Merry Christmas!
We did not wake up at the crack of dawn to see if Santa came. We did not have a decorated pine tree overflowing with presents to open. We did not have cookies, pie, or bismarks. We did not have family to spend it with.
Staying in our hotel room until after noon with breakfast and pots of coffee served to us in our room was a nice change though. After we emerged, our host “family” that we’ve been staying with for the past week tried to make our Christmas as special as they could. We spent the afternoon preparing Christmas dinner with Farida and watching TV with her sons Faisal and Danish. In the evening, we feasted on Mutton Korma with Green Chickpeas, Vegetable Masala, Salad, Rice, Chapati, Gulab Jamun, and Chocolate Balls, all of the ingredients bought freshly that day at the markets. After dinner, the entire family curled up on the floor to watch the James Bond film Octopussy which was filmed in the area (one of the two English movies available – the other is Titanic). We stayed inside their home all day and felt like it was almost ours for the day.
Tags: India
Adam
Merry Christmas!! Sounds like it was festive, if not exactly traditional. Hope your New Year’s Eve follows suit, whatever you’ve got planned, and that you find great people to spend it with. And here’s to a 2007 full of amazing travels…
Merry Christmas! I hope the coming year brings you even more nice people, places you didn’t expect to find, and food spicy enough for Adam.
Nicole and I are almost through our finger lakes wine supply–have you run across any popular wines I should like? Local popularity is sufficient.
Matt
Thanks you two, hopefully one of you got a werewolf for christmas.
Not many wines in india, but some ridiculously great wine is being grown in the barossa valley in australia. I’m not sure how much of it gets exported, but the wines we tasted were worth seeking out.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wineries_in_the_Barossa_Valley
Chateau Tanunda (http://www.chateautanunda.com/) in particular is delicious, if expensive. In the very least I know the wines from south australia should appeal to Matt’s snobbery, and he can say that the vines there are probably the oldest in the world as they have thus far escaped phylloxera.