Indian Food and a HUGE King

One thing that I really like about India, is the food. My family and I really like Indian food and at home we eat it quite a lot. Now, I must say, the Indian food here is actually pretty different from the Indian food at restaurants back home. Here they have a lot of dahl (lentils in a sauce,) and also potatoes. My favorite dish is something called paneer, which is little cheese cubes covered in curry. There are different kinds of paneer and I like them all. Indian food is also very spicy. It’s been a little bit hard because I don’t eat that much spicy but I can get through it, with a lot of water. As you might know there is no meat from cows here because they’re sacred, there’s really not that much meat at all here except for the occasional chicken or goat. Last Friday, for one of the volunteers’ birthday, we went to eat at a place that has food similar to that of the US. It has a menu that you would see if you went to a place back at home. There’s pizza, pasta, salad, quesadillas, nachos and other things. It also has a great dessert menu. I got the Cheesecake in a Jar. It was all really good and everyone really enjoyed having familiar food. The cook at the guesthouse where the volunteers are staying actually has made pizza and pasta and stuff like that. We’ve been having some eggs mac and cheese, and pasta so it’s not like we’ve been having Indian food nonstop. We went to a shopping center on Wednesday and it was a modern shopping center, like on that you’d see in the US. There was a big food court with pizza, noodles, barbeque, Italian food, Chinese food, and even a KFC and guess what! We ended up picking Indian food. It was like an Indian restaurant back home and it was really good. It was also really spicy and made my mouth go numb. So, I really like Indian food, but it’s good to know there’re some other options.

Did you know? Jaipur still has a king, and he’s 18 years old! No, he doesn’t have any actual power, like the queen of England, but he still has a palace and a lot of economic power. The palace that he lives in is called City Palace and we went to see it on Sunday. Parts of it are museums open to see. In 1702 a king built City Palace and moved there from Amber Fort. He had 47 wives and he needed space for them and his offspring. That seems strange to me because nowadays you have one and if you want to have a different one you have to be divorced with the first one. He had all his wives at the same time. The first wife to give birth to a son, not a daughter, is the most important. I think that’s unfair to women because if it were a daughter, the king would think she didn’t matter and wouldn’t treat her very well. Imagine having over 100 kids! No wonder he had to move to something bigger. The other kings also had a lot of wives, but he had more than twice as much.

Also, that king was into astronomy and moved because it would be easier to build observatories on flat land than on a hill (Amber Fort was on a hill). We got to see the throne room and on the walls were every king who has lived in City Palace. A couple of the kings really did a lot to help Jaipur, and some others didn’t do much. My favorite king was the one that was seven feet tall and 600 pounds. We got to see the robes of each king and his was like four times the size of the others. We also saw his pants and they were as wide as the length of my bed! There was an art museum and some of the pictures there were breathtaking. We saw how a guy painted and it was really good. It took ten minutes and he drew a really realistic elephant. To make the paint he put some water on a whiteboard-type thing and rubbed different stones on it and made colors, it was really cool. He gave us a bunch of paintings and a magnifying glass and we could see all the strokes of the brush. The brush that he uses to draw the outline has a single squirrel hair on the end. My brother got a little postcard of an elephant. After that we left City Palace and went to see another one. It was a magnificent palace on water. It’s actually not open to go inside and I was bummed. It had never been renovated so it was pretty dangerous to go in. We found out later that it had been bought and was being made into a hotel. It was still really cool to see it at a distance. One of the kings built it just for his mistresses. There were guards on the top armed with crossbow-type things and if somebody tried to escape the guards wounded them so they couldn’t swim. Both palaces were really cool and it was too bad we couldn’t go in the Water Palace.

We’ve been having meetings with the young dreamers discussing what we could do to help Ambedkar Nagar be a better place. A little boy of eight years old suggested at one of the meetings if we could set up a hygiene awareness campaign since people don’t really know about that kind of stuff. There were other suggestions as well and we’re going to try to do them, but a hygiene campaign got voted most so we’re doing that first. We’re going to teach people about washing their hands before they eat and after they go to the bathroom. We’re also going to teach people how to brush teeth properly. We’re going to give out handouts of things that they would need, including a mini first aid kit. A lot of the kids there have open sores and a lot of them usually get infected from the dirtiness, so giving out band-aids would help a lot of kids. Most things are planned out already, there’s going to be a booth where some of us will be teaching people how to brush their teeth and wash their hands properly. We’re also going to put up flyers and posters, maybe even in the school. The idea of performing skits came up, and the young dreamers said they could do some in the classes of the government school. I think it’s really cool how an eight year old thought of this and was in the midst of helping his community. The next meeting we will actually take action.

THIS WEEKEND WE’RE GOING TO THE TAJ MAHAL!!!! I’m so excited. It’s one of the seven wonders of the world and I’m going to see it in 2 days. I’ve been looking forward to seeing it for a while.