy wadas, right across from the aforementioned phone booth. Wadas are deep fried little tidbits, normally served with some raw onions and chutney, and after almost a month in Kerala we appreciated the change in taste, and the bright clean flavours of little green chillies hidden inside the wadas were just what we needed in order to get our day going.

But back to Krishna's birthday. In our little alleyway, we saw a bunch of boys stringing up a rope with big clay pots, bananas, apples and other decorations hanging off of it. This was all a part of Dahi Handi, (as the festival is known in Maharashtra) and is one of the most popular activities of this festival, meant to recreate Krishna's childhood pranks of sneaking ghee and milk from the neighbours cupboards. A handi is a clay pot, and it is filled with Krishna's favourite foods: ghee and milk, often tinted a bizarre shade of fuchsia just for the fun of it. Such clay pots are suspended from ropes hanging between buildings and lamp posts all over the city, in some places as high as 20 meters above street level. Groups of boys (and in the last few years girls as well) called "Govinda Pathaks", or Lord Krishna's troops, form human pyramids attempting to reach the pots, break them with their heads and shower everyone under them with ghee, coconut, coins, pink goo and pottery shards. The groups often train beforehand and compete between them as top who can break the most handis, sometimes a 9-tier human pyramid is even attempted.
The group in our neighbourhood was little more modest, and ended up lowering their rope halfway through the exercise, which apparently you are allowed to do after three attempts, but it seemed like they gave up a bit too soon. Egged on by a small group of onlookers and one local policeman, they managed to get a guy up there to the rope, and he shattered the pots, showering everyone around with pink water. Needless to say, the whole structure under him collapsed at that point, leaving him dangling precariously from the rope, until they were kind enough to rebuild it for just long enough for him to jump on to the top, causing the whole thing to fall yet again, much to everyone's joy. Miraculously, there were no injuries.

After a refreshing "unlimited food" meal (see our third post if you don't remember what this entails), made even more "special" and unlimited because of the holiday, we decided to find a more culturally refined way to celebrate Janmashtami. Krishna is well known for his flute playing, and we read in the Time Out Mumbai that the world famous bansuri flutist, Pandit Hariprasad Chaurisia and his students would be playing a concert starting at midnight the night before and continuing for the next 24 hours. What more appropriate way for us, two flutists, to celebrate Krishna's birthday! We had missed seeing Hariprasad live in concert (by about a day) three times already, so we were eager to hear him. Imagine our surprise when the concert turned out to be a fairly small event, taking place in his Gurukul (his private school) where there were around forty people- mostly his students and their families- all seated the floor in a large living room, in front of a small shrine with Krinshna and Radha dressed in silks and decked with flowers.
When we arrived four of the students were playing along with a tabla player. They were taking turns improvising on a Raga, and and occasionally playing together. After about an hour, the Guruji himself appeared, dressed in a suitably yellow silk kurta, and without further ado sat down, was handed a flute and started to play. It was something between a concert and a master class, with him playing a phrase, and some of the students repeating or answering it. Sometimes these were just echos of what the master had played, but sometimes these answers took on a life of their own and developed into small solos. The atmosphere was magical, and we had the feeling that we were a part of a very intimate circle centered around the guruji. He played for around an hour and a half (which seemed to pass in an instant) and eventually just got up and went into the next room, while his students went on improvising elaborations on what he had just played.
Indian music seems to be less formally constructed than Western classical music. The performers are improvising on a Raga, so the length of the piece is entirely up to their discretion. There is also not the clear break that Western music has between when a piece begins and ends. The performers don't stand up or do stage rearrangements, and they usually start the next piece while the audience is still applauding or going in and out of the hall. The Tanpura still holds its endless drone, the tabla player might tune his drums (often in a rhythmical way) and some of the musicians might drink some water, but the music is almost continous, giving a very organic feeling to the whole concert experience. For this concert, which lasted 24 hours, the music really never stopped (or at least it didn't in the 4 hours we were there from around 5- 9 pm). Occasionally a new flute player would change places with someone who had been playing for a while, and even the poor tabla player was finally relieved by a colleague after playing straight for about four hours. At some point a huge pot of food was brought into the next room, and both players and the small audience got to take turns having dinner and paying their respects to the guruji before coming back to play or listen a bit more.

We left the concert tired and happy after having one of the most amazing experiences of our trip, inspired to go home and play our own instruments again, but sad that our trip, which seemed so endless in the beginning, would soon be over.

BARFI: Genevieve wins yet another prize for her answer to last post's barfi. She correctly guessed that the spice those pigeons were eating was fenugreek! Being a fellow flutist, she will hopefully appreciate her new Krishna key chain.

The Last Jews of Cochin

2008-08-23T01:15:00.000-07:00

Just like the Arabs, Portuguese, and the English, we too, have ended up in Cochin. They all flocked here to buy spices, as the city is a convenient outlet for Kerala's spice producing regions, up in the western ghats. Old Cochin is filled with long streets of warehouses, or godowns as they are locally called, once all filled with the fragrant riches of the East. Pepper was, and still is, one of Kerala's main exports, as it has been since Roman times, when Phoenician and Egyptian ships came to the Malabar coast for it's "black gold". Today, the warehouses are largely in a state of disrepair, although there is still a lot of spice trading going on behind their ornately carved, usually turquoise, doors. Most "enterprises" specialize in one sort of spice: Chillies, cardamom, pepper, nutmeg, ginger as well as rice, tea and tobacco.

Kerala is also known for its old Jewish community, possibly settled here since the first century CE, with a large influx in population around the 15th century, when Sephardi Jews found a safe haven here from the prosecution of the Catholic Kings and the Inquisition. Yesterday we set out for "Jew Town", as it officially called with no negative connotations intended, and went to see the Pardesi Synagogue, which dates from the 16th century. It was unfortunately closed, which was rather disappointing, and left us at the mercy of the the Kashmiri shopkeepers who run the "antique shops" and "craft emporiums" (read: expensive, new, badly-made crap for tourists). A trip up "Jew Street" led us into the embroidery shop of Sarah Cohen, a sweet old lady that reminded Boaz of his Iraqi grandmother. When we met Sarah she was in her kitchen at the back of her shop, making what she called "Jew Balls" for Friday night dinner. Further enquiries and observation led us to the conclusion that she was actually making Kubbeh, a common and very tasty Jewish-Iraqi dish, which all of Boaz's family will probably recognize as a family favourite. While she flattened the dough in a special press, she told us a the story of Cochin's Jewish community. Most of the Jews in the city emmigrated to Israel in the 50s, and all is left of this once large and prosperous community are just twelve elderly people, five men and seven women. Sarah's own children live in Ra'anana, the very same city where Boaz grew up and Kim spends about 15 hours week teaching, and they occasionally come back to visit her, bringing a special "hard meat" that she couldn't remember the name of. A few minutes (and Kubbeh balls) later she remembered that it was Naknik that they bring her - literally dried sausage (instead of freshly ground meat) that she was using to fill her Kubbeh balls as a special treat. As the community does not have a Jewish butcher any more (her husband used to do it but he died a couple of years back) they have no choice but to be vegetarians, and are mostly dependant on people visiting from Israel for their Naknik and kosher meat supply. One of the men we met later that evening (more about that later) told us how he smuggled three chickens from Israel in a little cooler when he come to visit. Our meeting with Sarah Cohen turned out to be a fortuitious meeting on both of our parts because she told us that there was a service in the Synagogue that evening. We were pleased to have a chance to see the synagogue and she was pleased, because they often miss enough men for a minyan (the requisite 10 Jewish men required for prayer) for Friday nights.

