8:20am local time Frankfurt.  Another grueling leg of the journey is complete, although I don’t know if my knees and bum are going to recover.  One more flight to go before I reach home.

I have a 5hr stopover, so I cleaned up a bit, looked at some of the shops to see if I could get a deal on Zeiss lenses or german watches.  When I do the conversion from Euro to CDN for a 4000Euro watch or the 10000 Euro gold Leica… ouch!

I must say that anywhere I travel I will try to take a laptop with me.  That and a plug adaptor kit so I won’t look like an idiot for forgetting the India uses the same plug as the UK.  The laptop is great cuz wifi is available most places, so you can quickly hook up and do some research or catch up on email/news from home.  It also makes an ok DVD player.  I brought a few movies with me that I watched when I got tired of the local news or the Indian soaps.  Out of the 65 channels, 50 of them are playing Indian soaps. 

So my first full day in India.  I got up, showered, and went down for breakfast.  The first thing I kept reminding myself about was water discipline.  Basically don’t let your mouth come in contact with anything but bottled water.  Why?  As JHo eloquently put it- think of India as Mexico with bigger and badder germs.  Enough said.

I browsed through the breakfast buffet- standard fare- bacon, eggs, hash, french toast, bread for toast.  However there was also an Indian section- Pongol sweet, Pongal regular, and a bunch of other dishes that look like various currys and flat bread.  Looks yummy, but for breakfast?  They also had an egg and crepe section.  Lots of fresh, cut up fruit and lots of juices- pomegranate, pineapple, mango, young coconut are the ones I remember.  There was also a yoghurt station with apple and various fruit compote.

Here’s what sucks about travelling for work in India.  My primary goal there is work. As I only have a week, I can’t afford any down time, which means I have to be extra careful about what I eat/drink.  That means avoid the cut fruit, some of the juices if I don’t know where it’s from, tap water, and dairy. 

If I was on holidays, I’d experiment and try out a lot more things.  Anyways, I order an omelete with onion, ham, and Masala.  Man did my taste buds ever have a great time.  New, complex flavors combined with the familiar egg/onion turned a regular omelete into something I never thought an omelete could be.

This is a nice seque to food.  It’s pretty clear that Indian cuisine is heavy on the spices according to NA standards.  I would say that everything served in India is “Indianafied”  For example, I had Chinese for my first lunch.  Rice/noodles/soup… standard fare.  But when you taste it, right away you notice extra spices have been added to give it “depth.” 

I had Aloo gobi, a regional fish, and butter chicken.  Again, an explosion in your mouth… comparing the same dishes at home with the real ones in India is like comparing a post card with the real thing.  The dishes just had that extra dimension, more and stronger flavors… more depth.  Fabulous.

However everything is like that… lunch and dinner.  By day 3, my appetite just waned, although my nose and taste buds wanted more.  I don’t know if it was my body not wanting to have such heavy meals twice daily, or if the Malarone pills were messing with my appetite.  But that really didn’t stop me from trying different things.

First up is dairy.  I don’t know what it is- super happy cows, but I had a mango milkshake with dinner one night.  It was room temperature-ish, and I took a gulp.  Nothing registered in my brain for a few seconds… and then it was like the Mango center in my brain/taste buds just exploded and it was like having Mango for the first time.  Same with the ice-cream- happy cows=happy ice cream..

Another meal I ordered fresh mango juice.  I waited about 10 minutes before getting it.  Here in NA, they would just pout it into your glass from a jug.  When it came, again it was room temp… but I noticed that the juice was much more viscous.  I took a sip, and wow.  What they do is peel and squeeze the mangoes.  It’s as fresh as it gets.

However by the end of the week, I wanted some more simple fare.  My appetite was not100% and I just craved something simple like Sushi or noodles.  On the menu, they had baby corn battered in Mangalore spices where they take the baby corn, roll it in batter and deep fry it.  I love baby corn, so I give it a go.  It was very good, but I find that baby corn in itself has a subtle favor and that the Mangalorean spices just overpowered it.  

To sum up, fantastic flavors with lots of depth.  The tandoori chicken was marvelous.  However I just could not eat that much of it.  Imagine going to Tandoori King for 2 meals a day for a week, and that’s kinda how I felt.  I’ll include some pics I took of some dishes at lunch.

Next up, first impressions of the City, Traffic, Cultural differences, and Religion.