Random Thoughts

Mumbai, you mysterious city you, because of you I will never look at spices the same way again!  We got to go to a market and watch how spices are made.  I mean- really MADE.  It was incredible!!!  The local women all have their own "secret spice recipes" handed down from their mothers.  They collect all of ingredients they need - some sort of red pepper (there are many different varities), which kind of garlic, pepper, onion, tumeric, ginger, and on and on...  They bring it all to a shop like the one we went to, where men ROAST IT all (with a bit of oil) in a big open metal pot over a fire.  Then they lay out the roasted spices on a burlap bag and put them in a long queue for GRINDING.  Only, it is not grinding really, I guess it is mashing, or masticating.  Young men take the huge amounts of roasted ingredients, dump them in a hopper, and they fall into very old machines that have large, heavy pieces that pound down over and over a...

SO.  MUCH.  HEAT. The locals keep telling us it is indeed HOT, "It reached 44 today!!" they exclaim. Sadly, though we are getting better at figuring out the in-head formula to convert rupees to dollars to have some idea of what we are spending, a formula for converting celcius to farenheit has not been commited to memory.  Note to self:  when we have internet look up that formula!  I know 44 must be over 100 degrees.  In Delhi it is a dry heat and I am sweating like I have never sweat before.  But it is interesting - the sweat doesn't STINK.  Even clothes taken off and dried in the hotel room do not smell sweaty before they are pitched unceremoniously on the DIRTY CLOTHES pile.    At India Gate - boy were we SWEATY!  And how about those HATS, eh?? We had a super busy day on day 2.  In fact, we were so busy that by the end of the day we were EXHAUSTED and bailed out on going to meet some relatives of a friend in D...