Later that evening we came back to "Jew street" in time for the evening prayer. We were very happy to see the Synagogue open this time, although the Shabbas goy at the entrance did make sure that we really were there for the service before letting us in. Once we passed the little door that led into the courtyard we were especially pleased that we had come, as this was one of the must beautiful synagogues we have ever seen. It is well-known for its tiled floor, lain with over a thousand blue and white tiles, imported from China in the seventeenth century and depicting a love affair between a Mandarin's daughter and a commoner. They are hand-made and each tile is slightly different then the next one. The Jewish community, the synagogue and especially the tiles were immortalized in Salman Rushdie's book The Moor's Last Sigh in which an old lady,(the sweeper of the synagogue) whose son has left the community after a quarrel, is able to see his every action in the changing pictures of the Chinese tiles. We had plenty of time to admire the tiles, the beautiful Belgian glass chandeliers and the old wood-carved ark, as we had to wait for almost an hour for a full Minyan. Eventually when we had three old men from the community, an Israeli businessman and his son, Boaz and two American backpackers, we had only one man missing. Eventually, one of the old men went to fetch an other guy who didn't really want to be there, but looked like he could be guilt-tripped into it.

After the service and before the Kidush we were shown around, and got to see the synagogue's ancient Torah scrolls, and their gold and silver decorations, some of which were presented to the community by the local Maharajah in the 18th century.

Tonight we are flyin back to Mumbai for the last leg of our trip. We have fond memories of the "unlimited food" and have a few more restaurants to check off on Kim's list. We also have some touristic and cultural sights to catch up on from our last visit, when we were too busy eating (or recovering from "unlimited food" meals) or shopping.

BARFI: Yet another contest! What spice ARE these pigeons eating? We spoke to many Indian people, and have also noticed in cookbooks mentions of people WASHING spices, and drying them before use.....we always thought it was strange, but after seeing them set out to dry on a burlap sack in the middle of the road, or with the pigeons nibbling at them we might consider doing this next time!

Other People Are India Culture Too!

2008-08-17T01:07:00.000-07:00

Despite having regular internet at our disposal for the first time on our trip, we have been oddly silent over the last week. Why, you might ask, when we know that our loyal readers at home, many of whom are vacationing vicariously through our experiences, are eagerly waiting for the next installment.....it's just that we are too busy. Too busy! How can you be too busy on a vacation! Well, if you "are India culture" (as we have ascertained in prior posts that we are) then you might go to a cultural summer camp, as we have done at the Vijnana Kala Vedi. This cultural centre is dedicated to the fine arts of Kerala, and each "camper" gets to choose a primary (2 hours a day of lessons) and a secondary (1 hour lesson a day) subject. Now, obviously this won't keep you very busy, but if, like us you have chosen two main subjects and have a Mrdingam teacher who is very enthusiastic about teaching you, making you practice more then you do back home, so you might get very busy.

Our main incentive coming to the center was to learn all about the rhythms of Karnatic music - or the classical music of south India. While in Bangalore last year as well as this year we fell in love with this music and with all of the percussion instruments used, mostly to accompany singers or violinists, but also as solo instruments. The instrument we have chosen, Mridingam, is the most important percussion instrument in Karnatic music, and is made of a hollowed-out piece of jackfruit wood, with leather skin covering its two ends. In our first lesson, with Subash, our teacher, we have learned the basic alphabet of Karnatic percussions, called Konnakol. This is almost like a language with different words, used to describe different sounds you can produce: Tha, ti, tom, nam, dim, cha, tham and so on. We started with really simple exercises, in order to learn the basic strokes: Tha tika ti tika tom tika nam tika (repeat many many times), and progressed to learn complete "compositions" that took our teacher three lessons to dictate, starting like this:

nam. dim. dim. nam. tikathaka dim. dim. nam. dim. tikathaka dim. nam. tha.taka tika tatha chatathat kita taka nam. dim. dim. nam....
Below are shown (from left to right: nam, ti, tha, tom)

You'd think learning a percussion instrument would be about rhythm, but this one is much more about memory (we were expected to know these compositions by heart for the next lesson) and hand coordination. We have been practicing about two-three hours a day, but still haven't got some of it right - we'd really need a few months just to be able to accompany a simple song.

When we were still in a cool and level-headed frame of mind back home, and knowing how have a tendency to get rather excited about interesting percussion instruments, we had a discussion in which we agreed that a Mridingam would be a heavy and impractical purchase while we were traveling. Of course, when your teacher asks you after a particularly fun lesson if you plan to continue with Mridingam back home, what can you say but "do you know any good Mridingam makers?" Of course he does, and before you know it he makes an appointment for the next day at 8 am in the next city at a local maker's shop. He was kind enough to weigh it for us, and it is "maximum 8kg" (which in India means 9.5 kg).

The fun thing about this "cultural summer camp" (which actually runs all year long) is that they offer many exciting Keralan/Indian subjects such as Katakali (more on that later), wood carving, mural painting, cooking, ayurveda, yoga, 2 types of south Indian dance, Kalari (Keralan martial art), and Karnatic violin, voice and percussion. For us, however, the most fun was meeting a lot of other people who were "India Culture". Don't get us wrong, we love each others' company, but after a month and a half on the road, we only met two or three other travelers who were interesting to talk to, and we were getting eager for company. Everyone comes to India for their own personal reasons, and most of the people we met elsewhere had other interests in mind... like the two nubile Swedish girls who always wore their bikinis everywhere under their clothing in case an appropriate beach presented itself. And they were complaining that everyone seemed to treat them like porn actresses. Or the American teenager we met whose conclusion was that India was generally a "fun" place except that she hated Indian food and Indian people.

Our summer camp is full of people just as crazy about India as we are. They wear saris out and about, and were all eager to have a look at Kim's sari wrapping book (several asked to photocopy it!), they enjoy discussing the fine points of Indian musical theory and compare ragas they have learned, and it is not uncommon to hear people say "would you be interested in seeing a Bengali movie from the 50's or the latest comedy in Malayalam?". There are only about fifteen students at the center at any given time, and each one follows their own schedule according to the subjects chosen. The lessons are generally private and taught by excellent teachers. For all of you out there who are also "India culture" we can highly recommend a few weeks here.

Last week's big adventure was an all night Katakali performance at a nearby temple. Katakal i is a type of Keralan dance/drama, usually based on stories about Rama and Krishna. It involves several actors dancers who act out the drama using a series of "mudras" or hand gestures, dramatic eye movements, and wild facial quivers (lips for sadness, eyebrows for love). It is highly stylized, and accompanied by two singers (who narrate the text, but are required to repeat each line as long as the actor/dancer keeps acting/dancing) and a team of percussionists whose job it is to keep the audience awake for those all night temple performances by playing extremely loud and clanging metal things together. The best thing about it, however, is the over the top costumes and the make-up that takes all together about three hours to put on. It was fun going into the "green room" to watch the actors get dressed and ready for the performance. Although the show lasts until dawn and will include three plays (each about three hours long) we only made it through until two o'clock in the morning (we had to get up for yoga the next morning), but thoroughly enjoyed it none the less.

We had originally planned to stay here for only a week, but after about two days realized that it would not be enough, and if we really wanted to get anywhere with Mridingam we would have to stay here for two months, and practice "many many times" as our teacher keeps repeating. We didn't have an extra month and three weeks, so we have settled for four more days, and sadly, will be leaving the center on Thursday. From here we are off to Cochin, and our Indian vacation is quickly drawing towards its end. We are still hoping to do one or two posts before that, so stay tuned!

Bored With Your Current Job?

2008-08-08T03:09:00.000-07:00

Thinking about a career change? Here is the Kim and Boaz list of alternative, yet amazing professions you can pursue. We have been collecting these for a while, and it is time we shared them with you. India is brimming over with an array of occupations that you don't see so often in the west anymore - like the sign painters, tanners, basket makers, weavers and many more. India also has some unique professions, that never existed in the west, like paan wallahs, jasmine flower garland makers and coconut tree climbers - the terrestrial version of pearl divers: apparently a very dangerous job reserved for a "special" (i.e. low) caste.

We have decided to dedicate one post to some of the more amazing craftsmen we have seen on our trip. Whenever we meet anyone making something on the street we are riveted to the spot, asking questions, taking pictures and buying unnecessary, yet fun, souvenirs from them (which might turn up as prizes for bright blog readers later).

