8:20am local time Frankfurt.\u00a0 Another grueling leg of the journey is complete, although I don’t know if my knees and bum are going to recover.\u00a0 One more flight to go before I reach home.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 When I do the conversion from Euro to CDN for a 4000Euro watch or the 10000 Euro gold Leica… ouch!<\/p>\n
I must say that anywhere I travel I will try to take a laptop with me.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 It also makes an ok DVD player.\u00a0 I brought a few movies with me that I watched when I got tired of the local news or the Indian soaps.\u00a0 Out of the 65 channels, 50 of them are playing Indian soaps.\u00a0<\/p>\n
So my first full day in India.\u00a0 I got up, showered, and went down for breakfast.\u00a0 The first thing I kept reminding myself about was water discipline.\u00a0 Basically don’t let your mouth come in contact with anything but bottled water.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 As JHo eloquently put it- think of India as Mexico with bigger and badder germs.\u00a0 Enough said.<\/p>\n
I browsed through the breakfast buffet- standard fare- bacon, eggs, hash, french toast, bread for toast.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Looks yummy, but\u00a0for breakfast?\u00a0 They also had an egg and crepe section.\u00a0 Lots of fresh, cut up fruit and lots of juices- pomegranate, pineapple, mango, young coconut are the ones I remember.\u00a0 There was also a yoghurt station with apple and various fruit compote.<\/p>\n
Here’s what sucks about travelling for work in India.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 That means avoid the cut fruit, some of the juices if I don’t know where it’s from, tap water, and dairy.\u00a0<\/p>\n
If I was on holidays, I’d experiment and try out a lot more things.\u00a0 Anyways, I order an omelete with onion, ham, and Masala.\u00a0 Man did my taste buds ever have a great time.\u00a0 New, complex flavors combined with the familiar egg\/onion turned a regular omelete into something I never thought an omelete could be.<\/p>\n
This is a nice seque to food.\u00a0 It’s pretty clear that Indian cuisine is heavy on the spices according to NA standards.\u00a0 I would say that everything served in India is “Indianafied”\u00a0 For example, I had Chinese for my first lunch.\u00a0 Rice\/noodles\/soup… standard fare.\u00a0 But when you taste it, right away you notice extra spices have been added to give it “depth.”\u00a0<\/p>\n
I had Aloo gobi, a regional fish, and butter chicken.\u00a0 Again, an explosion in your mouth… comparing the same dishes at home with the real ones in India is like comparing a post card\u00a0with the real thing.\u00a0 The dishes just had that extra dimension, more and stronger flavors… more depth.\u00a0 Fabulous.<\/p>\n
However everything is like that… lunch and dinner.\u00a0 By day 3, my appetite just waned, although my nose and taste buds wanted more.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 But that really didn’t stop me from trying different things.<\/p>\n
First up is dairy.\u00a0 I don’t know what it is- super happy cows, but I had a mango milkshake with dinner one night.\u00a0 It was room temperature-ish, and I took a gulp.\u00a0 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\u00a0it was like\u00a0having Mango for the first time.\u00a0 Same with the ice-cream- happy cows=happy ice cream..<\/p>\n
Another meal I ordered fresh mango juice.\u00a0 I waited about 10 minutes before getting it.\u00a0 Here in NA, they would just pout it into your glass from a jug.\u00a0 When it came, again it was room temp… but I noticed that the juice was much more viscous.\u00a0 I took a sip, and wow.\u00a0 What they do is peel and squeeze the mangoes.\u00a0 It’s as fresh as it gets.<\/p>\n
However by the end of the week, I wanted some more simple fare.\u00a0 My appetite was not100% and I just craved something simple like Sushi or noodles.\u00a0 On the menu, they had baby corn battered in Mangalore spices where\u00a0they take the baby corn, roll it in batter and deep fry it.\u00a0 I love baby corn,\u00a0so I give it a go.\u00a0 It was very good, but I find that baby corn in itself has a subtle favor and that the\u00a0Mangalorean spices just overpowered it.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
To sum up, fantastic flavors with lots of depth.\u00a0 The tandoori chicken was marvelous.\u00a0 However I just could not eat that much of it.\u00a0 Imagine going to Tandoori King for 2 meals a day for a week, and that’s kinda how I felt.\u00a0 I’ll include some pics I took of some dishes at lunch.<\/p>\n
Next up, first impressions of the City, Traffic, Cultural differences, and Religion.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
8:20am local time Frankfurt.\u00a0 Another grueling leg of the journey is complete, although I don’t know if my knees and bum are going to recover.\u00a0 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-109","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/derekandevonne.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/derekandevonne.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/derekandevonne.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/derekandevonne.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/derekandevonne.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=109"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/derekandevonne.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/derekandevonne.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/derekandevonne.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/derekandevonne.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}