What we did: Shashi cooking class, hindu temple, city palace,
shopping, train Mumbai (Bombay)
Budget: 3500R/$70; Spent: 3210R/$64
We had a busy morning this morning. We had to pack and check
out of our hotel before 10:30am and get to a cooking class we had booked two
days before. Patty was still not feeling 100%, but much better than the day
before I think.
We made it to the cooking class a little bit late. I think
the cook, Shashi, had begun the class by telling the five other people about
herself, so we hadn’t missed any actual cooking. It was funny, though, because
we had not done the class two days before because, with us, there would have
been five students and she said that was too many. Now, there were seven!!
She’s a very sweet lady though and definitely acknowledged this.
Our class was extremely fun. Shashi, who speaks in a broken
English, is an excellent communicator and teacher. It’s remarkable that she
just started learning English three years ago. Some of her vocabulary is
excellent. She prepared about 12 meals in all right in front of us, including
masala chai (tea), various curries, and breads.
The other students also made the class an enjoyable time.
There were two other young couples, one from California and the other from
Australia, and one older man from Denmark, who was in India with his wife and
two daughters. We all took turns doing various tasks and had good laughs when
we screwed up.
Cooking in India is not for the faint of heart, however. We
“washed” our hands in a bucket of tap water on the floor. None of the cooking
surfaces were cleaned. None of the vegetables were washed. Well, we’re still
alive, so I guess that means something, though I’m not sure what.
My personal favourite were deep fried vegetables covered in
a batter made of flour and all sorts of spices called pakora. These are eaten with two
different sauces, one of which was made with cilantro (otherwise known as coriander, who knew?) and absolutely spectacular. Another favourite of mine was parantha
bread with butter (ghee), coconut, and icing sugar cooked inside.
At the end of the class, we ate everything we made. The
Americans had a flight to catch so they had to run, then the Danish fellow
left. We chatted with the Australian couple for a while. They were both
extremely friendly. They had been working in England for two years as
accountants. They said they got paid 300 pounds per day, and as a result were
able to travel in Europe every couple of weeks. Sounds like a pretty sweet deal
to me. Is it too late for me to switch careers?
Before we left the class, Shashi showed us a box of spices
that we could pick up from her. She also gave us, free of charge, a packet of
lemon salt, which we had tried during the class and loved. This was her way of
apologizing for our trouble with scheduling. We ended up buying the spice box,
although I’m sure we could find most of the spices back home. It was just nice
to support her, especially since she’s such a character.
After the class, we decided to do some last minute
site-seeing before our train this evening. Our first stop was the nearby Hindu
Temple of Jagdish. It’s a very interesting looking building, but not much to
see other than the outside. The inside is simple and small. We stayed only five
minutes.
[pics]
From here, we walked down the alley to the city palace. We
bought tickets and, of course, a ticket to allow us to take pictures. What a
ridiculous thing. We paid 200 rupees for entry and then another 200 rupees for
the privilege of taking pictures. Honestly, the palace wasn’t even that nice.
The palace in Jaisalmer had been way more interesting. Here are some pics:
[pics]
After the palace, we dropped a couple things off at our
hotel, where we were storing our luggage, and then set out to buy some pillow covers
for our non-existent house. Patty had been wanting to buy these for our entire
time in Rajasthan, but hadn’t found the right ones yet. Luckily, she found two
very nice pillow covers near to the palace and received an excellent price for
them, in my mind.
I meanwhile, was across the street looking at some very cool
books that we had been seeing throughout Rajasthan. The outside of these books
is made of camel leather, with a stone fitted into the front. They look like books right out of Lord of The Rings movie. Inside is
simply empty pages, but the book as a whole feels ancient. I picked up two for
a decent price.
After we had finished shopping, we realized that our train
was leaving in about an hour, so we rushed back to our hotel, with a pit stop
at a convenience store for some chips and pop, packed up our newly purchased
items, and ran out. The auto-rickshaw drivers weren’t being very cooperative
with their prices so I walked away from three or four until we got a price we
wanted.
The ride itself was only about 10 minutes, so we actually
had plenty of time before the train left. We grabbed a bottle of water on our
way to our platform and could board our train immediately. We had bought 2nd
class seats for this trip, mostly because we were tired of being cold and
uncomfortable. There is a huge price difference between all the classes, but
that didn’t make our tickets unreasonable. We probably paid about five times
more for second class than we would have for the sleeper class, but this
amounted to only $30 per person for a 1000km/16 hour trip. Not so bad. It also
made us feel a little safe, though we didn’t let down our guard.
Once we had settled in, we decided to watch Skyfall, the new
James Bond movie. During the movie the sweet older man who was sleeping in our
compartment on the bottom bunk asked us if we wanted some of the candy he was
carrying. It’s hard to refuse an Indian, so we accepted and tried it. It was a
baked good of some sort and kind of spicy. I wasn’t a fan. However, he then
came back with a box of the first candy and another. The second candy was
delicious. Patty then went through her backpack and found some Hershey’s kisses
that Mintoo had brought for us from her family. We offered some to the man, who
ended up giving it to his grandson who was sleeping nearby. It was a cute
exchange because he actually brought his grandson over to say hello to us. He
must have been no older than five. The boy pretty much just ran off when he
took one look at us though.
Another older couple had beds in our compartment (I say compartment, but there are no doors or anything like that; there’s just six
beds arranged in such a way that a corridor along the train car runs between
them all) had an upper and lower bunk and we noticed that the older gentleman
was going to climb up to his upper bunk. We decided to give up our lower bunk
so the man didn’t have to climb to his bed. I tapped him on the shoulder and
motioned for him to take the lower bed. I think he actually spoke a bit of
English so I probably could have just spoke what I was suggesting, but he
seemed extremely pleased by the proposition. Oddly, he ended up taking his
wife’s spot and she got up to move to the new bed. She looked like she was
struggling, perhaps she had motion sickness, so we helped to make her bed for
her, while she went to the washroom. When she came back, we helped her into bed
and moved up to the upper bed to finish our movie.
Skyfall was actually pretty enjoyable. I had heard pretty
amazing things about it, but I wasn’t really blown away by it. Maybe it was all
the interruptions or that we were listening to the movie through earphones that
we kept pulling out of each other’s ears.
Once the movie was done, we climbed into bed to a chorus of
snoring. Indians are way worse than Chinese. Hopefully we’ll sleep!
No comments:
Post a Comment