The first one we saw on our trip was the woodblock carver. This young guy was sitting outside his shop near Crawford market in Mumbai, carving the most intricate patterns on wood blocks that would later be used for both block printing fabric (mostly cotton) and for applying henna to ladies' hands. The henna application is for lazy or un-coordinated ladies only- or more often a guy on the street who does henna for a few rupees in under a minute (it takes quite a while if you do it "by hand" and is priced accordingly). He started by taking an off cut of plywood...we can write a whole other post about the people who make a living selling leftover bits and pieces of stuff... Then he drew the pattern to be carved, often according to a template that was prepared by another person in the workshop. Then he proceeded to chisel little bits of wood at a time, according to the lines previously drawn, leaving the pattern in relief. His chisels that looked very very sharp, but also were obviously made from scraps of steel: old needle files and broken drill bits, and his "hammer" looked like an old chair. Indians are so good about recycling!

Much as we would have liked to purchase something from the Ganesha maker, we restrained ourselves, knowing that a terracotta statue would simply not travel well. We encountered the Ganesha maker in Badami, he was part of the family (to whom you were introduced in the sari post) whose womenfolk gave Kim the beautiful green bangles. It was only after hanging out on their doorstep for almost 15 minutes that our glances fell upon a small clay leg lying there... there was such a big crowd of people that it was difficult to see what this may be attached to, but then we noticed that there was a statue of Ganesh sitting there, minus a leg. The man would take a piece of clay and, with the help of a small sculpting knife, would fashion individual body parts to put on the statue. The detail was amazing. We were impressed by his sculptures - they were all about 40 cm in height, and he had made several that morning, all of them lined up on a side shelf to dry. Unfortunately, these lovely pieces were later covered by painting them really bright, kitchy colours...

One of our favourite jobs was seen in Chettinad while we were pretending to be rich, and that was the Sari weaver. We met a couple who had a small "factory" composed of 70 looms in total, spread over different houses in town. In house we visited, there were three weavers and one woman winding bobbins on a bicycle wheel. The looms were amazing, very simply made of bamboo poles. The women sat in chairs set into the floor, probably because it is easier to make a hole in the floor than to build a table for the entire loom, the looms were easily 6 meters long- about the length of a sari, come to think of it. One woman is able to weave a sari in 2 days, 4 if it is complicated with checks or patterns. An additional morning or so is also needed to set up the loom with all of the threads. Because the visit was organized through our expensive hotel the saris were unfortunately priced accordingly, and we did not end up getting any, but don't worry, we did end up getting some table cloths - the stuff was simply irresistible.

Boaz fell in love with the bead turner. If you described what this man was doing and we hadn't seen it for ourselves we would have told you that this is impossible. This man, who we saw in Panderpur during the mela, was making beads for rosary-type prayer necklaces. He used really soft wood, apparently with a hollow center. He drilled a hole through a little piece of this wood with a long needle, and then set it between the centers of a very simple little "lathe", basically a small metal frame. With his right hand he used a bow which was wound around the piece of wood, and while it was turning, he was using a chisel with his left to round and shape 5-6 beads at a time. Then he took them off, cut them into individual pieces and strung them. The beads he made were tiny - about 5 mm in diameter, and you needed at least a hundred of them for one of these necklaces.

BARFI: Although there were some pretty good attempts, no one answered last post's quetion correctly. The strange plant in question, of which we have only shown you the flower, has an edible root. It is GINGER... we would have never guessed either if our guide hadn't told us.

Floating Around the Keralan Backwaters

2008-08-07T03:57:00.000-07:00

"Kerala - God's Own Country" claim billboards on every roadside here, with what seems to be, at first, a slight exaggeration. However, after traveling around this state for the last week now, we can attest that there is some truth in the claim. With its abundance of water, delicious food, butterflies the size of hummingbirds, and coconut trees as far as the eye can see, this does seem to be as close to a paradise on earth as it gets. The people, too, are the nicest we have met so far and best of all: Autorickshaw drivers ask for a decent price and never have to be bargained down!

Our goal in coming to Kerala, apart from all those attractions recently mentioned, was to find some nice homestays, meet some families, experience their lifestyles and (of course) their cooking, and to collect as many tasty recipes as possible for future reference. Kerala has an extensive network of "homestays" which is sometimes a bit of a catchall expression ranging from 'you will sleep in the spare room and help the kids with their English homework' to ' resort accommodation involving only one or two cottages run by a family'. Obviously we were more interested in the first option, but the difficulty was extracting the information from the guy at the tourist office, from whom getting coherent suggestions was as difficult as pulling teeth from a chicken. For the entire region, he told us, there were only 3 homestays....well maybe there were more, but until the tourist ferry started running in the "season" there was absolutely NO way to get there. As if all of the inhabitants are stranded in their houses until enough tourists come. After a long discussion, and a visit to the "rival" government stall (we are not sure how that works, but there seems to be more than one official tourist office in town) we managed to come up with three nice-sounding options.

We first stayed near Kollam, just a few stops on the PUBLIC ferry away from town, in a very quiet village where we entertained ourselves by relaxing and doing nothing (a first on this trip), taking a romantic sunset paddle (there was some one who did this paddling) seeing Chinese fishing nets, and having one of the best sleeps ever, with little fireflies flitting about the room. From there, we took the PUBLIC ferry to Monro island, a location apparently only accessible to tourists by 300 rupee rickshaw rides, and where it is "not safe to spend the night", according to our host at the first homestay. Thus forewarned, we ventured into the unknown, only to be dumped two hours later at the end of the ferry line, where we were supposed to meet someone from the homestay (who, naturally, wasn't there). In the meantime, we followed some other people across the railway tracks (yes, there is also a train) to a TODDY SHOP (read: den of iniquity). A toddy shop is an infamous Keralan invention, where people (read: men) go to eat very delicious and spicy fiery fish curry with cassava, all the spiciness being an excuse to drink toddy. Toddy is a fermented coconut palm sap beverage, in the morning it is like juice and as the day progresses it gets steadily more alcoholic. It doesn't keep for more than a day. We had a very small glass at around 3 o'clock and it seemed to be as strong as wine, with a sweet yet fermented taste. We could easily become regulars at this kind of place on the edge of the water, so peaceful and with much better wildlife than in bars back home (see photo below). Saving us from too much Toddy, someone eventually turned up to collect us and bring us to our homestay.

This was very much a family homestay, with two very sweet children who spoke English rather well and used our interest in cooking to further their interest in getting their mother and grandmother to make their favourite foods. We spent an almost sleepless night on a small sagging mattress and then went on a morning canoe trip where we got to see many local coconut-based industries such as coconut picking, coir rope making and coconut drying. New career prospects were also in the making as Kim tried her her hand at coir winding (for woman only) and Boaz learned how to canoe with a pole (there is a paddle, but that's only for when it is deep).

We continued on by bus to our current boat-accessible only homestay, which is definitely the nirvana we have been seeking. Facing the broad canal that connect Allepy and Kollam, among tall swaying trees, it is a quiet, remote retreat, as the name Riverside Retreat suggests. We got a small "cottage", a spacious bungalow made of wood, a few meters away from the main house. There were two main attractions: first, the bed is exactly twice as big as the one in the last homestay, and second, at the back there is a little secretive shower, outdoors, under a banana tree. We have tea and delicious meals overlooking the river, watching the canoes and fishermen go by, and if that gets too stressful, there is also the possibility of an ayurvedic massage at a real ayurvedic "hospital" where you start by having a consultation with a doctor, and then are vigourously massaged by two people and about 3 liters of herb infused coconut oil. This is not the sleazy and cheesy faux ayurvedic massage that people try to lure you into in other touristic locations, but actually requires an appointment! The massage table is made from wood with edges running around to catch all that oil (and to catch you, it gets pretty slippery). It is probably one of the best oiled pieces of furniture we have ever seen! It was followed by a visit to the steam box (it looks more like a medieval torture kit, but was actually fun).

Only a few days remain in our little backwater idyll, and then it is off to our "Keralan daycamp", but first we are going to go to Allepy for the yearly "Neru trophy snake boat race" from which we are hoping to report back to the faithful readers of this blog.

Barfi: Another contest with fun prizes! Who can tell us what this plant is (hint: it is edible).

