I've never thought I would long for Lowes or Home Depot, but trying to get some remodeling done in India does strange things to a person!
This is one of my favorite things to eat - kadhi is a tangy, creamy, yogurt-based curry gravy with pakoras in it. Lots of curry leaves and mustard seeds add to the tangy flavor and it's generally served over rice.
We usually eat in since Indra's food is so good, but the other day we were running round Delhi all day so we decided to stop for some takeout on the way home. We knew exactly what we wanted - burra kebabs from Swagath in Defense Colony Market.
Our trip back down the mountain was made all the more eventful by Brahm Datt's car sickness. Apparently he only gets it on the way down, not on the way up or on level roads. We had to stop three times for the poor guy...
That there are vendors hawking everything all over the place goes without saying, but the ones that were most enticing to me were the ones selling roasted corn on the cob and the ones selling little leaf cups filled (or so I thought) with delicious looking cherries, tiny apricots or some other kind of berry (goji berries maybe?).
We put on our lifejackets, climbed onto the boat and headed out onto the lake. The cherries were sweet and yummy but after eating down a layer, I realized that the little leaf cup had a little leaf shelf inside that effectively delivered half the cherries I thought I was going to get! Since Rajiv wasn't eating any cherries it was enough for me though.
If you're Rajiv, you spend time meeting with lawyers - the high court grounds are a lot nicer than the ones in Delhi! If you're the average Indian here on holiday you dress up in your outfit with the most sequins, sparkles and gold and walk up and down admiring all the stuff for sale from embroidered "Kashmiri" shawls and cheap plastic toys from China, to lacquered, odd-looking "sculptures" made from local pine cones or really ugly furniture.
If you tire of the metropolis you can head up into the hills (along with 15,000 other people) to a point where you're supposed to be able to see the snowcapped Himalayas on a clear day (which it wasn't when we went). There you can dress up in a gold-trimmed velvet outfit to have your picture taken (for some unknown reason this seems to be a popular pastime in Nainital, you can have it done by the lake too) or you can shoot at plastic bottles strung between trees down the hillside.
Another popular attraction is the Cave Gardens where for 15 rupees you can experience nature in a setting that's devoid of any concept of liability litigation (as long as you don't spit). Here in the Cave Gardens you climb down narrow paths into natural caves (more like crevasses that have been opened up in the mountains) with absolutely nothing in the way of security. Slippery rock steps, low hanging rocks in narrow passageways, pits going down another 100 feet completely open next to the path just waiting for a child to slip into... It's an amazing sight to see fully decked out Indian women wearing sparkly saris, glittering jewelry and sandals picking their way over the rocks, through the narrow tunnels!
And by close association Tallital and Mallital also.
We paid our 100 rupees to get onto the main drag of Nainital - the Mall. The town is squeezed along the steep slopes of the lake and there just isn't enough room for people + cars + bicycle rickshaws and as a result everyone is honking all the time. In a country where honking is a national pastime, it reaches shrill new levels here. 
It's quite depressing actually. Poverty, dust and dirt are one thing but acres of garbage, garbage lining the roadside, garbage piles next to the marketplaces, garbage piles spilling over into the ponds, rivers and canals - it's like people just dump their garbage everywhere. Doesn't anyone care? It's really a shame because UP is home to the Taj Mahal and Varanasi among other sites and it's considered the cradle of Indian civilization.
Something was definitely going on and a lot of people were headed for it. It turns out we were driving into Garmukteshwar on the last day of the Ganga Dusshera Festival, a 10-day long festival devoted to the worship of holy river Ganga where devotees flock to numerous ghats located on the west bank of the river Ganga to bathe in water and carry the river clay home to venerate (thank you Google search). As we crossed the bridge over the Ganges (the first time I was seeing the Ganges River!) we could see hundreds if not thousands of people in the river and on the shores - quite an impressive sight! 
They have the craziest looking taxi/trucks in UP! Maybe they go over the top decorating their vehicles to compensate for the bleak, garbage-filled scenery that blights the landscape in so many places?
This is Indra. she and I have a hard time communicating but I have learned to say yeh khanna bahut badhiya hai (this food is delicious) because it always is! 
For lunch she usually fixes rice, dal (a different kind every day) a vegetable and sometimes some meat. Dinner is pretty much the same except we get hot, homemade chapatis with it and either a lamb or chicken curry. I don't know how she does it, but everything she makes is delicious. My tolerance for spicy food has increased, although she doesn't overdo the heat generally.
While Rajiv was meeting with his lawyers, I went to Chandni Chowk in Old Delhi in search of a mango lassi. I had read about Amritsari Lassiwalla in the paper so Brahm Datt, the driver and I went off in search of it. Chandni Chowk has a few streets through it, but most of it is a maze of narrow passages which I'll have to come back with a guide to explore. It was worth suffering through the insane traffic of Chandni Chowk - the mango lassi was deliciously thick, creamy and not too sweet with a nice tangy spoonful of fresh yogurt on top!
It's mango season and I was craving a mango lassi so when Rajiv had to go to the Income Tax Office, I came along hoping to find a lassi walla while we were out. The street next to the big ITO is filled with vendors of everything from fruit juice to legal books and typists. While Rajiv and Brahm Datt went inside, the driver and I looked around for mango lassis.No mango lassis were to be found so I settled for a regular lassi. It's quite a procedure to make one and it 
hits the spot on a hot hot day. Rajiv thinks I'm going to die one of these days as the concept of hygiene among Indian street food vendors isn't up to even NYC hot dog cart standards, but I carry emergency Imodium, I take my probiotics every day and I've been fine so far!
After the lassi we checked out the other snacks on offer and I tried a mung bean samosa. It's basically a fried dumpling made of cooked mung beans - not much to write home about, kind of bland but the green chutney and radish on the side perked it up a bit.
Hopefully you'll never have a 4+ hour layover in Calcutta airport, but if you do pick up a book by Tagore at the small bookshop, find the "Top Deck" restaurant upstairs and have a samosa and a drink while you're waiting it out.
So after about an hour and a half chugging upriver on the boat we took a smaller, side branch of the river and pulled up at a small village. As soon as I climbed off the boat I was surrounded by children (who love seeing their pictures in the digital camera) and suspiciously eyed by the women who were working spreading rice to dry on the packed earth under the sun. We walked through the village, obviously heading somewhere but I couldn't figure out what the guide was saying.
We walked through the narrow path, past the cutest little mini-chickens to another courtyard where men were at work hitting rice stalks across a board and barrel to knock the rice off, the kids trailing along behind me the whole time. I thought, that's nice to see some more of the harvest work, then we went into a building and I was very ceremoniously led to the end of a short hall and a bathroom - I got it, this was the bathroom break part of the trip! I've had to use turkish toilets before in France but I didn't have to go (really). I went in anyway and washed my hands, waited around a couple minutes, came back out and thanked the waiting crowd.
We stopped by where the women were working on the way back out and the guide started talking to an ancient looking lady sitting on the ground. He said she was the oldest lady in the village. I asked if I could take her picture, so he got a photo of us with some kids. I got a picture with all the ladies and they giggled looking at the image on the digital screen. They were starting to look at me less suspiciously now and followed us down to the riverbank waving when we left. The kids ran along the bank following the boat as far back down the river as they could waving and yelling like crazy. It was the best part of the whole trip.
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