South Indian Breakfast: Part I, the Parota Addiction

2008-08-02T22:06:00.000-07:00

While waiting for the parcel service dude to open his shop on this fine Sunday morning in Trivandrum (he only opens at noon, and we got there at 9:30), and as our we got stuck checking out of the hotel at 8:00, we decided to write a short post. After having a delicious breakfast at the Ariya Nivas we decided to tell you about some of our favourite breakfast foods. There are just too many for one post, so we have decided to break it up into segments.

One of our all-time favourites are PAROTAS. These are not to be confused with north Indian Parathas, which are also very tasty, and usually are like stuffed chapattis. The Parotas of the south, however, are flaky, delightful, griddled flat breads. We already discovered them last year in Tamil Nadu and Kerala, and to tell you the truth, we became so addicted that we decided to attempt them at home. Many Saturday mornings were spent with various recipes downloaded from the internet, attempting to whip up parotas with limited success. Usually, we would start at around breakfast time, it would take us until lunch time (and half a bottle of vegetable oil) and we would devour them so greedily that we would be too full to contemplate dinner. But still, the result was about 6 parotas, flatter than we wanted, slightly singed rather than golden, and all this after two hours of fiddling with the dough and saying words we aren't going to write down here.

So how does Parota magic happen? we were very happy to run into a local parota master in Hampi and and tried to extract some of the trade secrets through careful observation and many photographs. So here is how the pros do it: First you need the dough. We are not sure what's in it - probably flour, oil and water, we are yet to find out the exact proportions, but this guy's dough looked very smooth and flexible. You divide your dough into little balls (the master did it by squeezing the dough between his thumb and forefinger, into little, perfect, mushroom-shaped balls). Then, you whack it against a very well oiled table (master had a shining black marble slab) to an oval shape, so thin you could read your morning paper through it (at home it took Boaz about half an hour with the rolling pin). Then you origami it into a fan, followed by a snail and set it aside. It took the Master about 10 seconds (we timed it) to form those little snails, but it took us more than ten minutes to do this back home... Then, you get your helper to roll them out flat and place them on the griddle (the helper not yet being worthy of whacking and shaping). Once they have been browned to golden perfection on both sides, you set them aside in a stack, and wait for the master to do the final touch. The most important part about making the layers separate is to clap the whole stack between your two hands (sideways). This trick takes years to perfect, and hence only the true master should do it. They are then served with the "curry" of your choice, usually sambar, and sometimes egg curry but always coconut chutney. A standard order is two parotas, but we are often tempted to be greedy and get a third just because they are so tasty!

BARFI: This barfi is about jewellery. In the west, jewelry is considered frivolous and decorative, but here in India, jewellery is like a women's savings account. Everyone is all decked out with solid gold earrings, nose rings, necklaces and bangles for the most mundane of everyday tasks (for example, street sweeping and cement mixing). After finding out how much gold costs, we looked at these women in a whole new way. On a hot day, after a big lunch we decided to relax in an A/C jewelers shop and look at some silver jewelry (much to everyone's amusement since no one over 12 wears silver jewelry here). This made us realize something else about Indian jewelry: they are a bit like IKEA furniture: you can always add an other little component as your husband grows richer. You start with studs, and then you can add little bits to dangle from them, you can also attach thin chains to loop over your ear, to connect to your nose ring, hairpin, or husband... you get the picture. We found several very nice earrings and happily took them home. The closings were not the "butterfly" backings found in the west, but rather the earrings actually screwed shut. I guess that it makes sense if it is your life savings and is the essential component of this modular system. At home we realized that we had a small problem. Because Kim wears mostly very small earrings, with very small posts, the new earrings had posts 3 times the size of the old ones and were not, with any amount of pushing or turning, going to go in. How embarrassing. We might try to find an intermediate thickness and "stretch" the holes a bit. In the meantime, feeling like sissies, we saw an older, possibly tribal, woman on the bus who certainly did not have this problem at all....in fact she had about a kilo of solid gold nuts and bolts (quite literally, we kid you not) strung through her earlobes. And her holes were about 10 cm long.

Congratulations to googling queens Genevieve and Ghislaine, who tied in the contest to find out about the turmeric paste on the face! Genevieve will be the proud recipient of a brass key hanger and Ghislaine wins a hand carved wood-block for henna application. Turmeric everyone can get back home - and as we read, it will certainly make you more beautiful!

In The Style to Which We Are (un)Accustomed

2008-07-31T22:57:00.001-07:00

Chettinad. We had heard so much about it’s spicy cuisine, it riches and its palaces… ok, ok, it is actually not in the Lonely Planet (the backpacker’s bible) or the Rough Guide, but we read good things about it on internet forums, and after all, we are here to explore the unknown and to report back to you folks back home about places which are off the beaten track.

The Chettinad region was home to rich trading tycoons who made their fortunes abroad in places like Burma, Sri Lanka and China, while the rest of their extensive extended families lived in the lap of luxury in this dry dusty region poorly suited to agriculture and pretty much most else. They turned the little village of Kannadukatan, among other places, into a “modern” town, with wide, paved streets set in a grid pattern, and built large, stately mansions that seem to take up entire blocks (which may explain the grid pattern). Every mansion has several large courtyards, each with a different purpose. The first one is for receiving important guests (such as ourselves…) the second for banquets, the third for the women to hang out during the banquets (it goes without saying that they were not really invited otherwise) the last one or two were for cooking all the food for the aforementioned banquets. Needless to say, it was these last ones we found the most interesting. They have sunny places for drying food (like pappadums or chilies) and shady places where you can do more physical work like grinding masalas on a huge stone slab or in a gigantic, deep mortar and pestle. Because of their weight, they are mostly still in their original places, although for those who enjoy browsing at flea markets, they are also available there and make excellent, easy to transport gifts. All you need is a small truck or an elephant to get it home.

Most of these houses (and there are about 50 of them in village alone) are nowadays empty and in need of some repair. The trading tycoons did not survive World War Two after trade was severely limited, and their riches dwindled, living their coffers and stately homes emptied of wealth. Nowadays, the owners are either away at their other house in Chennai, or their 60 odd offspring cannot agree what to do with the place and its 120 rooms. Sometimes part of the house is rented out to prevent squatters, and people will only use the front porch (which is still big enough to house 10 college students, as we saw).

Another possibility is to turn it into a fancy “boutique” hotel, which is exactly what the owners of the Chettinadu Mansion, where we stayed, have done. They refurbished seven out of the 100 or so rooms in the house, added a western style bathroom, and are doing a booming business. There is still not too much tourism here, which is actually quite nice, but also means that you have to depend on the hotel staff organizing tours for you.

On the first day we got a guided tour of the village, including a very interesting visit to another “palace” that was even bigger than the one we were staying at. The guard let us in because our guide was his cousin, but we had to quietly wait locked inside while a group of tourists were denied entry. The palace was still furnished, and included hunting trophies (an elephant’s leg vase and tusked mirrors- poor elephants!), elegant European furniture and a series of bigger-than-life sized portraits of the former matriarchs and patriarchs. Time seems to be frozen here and one is transported back to the glorious days of the Raj.

Yesterday, we were driven around in an A/C car for the better part of the day and were taken to see an interesting tile “factory” – where they make the kind of lovely painted tails one can still find in old houses in Chettinad and in Jaffa (as well as at least one in Ra’anana). Then we were whisked away to see how they make handloom saris (and had to exercise extreme restraint in not purchasing the entire stock) and then we were taken to “Antique Alley” where many of the former riches can be found today. I think it was the most interesting flea market we have been to, we would have been happy to purchase almost everything we saw: cupboards, hanging cradles (remember the two rupees we left at the Shiva temple…), carved hope chests, doorframes, and original teak wood pillars. However, practicality reigned, and we only ended up with a couple of wooden bowls and a half meter long ornately carved wooden coconut scraper. Then we finished the day off by shopping for Chettinad saris for those who requested them. Can you imagine what our first thing to do in the next town we get to? Yes, we will find a post office and make a very large parcel to send home.

But, getting back to our Mansion. We have entitled this post “In the Style to Which We Are (un) Accustomed” because we usually stay in 200 rupee cockroach motels, with suspiciously stained walls and bed sheets, and eat in truck stop cafes with people who think nothing of washing their hands by pouring a glass of water on to their hands over the floor (usually dirt, so it isn’t a problem). But this was a whole different affair. The room which was decorated with eggwash paint in tromp d’oeuil style, popular in Europe of the 1880s, had A/C that actually worked, shining crisp white bedsheets we didn’t think twice about actually sleeping on (we usually use our own), complimentary sweets, soap, shampoo and razor and for the first time on this trip, TOWELS were not only provided but were also changed daily.

The food was nice, and served in the amazing grand entrance hall, but it took us a couple of meals to get them to understand that we wanted SPICY, original Chettinad cuisine, not some sort of a bland watered-down version meant for delicate French tourists (which seem to make up most of their western clientele). Needless to say, this was the splurging two days of our vacation, costing about 20 times what we usually spend, but it was worth every moment. Candle-lit dinners in the open air courtyard, a nice swim after a long, hot day, and, did we mention the clean bedsheets? It was an unforgettable experience living like wealthy people for a few days. There were too many nice photos to fit on the blog so go to the picasa Chettinad album if you would like to see more.

BARFI: Another quiz to see if you can

answer something we couldn’t figure out. We saw a lot of women who had put turmeric paste on their faces, giving them a strange ghostly yellow glow. We tried to discreetly ask one woman we were talking to about this, and the answer was “it is yellow.” We weren’t sure if that was actually the answer or if the question was misunderstood. Perhaps there is an ayurvedic explanation? Does anyone know or can google this?

Monsoon Activities - a Rainy Sunday in Bangalore

2008-07-27T22:40:00.000-07:00

First of all, for all of you who have heard about recent events in India: we are both fine, and although we were in the city last Friday when a series of low intensity explosions went off, we were not in the vicinity.

We came to Bangalore originally because we were a bit behind schedule and needed to axe a few other places from our overly-optimistic itinerary, and while we only planned to stay for two days, we forgot how much we love this city and have now been here 5 days. don't ask what we have done - somehow the days just went flying by. Staying at home and having a nice home cooked meal was one of the things we were really looking forward to after a couple of weeks on the road. We were very lucky in this respect, as we managed to get TWO home cooked meals, one from Gayatri's Aunt Keerti, and the other from Keerti's friend, Vidyullala. Both were "normal everyday meals" according to the claim of the hostesses, but to us they were an elaborate affairs that involved lots of veggies and other tasty tidbits. We wish our "everyday meals" back home tasted like this! Kim got some of the recipes, so we are looking forward to re-creating it back at home.

This also the first place were we really noticed that we are in the Monsoon season: there have been many power cuts (up to 8 hours a day) due to a lack of rain and to the fact that the state mostly runs on hydro-electric power. Then there was diesel shortage, because everyone runs a private generator, and then, finally, the rains finally started to come, solving some of these problems.

So, what does one do in the Monsoon? There are many things to do, and we did many of the typical ones yesterday. To start with, as the weather was still dry, we headed to the Lalbagh, or local botanical gardens, for a bit of fresh air and a light breakfast al fresco. We walked around the gardens and observed many families doing the same thing. It seemed to be just the thing for people to do with their elderly relatives. Unfortunately, the weather didn't hold up, and it began to intermittently shower, so we decided to look for shelter. A good opportunity presented itself in the form for the Marvalli Tiffin Rooms, also apparently just the thing to do with those elderly relatives of yours. The MTR as it is commonly known, is a local institution - a "restaurant" would be too humble of a word to describe this phenomena. It is literally a series of "rooms" - about four of them, each seating about 50 people. They have got quite the system going at the MTR: first you pay for your "meal" (there is nothing else on the menu between noon and two) then you head upstairs, to find out that all of the people you have seen in the Lalbagh gardens have made it there before you, and are all sitting on benches in a waiting room. From the photo below, you can think that this is a local doctor's office, or a waiting area at the train station, but no, this is the "waiting area" of the MTR. The system: you wait for about one hour, exchanging pleasantries and personal details with everyone else in the room, until one of the four dining rooms is completely empty. Then they call out the numbers of about 50 people and everyone files into that room. Following this, everyone is served exactly the same thing at the same time, by a gaggle of waiters, carrying the food in large buckets. The woman who waited next to us promised that there will be 25 items in the meal but we counted about 22: grape juice, water, coconut chutney, kosimbari salad, cabbage bhaji, potato curry, puris, gulab jamum, rice pudding, deep fried snacks, tomato rice with cashews, regular rice with sambar and rasam, raita, mini-pappadums, yoghurt rice, fruit with ice cream, and of course, paan to digest everything well. This was an amazing meal, all the more so, because it was eaten in under 20 minutes. Everyone had to "stay with the tour", and there could be no lingering and chatting, as the next shift was waiting in the wings. Thus satisfied, we headed back for a nap at the hotel and a bit of recovering before our evening's activities. (below: making enough coconut chutney to feed a small hoard of elephants at the MTR)

Originally we bought tickets to a special concert dedicated to Monsoon Ragas. A Raga is like a mode in Western music, only there are many more of them, and they are dedicated to various times of the day and seasons in the year. We thought this concert sounded very special, and prolonged our stay by two days so we could hear it, and we were therefore very disappointed when we read in the paper that it had been postponed by two weeks because of the situation here. However, we still managed to hear a different concert of Karnatic music, and with all the windows open and the scent of rain floating through the auditorium it certainly qualified as an excellent monsoon activity.

No evening was complete without walking home in the rain. There are always lots of puddles to splash through on the way home, and while it is one thing to walk in the rain and have wet feet, it is quite another to have wet feet when you walk through a place reeking of pee or sewer....your imagination starts to work overtime, and I think we are the first people to alco-gel their feet!

BARFI: You don't get a new BARFI because you haven't solved the last one yet. However, tgber(Boaz's parents) were the ones came the closest. Obviously, a "Takla teli nupolo" is Tagliatelle Napoli. Don't ask us what this gourmet rendition entails in touristic Hampi, but we suspect it is pasta with canned tomato sauce.

The Road MORE travelled- Hampi

2008-07-22T05:54:00.000-07:00

When we planned our trip last year, we eventually decided not to go to Hampi because it seemed like one big tourist trap. This year, after seeing many pictures and hearing many accounts of how magical and wonderful it is, we decided that perhaps we had been unduly harsh. We were both right and wrong on both accounts, it is a HUGE tourist trap, but it is also very special and wonderful (if you can hold yourself back from accidentally killing the 2 millionth person who starts grabbing at you and saying "postcards, postcards, postcards").

Arriving in Hampi three days ago, we were shocked to find out that there were OTHER western people in town. We have been traveling for more then two weeks now, and apart from Colaba in Mumbai we haven't seen any other western peoplethe whole time. We found that we developed a natural Indian instinct towards them, we simply stare... and rightly so... the girls - they don't wear anything! These little tank tops are smaller than cholis, and those shorts are really shocking. There is a whole culture of people who migrate for 6 months on end across India from one of these tourist traps to the next, and they have developed a certain style of dressing. Several things we have seen that qualify as "please try this only when you have left India" include wearing a lunghi (men's skirt) as a scarf and wearing a sari petticoat as a skirt(with no sari on top) .... and you wonder why people stare at you.

The second shock was the food. We randomly chose a place down in Hampi Bazaar that looked like it had a nice flow of people, and were very surprised at the menu: first that there was one, and then to find out that it had Italian, Chinese, Israeli, Mexican, "Continental" (where the hell is that?) and faux- Indian. We really didn't know what to chose, and eventually decided that "Dal Roti" was probably the safest way to go. What we got, after waiting for half an hour, was a strange flying saucer shaped disk....like a flattened empanada or calzone. Normally, Dal Roti is dal with roti, but this was dal inside the roti - and there were no spices whatsoever.

Putting aside all the touts, touristy restaurants and cheesy guest houses, Hampi is truly a magnificent place. Hampi, or Vijayanagar, as it was once called, was the capital city of a vast empire that included most of south India from the 14th to the 16th centuries. It is a true "lost city" in a sense, as all of its 30 square kilometers of temple complexes, palaces and markets are now lying ruins. The city was sacked in the sixteenth century a coalition of Muslim rulers, headed by the Adil Shahs dynasty. Remember them? they are the ones that used all of the riches of Vijayanagar to build their capital - Bijapur, which we have visited last week. It is fascinating to see how one city's victory is an other's ruin. The city's remains, and there are many of those, are scattered over the whole site, between hills that look like a pile of rocks that some unknown giant has left there, and a little flowing river that has to be crossed by coracle. A coracle is a little reed basket that can hold up to ten people and is paddled by a greedy, lazy, temperamental boatman, who is never there when you need him or asks a ridiculous price for a two moment's crossing.

Hampi also has special significance as the location of Kishkinda, the kingdom of the monkeys as told in the Ramayana. For those of you not familiar with the story, you will be pleased to know that I broke down, admitted I would never get through the original book, and bought a version for children with pictures. Even then it was nearly 100 pages and the pictures weren't that big. And indeed, this is the kingdom of the monkies! We climbed the hill to the Hanuman temple, where the priest let us feed his favourite monkey. We were then harassed all the way back down the hill by rest of the clan, who probably smelled bananas on our breath....they were far worse than the postcard sellers, rickshaw drivers and shoe minders!

Another huge attraction of this place is Lakshmi, the Elephant that belongs to the local temple. She is a bit of a local mascot, and is trained to give people a blessing in exchange for a rupee coin. She is bathed every morning at 7:30, about 10 meter upstream from where everyone does their laundry and morning washing. I guess she is good luck.

After 3 days of wandering through the sites, both the main ones and the "off the beaten track kim and boaz special" sites we are ready to move on. We will be going to Bangalore, which was not on our itinerary, but is a nice place to break our long trip south towards land's end. We have also been promised a home cooked meal by Gayatri's aunt and we are especially excited.

BARFI: Many are the mysterious and funny signs that you see around town. For example, this one (below) from our guesthouse.

What does it mean? We will beat the "heckout " of you if you are not gone by 10 was the best interpretation we came up with. We are leaving tomorrow at 8 so I guess we don't get to find out. So the purpose of this BARFI is to offer a prize to the person who is able to answer the following riddle: what is Takli Teli Nupolo (clue: it is something you eat....or something one eats, but we certainly didn't) The winner will receive an exciting prize of our choice!

The road less traveled - cycling to Mahakoota

2008-07-21T06:50:00.000-07:00

There are many ways to explore the area around Badami - the cradle of Hindu temple architecture. Obviously, if you are a tourist, you don't really want to be walking, or cycling or doing anything hard like that - you'd want to sit in a little auto rickshaw and be bumped to deathdeath around the different sites as fast as possible for an outrageous amount of money that could probably feed the entire village for the next week or so. But, if you like to see things the slow way, you might be able to get them to rent you a pair of bicycles for the day, along with some very general instructions on where you might want to go.

So, we set out one fine morning after many warnings from the man at the hotel...."you should buy food to eat along the way, bananas and biscuits, because there will be no food at all where you are going..." Now, being seasoned Indian travellers, we have difficulty thinking of any village so small it doesn't have some little snack stall with tasty things for us. "Well," he said "there will be only INDIAN food, and it might be SPICY".... ooooh now we are really worried. Only Indian food, how terrible for us! (we should have kept this in mind when he did recommend the hotel restaurant which served bland and unpalatable "pseudo-Indian" food).

After about one hour of fiddling with the bike (including a trip down to the local bike repairmen) we finally headed out along the beautiful country road that connects Badami with Banashankari, a little temple dedicated to the goddess. Once we managed to get out of the busy traffic of the dusty downtown the road became much quieter, with graceful trees arching over is, and with only the occasional bullock cart or herd of goats sharing the road with us.

The most beautiful thing about this temple was a 1500 year old water tank, about a kilometer square, surrounded by stairs and guarded by rows of ancient stone pillars. The tank is still full, and although its original intention was to provide a place for people to bathe before going to the the temple, it now also functions as a local Laundromat and a swimming pool.

From there, we headed out to Mahakoot, a sacred pilgrimage site dedicated to lord Shiva. Upon entering the little temple courtyard we ran into a young priest who volunteered to show us around the place and tell us all about it. Back in the Chalukiyan era you had to make a choice: you could either be a follower of Vishnu or of Shiva. This, as the priest explained, is like the difference between Sunni and Shiite, and "Roman or Catholic"... well, apparently the dudes here were all Shaivites (followers of Shiva), judging by the hundred of lingams scattered around the place. A lingam (see right) is a phallic-looking pillar that represents lord Shiva, and is usually the main icon found in Shiva temples. Across from the Shivalinga, you will always find Nandi, Shiva's loyal bull vehicle, of whom Kim is rather fond (see below)

Apart from all of the above, one of the main highlights of going to this temple is the beautiful little spring water pool in the middle of the courtyard. It's meant to have curing and purifying powers, or, in other words, people don't use it for their laundry. Boaz hopped in for a short swim, Kim came along more reluctantly, being expected, out of modesty, to swim fully clothed and didn't have anything else to change into.

The place is well known for its powers of fertility (possibly because of all the lingams lying around), and our priest decided that we were obviously in need of help. He took us through the temple, and explained to us how when a couple wants children they come to the temple, and put a rupee coin in a little silver crib hanging next to the main lingam, and they rock it together. I am sure many of you will be happy to know that we followed all the rituals - you never know when you might need a bit of help in the future, and since we didn't think that we'd be able to come back any time soon we , and put a TWO rupee coin in the crib. The good news is that this fertility treatment is really affordable. The bad news is that you are expected to come back with your offspring and shower the lingam with many thousands of rupees. (Our first family vacation?)

The priest also invited us home for lunch. He pulled a mobile phone from somewhere under his dhoti, and called his wife back home in the village to say that company was coming. We rested a bit and then headed to the little village on his shiny, spiffy, bright red motorcycle. He lived in a two-room mud house, along with his wife, two children, and their cow. His wife had prepared a typical humble village repast, composed of jowar roti - a local flat bread made of sorghum, or as our friend called it, a "hungry", some dal, fiery red chilly paste to mix into it, and very tasty peanut chutney accompanied by curd from the cow sitting in the same room with us. It was probably one of the best meals we have had here, simple, yet tasty. After an extra helping of "hungry" and an an other soak at the temple pool, we headed back to our mosquito-ridden hotel in Badami, were we watched the the sun go down over the palm trees.

Barfi: You may not have realized it, but our blog also awards prizes to the best participants. Dorothea, for all of her excellent information on the Lambani women, is going to be (in the distant future) the proud recipient of a pair of original Lambani anklets with red embroidery, antique 2 paisa coins and lots of jingly jangly things! Congratulations Dorothea!

Madam is India Culture...yes!?

2008-07-18T08:26:00.001-07:00

Indeed, there have been so many requests for updates on the "Sari Situation" that we decided to dedicate an entire post to it (and maybe more in the future for the hardcore sari affecionados). Obviously, when we got off the plane in Mumbai, the first thing we did, before finding the hotel, was to find a starting point for the Sari shopping, I mean, you have got to get your priorities straight... so, Fabindia and a small shop, conviniently located right under our guest house were chosen. The first sari that Kim saw was a beautiful cotton sari from Orissa (where we will not be going, so she did feel momentarily guilty about getting it). Kim managed to wait an entire day, while constantly annoying Boaz by talking about it and worrying that some other evil person may have bought it. As a (slightly more practical) consolation prize, Kim went to Fabindia and bought a simple yet elegant bordeaux cotton sari at a reasonable price (for Mumbai). The next morning, we exchanged a stash of travellers cheques and happily bought the first sari as well.

However, we would like to say that buying clothes in India is not about instant gratification, but rather double gratification- once when you buy the cloth and the next time when you get it back from the tailor. For a sari, you need a choli, which is a VERY SMALL tiny little blouse that has to be very expertly tailored, otherwise it either bags unattractively or binds your arms to your torso. We had a bit of trouble finding a good tailor, and that's what put us a week behind.

In the meanwhile, Kim was attempting to learn the ins and outs of sari tying both alone in the privacy of our room and with the help of a nice homeless old lady that Boaz had befriended the
night before. She taught Kim the Gujarati wrap, which fits all of the Kim criteria: unlikely to fall off or get caught on things and looks ok with a backpack. Normally, a nice Indian girl will drape her sari with the pallu (the beautiful ornamented end part) over her shoulder and cascading down her back elegantly. This does not work with a knapsack. More practical working women (the ones who use their pallu for things like covering their heads, carrying babies, blowing their noses and wiping their hands) usually keep it tucked in. This is why Kim's photos might not look exactly like you may have seen saris worn before....apart from the fact that she isn't Indian, that is!

Fast forward: Bijapur, where Kim has found a choli tailor and after many alterations, finally took it home to test it. Now, a choli is something neither of us had ever seen in it's entirety before, since the front is always covered by the sari. When Kim put it on for the first time, it was rather ...um... surprising. A choli can also function as a bra and had strange circular seams that made Kim look astonishingly like some of the statues in the temples (see left).

Never the less, the front firmly covered by the sari, Kim spent 3 hours perfecting the drape, and then ventured out into the dusty streets of Bijapur. We had a long photo session (for posterity, and this blog's sake), which managed, as usual, to attract a significant crowd of onlookers - it seemed like the best show in town! This accomplished, we went on to do some sightseeing and took some more photos of Kim posing as a Bollywood star. People's reactions are generally very positive. A lot of people come up to us and say "Madam is India culture, yes!?" (I'm sorry, was that a question?) It is also a great conversation starter and large groups of women constantly approach Kim to ask about her sari, her jewellery, her marital status and plans for enlarging the family. Today we walked through the narrow old streets of Badami, where a hoard of women decended on Kim and dragged her into an alley, in order to undrape her and get her wrap right (it looked perfectly good to us before the 10 women got at it). Many women were compelled to give her bangles, little purses for hanging inside the sari, and in many cases, felt free to get Boaz to put tilak marks on her forehead.

Kim's taste for simple, locally produced, hand woven cotton Saris is apparently horribly out of style with the younger generation, or to put it in plain words: she has the fashion taste of an old lady from the village. Every time we "people watch" all the women under 60 have horrible synthetic saris that look (to us) like tablecloths or something you would find in a hotel room masquerading as curtains. To each their own! However, Kim's fashion taste is extremely appealing to septagenarian gentlemen, who feel the need to come up to Boaz and commend his wife on her excellent choice of sari, Indian culture, and upstanding morals. We were joking that she probably reminds them of some lovely creature they set eyes on in the 1930's.

Wearing a sari is great fun, much appreciated by everyone, looks elegant on every figure, can be used as a tablecloth and baby carrier, and we are taking orders (please specify if you will need a choli and send measurements). The only drawback, is (Boaz says) is that if your wife gets a Sari, it means she spends about one hour longer getting ready in the morning, but this means you also have more time to finish reading the paper, do a bit of Yoga, choose pictures for your blog, go outside to take even more photos and mess with your camera equipment... but to be honest, it does get faster every day, and Kim looks great!

Bijapur - the Agra of the south?

2008-07-17T08:35:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone, we are back online after a few daily power outages that always seem to start just when we want to write. Today we have decided to eat first, and hope to have avoided the daily black out of town - but more importantly of this little one-stop Internet cafe cum photo studio cum social club. Actually it's just a dusty room with one computer in it and a lot of Indian guys hanging around.

But back to Bijapur. According to the Lonely Planet, this little town has some "air quality issues", which surprised us, as most Indian cities seem to have this "issue", and it is not worth a special mention. However, with this city "issue" might be a bit of an understatement, as chunks of pollution fly into your eyes every time you take the auto rickshaw up and down the main street. It is even worse when you are trying to walk down the aforementioned main street (no sidewalk), and avoid: a) open sewers, b) oncoming traffic, c) little kids asking for a "school pen" or d) the hoards of "stray" pigs that fill the function of a garbage removal team. We couldn't figure out how there came to be so many of them until we thought that in a city that is partially Hindu and partially Muslim, they obviously have no natural predators....we thought that if we could introduce a few Spaniards into the city they could make it famous for it's free range "jamon bijapuro".

But seriously, we weren't there for the famous "air quality" but for the city's gorgeous Muslim monuments, all dating back to a particularly rich period in the city's history: the rule of a dynasty called the Adil Shahs. For a brief 200 years they ruled the city and the surrounding area, and have managed to leave quite an impact on the city, in the form of a series of amazingly large-scale monuments, such as the "Golgumbaz" (right) and the inevitable "Jami Masjid" (below). We LOVE Muslim architecture, but hey, we live in Jaffa so we are not really what you can call objective, yet there is something beautiful about the simple lines, the lovely arches, and the geometric patterns that make those buildings a little piece of paradise on earth.

Other highlights on our visit to the city were the super fast, ultra modern Internet cafe (complete with keyboards still in their original plastic wrapping), a very nice local market, and a visit to some tailors - one for men, one for women's Salwar Kameez (see left), and one for women's Choli (a little tiny blouse that you wear with you sari). Yes, as you can probably tell, we are working on Kim's Saris, but we have decided to dedicate a whole post to that in the very near future. Boaz got a bit sick (the usual stomach stuff, much better now, thank you) which was a BIG mistake, however, as Kim was let loose into town and came back with two new cotton saris... one of them, she claims is for Brenda, but I think I will try to stay with her from now on.

An other exciting thing about this town, is that on Sunday the market was full of Gypsy women, all dressed in blindingly colorful attires, covered with mirrors. We later learned that they come from a Lambani tribe/caste and if anyone has wikipedia and a little faster internet then what we have here, we would love to hear more about who they are.

We are now in Badami (we are lagging behind on our reports...) for a few days now, and will be leaving to Hampi on a day or two.

We have to wrap up, but before we do we would like to thank you all for all the great comments. It was really nice to hear from you, so don't be shy and keep on commenting!

10 Lakh Pilgrims...and 1 Western Couple

2008-07-13T07:23:00.000-07:00

On the night train in the direction to Bijapur we had some very nice people sitting with us. They happened to mention that there was a HUGE festival/pilgrimage to Pandarpur, quite close to where the train was heading. We decided to check it out! The "mela" or pilgrimage is done once a year by about one and a half million devout hindus who walk for 20 days (about 400 km) and end up in Pandarpur for the final festivities, which is tomorrow. This is particularily amazing when you consider that most of the people doing the pilgrimage are well past middle age and seem to be either barefoot or in extremely impractical footwear. If you just want to see all the pretty pictures, we made a picasa album with some of the hits (also it takes a long time to upload photos to the blog, and power cuts are frequent...)

As with any good festival, many sorts of entertainment are to be had. There were people selling every conceivable thing, bangles, blankets, toys, clothes, large religious statues made of stone etc. etc. There were however, two main attractions that were especially crowd pleasing. One was the devotional song and dance videos blasted at loud volume, and the other one was a pair of western tourists who showed up and took everyone's pictures. According to police accounts, there were 8 lakh people (a lakh is 100,000) present when we were there, and of these people, 4 lakh wanted to shake our hands and 2 lakh wanted us to take their photo....with their children, with their friends, with the holy cow, with the hanuman statue, but mostly with Kim. The rest of them were content to watch us - in the photo here you can see what happened when we stopped for a cup of Chai. We are serious, all of these people surrounded us and took pictures of us with their mobiles (those who had them).

Here's what the life of a pilgrim seems to be like: After walking for 20 days, you arrive in Pandarpur where you can bathe in the river (with 7 lakh, 99,999 other people and some cows) and then, with the help of a friend, to wash your sari and dry it by holding it up in the air for about half an hour. This may seem silly, but is extremely photogenic. Unfortunately we don't speak any Hindi, because everyone wanted to tell us all about it. Then, when you are all clean, you can either offer a small prayer in one of the 20 minor temples in town, or you can spend 7 hours in line (and we are talking about a line that curled around the town about 3 times, going through abandoned buildings, and over special walkways) to do the special darshan (deity viewing) that you originally came for. Everyone was very eager to know if we had done the special darshan, and we felt bad saying "Are you crazy! 7 hours in a line to see a statue?" so we politely said we were planning on doing it the next day. The food (you knew there would be a gastronomic element to the pilgrimage, didn't you...) was very nice and simple. We have gone from riches to rags. Instead of the 250 rupee tali with 8 uniformed waiters, we are now having a chapatti and dal (watery) accompanied by a lot of chopped raw onion and some spicy chilis for 7 rupees served by a dude in a grubby undershirt whose mother is sitting on the sidewalk outside making the chapattis. And it sure is tasty! Already the 8 lakh people was getting a bit crowded for us, so we didn't wait for the other 7 lakh to arrive over the weekend, but came instead to Bijapur, where we are now.

Before we wrap it up for tonight, (and it has taken us a long time because there have been 2 half hour power failures) we just wanted to say that we Looooooove comments, so please keep writing them, we will respond if we have time or electricity.

We also wanted to introduce a new concept on the blog, the BARFI. Normally, a barfi is a type of dessert eaten by Indian people all over the country. We wanted it to be a small postscript about an unrelated topic that we found funny or amusing. The BARFI of the day is "chicken"....what do you think it means when 10 childen come running towards you holding out their sweaty hands and yelling "chicken, chicken!"? It took us a while to figure it out, but it actually means..."shake hands"!

Unlimited food (eating out in Mumbai)

2008-07-10T06:46:00.001-07:00

You thought you'd escape the food descriptions, but alas, this is what we are here in India for! Eating out in Mumbai is nothing like our experiences in any other Indian city. As far as food is concerened this city has lots to offer, and we could hardly catch up with all of the different types of restaurants without giving ourselves severe indigestion. There is Maharati, Gujarati, Farsi, Rajasthani and Konkani. You name it! they even have CHINESE here, which seems to be a big hit among the locals. But let's go back to basics... The city's favourite street food is Behl Puri, a "snack item" (chaat) sold on every street corner, and eaten in huge quantities by the hoards of passers by. It is composed of puffed rice, chopped onions and chillies, sometimes potatoes and bits of unripe mango (yummmmi!), all tossed together with tamarind and coriander chutnies. Yes, yes, we know we shouldn't be eaying street food, but everyone else was doing it and it seemed like a good idea at the time.

When we want to sit down and relax from all of the cutural activities (shopping, mostly) and sightseeing (Fabindia, Kadi cloth shops) that we are doing, we go into one of the nice AC restaurants for an "unlimited thali". Kim has spent the last six months researching blogs and guide books, cross-referencing them, asking everyone she could, and came up with the alternative, ultimate, super-duper hip guide to eating in Mumbai (available to friends, relatives and blog subscribers soon for a nominal fee). We will not trouble you with all the descriptions of all the meals (although Kim is preparing a food diary, for those interested), but thought we should tell you about the wonders of this wonderful system of the "unlimited thali". It goes like this: You go into a restaurant, you sit down, and before you even have time to relax or wash your hands, a line of uniformed waiters comes by in a great procession, laying down dish after dish: first of all the four chutnies and a pickle, then some Farsans (appetizers), both sweet and savory, like samosas or pekoras. Next come the veggie dishes (there are usually four of these), and at least three types of flat breads: chappatis, teplas, bhakris, pappads etc. You are supposed to wash it all down with at least two drinks: a chass (lassi) and a strage green drink that tastes like the juice of arabic salad with a few indian spices thrown in. It is all amazingly delicious, all things you (or at least we) have always wanted to try and was never able to, or all those things you have been making at home, but never knew what they were supposed to taste like! The terrible part is that it is UNLIMITED... the line of waiters keeps on coming, just like the sourcerer's apprentices, and keep on filling your thali as you finish things, or even before you do. It's all so good you cannot refuse. And if you do, they look mildly insulted, as if you aren't trying hard enough. Just when you think you had enough and pick up the courage to refuse all that tasty food and finally sit back and relax, you are in for a suprise: You should be having a bit of rice and dal or kicheri just to balance your meal. In most cases this was the last nail in our coffins, and we had to stagger home, moaning, mostly happily, but swearing that we will never do it again, only to fall into the same trap the next day. The photo above was taken after we made such an impression with our eating capacities (or the fact that Kim ate a whole chili pepper and was completely nonplussed as the waiters looked on in horror) that we were invited into the kitchen to meet the cooks.

Just in case you wanted dessert after all this, Mumbai has lots to offer on that front as well, but I think the ultimate dessert of our week in the city was the Falooda we had (admittedly at 9 am, before any thalis happened) in the Crawford market. If you are Israeli, you might know "falooda shirazi" from sketchy little kiosks in south Tel Aviv - an opaque and slimy concoction that stinks of rose water. Well, Bombay's version is a world apart: There is a whole menu of them (including the infamous "shrazi", which we didn't try), and the one we did get had mango syrup, condensed milk, ice cream, tapioca, rice noodles, and other things we couldn't identify... but it certainly was good (see photo).

Off to Bijapur in a few hours, will keep you posted on our further adventures!

Bollywood Stars!

2008-07-07T09:16:00.000-07:00

Well, we arrived safe and sound in India after our bus trip to Jordan. Our flight was from Amman to Mumbai, and it was 500$ cheaper if you flew from Amman instead of Tel-Aviv, and only 20$ on the bus. We arrived in Mumbai early in the morning, only to find that we had mis-reserved our hotel for a day later than we needed. We checked into another hotel, far substandard to the first, its only redeeming feature being that it is where Bollywood directors go when they need Western "extras" for movies. Apparently we were just what they were looking for, and we were recruited on the spot!
We were picked up the next day and taken to the shoot. Usually Western people appear in cafe and bar scenes to add an international flavour. Sensing our musical abilities, however, we were given small annoying percussion instruments and put into costume for a Hare Krishna parade scene. We later found out that the movie is a horror film called Raaz, and it seems as if we were the sub-plot within a sub-plot. It took all day to shoot what will probably be only 2 minutes in the movie. We shot the parade in a variety of locations, from a variety of angles and ....in a variety of weather conditions. Logically the first one to shoot was the MONSOON! We learned a new word, which was "Pani", Hindi for water. Every time we would start the director would shout "Music, Camera, Pani, ACTION" and six men would spray us with shower nozzles attached to fire hoses draining water out of a huge truck. We were completely soaked, and after being very careful not to get too much of this water in our mouthes, we discovered at the end of the day that the bottles of water on the set were also being filled from the same truck! We met many interesting people in our little "Hare Krishna band", such as the troupe of pupeteers from Rajasthan, a construction worker from Bijapur and an English guy who is currently doing this for a "living". For many hours afterwards the jingle jangle of percussion instruments rang in my ears.

We're off!

2008-07-03T12:22:00.000-07:00

Everything is packed and ready to go, and we are trying to find some time to create a blog for this trip, so we can keep you all posted. We are very excited to be going back to India, in a sense we haven't really left it since we came back last August... we have Indian food everyday, eat with our right hand, and wear lunghis around the house (but not in polite company any more). We are hoping to share our trip with you with photos, recipes and horror stories about poor hygiene and the perils of eating street food.

Our cat, on the other hand, is NOT looking forward to us going away for so long, and has been using all the tricks in the book in order to try and make us stay. He was pretending to be sick after getting his vaccinations yesterday, and was looking particularly miserable when we gave him the flea treatment this morning.
To top it all off, there is this little three year-old kid called Ella who will be staying in our apartment with her mother. We think she is very sweet, but Josquin, who met her a couple of weeks ago, was not really impressed with her. Many were the tears when she found out that little fluffy kittens may bite...
Today when we were frantically packing he was going around, nervously sniffing everything, mostly our backpacks. He was trying to get packed into one, but we told him that he is not going to like it in India: it's noisy, full of strange sounds and smells, and nobody eats tuna fish there.

We have to wrap it up for today (the fridge still has to be cleaned), but we are hoping to have more of this blog coming throughout the coming two months, and to inform you all about our (mis)adventures.