A week in the life of....the weekend!

Okay, so I guess I am not doing too good at this writing every day malarkey! In my defence I did do another post and then the internet crashed mid-flow and I lost the entry!

And now my memory isnt too great! Friday is my other regular day at Chaya, so I spent time there teaching the 'Small' (7/8 year olds) and 'Junior' kids (14,15 year olds). After Chaya it was a gym session and then round for dinner at some friends, Ruth and Tim's house. They both work for a large NGO out here, but are also volunteers at Chaya. Tim cooked a lobely dinner and I made the most of a fairly rare opportunity to drink wine. It is really expensive here - domestic wine (Sula being one of the better brands) starts at about £5 or £6 a bottle, which is pretty steep when you think that you can easily have a slap up meal out for half that! And that is when you buy it from an "English Wine Shop" - in the restaurants that do serve alcohol, you're talking £20 for a bottle of Indian wine!

On Saturday, after a lazy morning, I finally got round to visiting the Jantar Mantar in central Delhi, with some friends. It is a kind of observatory built by Maharaja Jai Singh in the early 1700s. I visited its sister observatory in Jaipur earlier this year, which had a really different feel to it as all the huge astronomical instruments are built from white stone there, which looks pretty dramatic against the blue desert sky. In Delhi they are a more under-stated red, but I liked it. The place was full of young couples taking advantage of the slightest bit of privacy. Whereas in Britain where the average age of visitors to national monuments/historic buildings is probably 50, here it must be around 19. The historic sites of Delhi are one of very few places where young people can be alone together, and to some extent unobserved...kind of romantic really, if occasionally a little sickening!

The afternoon was spent trying to hunt down a Harry Potter DVD with Hindi subtitles for the boys. Was easier said that done,but I found a place that said it would have them in stock next week. In the evening it was a visit to one of my favourite restaurants.....an Italian place called Flavors, where you can sit outside and eat delicious wood-fired pizza (you do get sick of rice and curry after a while, you know!).

Sunday

In the morning Emily and I popped into Chaya to see the boys, who were all glued to an Indian reality TV show - something akin to Junior Pop Idol. We gave our best efforts to convincing them that playing a game and some real human interaction would be more fun, but failed miserably! In the afternoon I read some books, did a little Hindi homework.

In the evening we headed out to one of our favourite bars, called the Living Room. There isn't the widest selection of good places to go in the evening in Delhi, so we were pleased to discover this place. It was actually opened by an English bloke and he has instigated a "Pub Quiz" night! We have had to explain this concept to our Indian friends, who have appeared initially skeptical, but soon entered into the spirit of things! As Emily tucked into a roast dinner (which she made me photograph, such was her delight in finding this British delicacy in Delhi) we did our best to answer the questions - a real mix of Indian and English trivia. However, we didn't fare too well, and the prize (a bottle of Sula wine) was lost to us again.

In many ways we could have been in a London bar....perhaps the biggest difference is that no one was drinking. There is much less of a culture of it here, which I actually really like. Most bars do a much more inventive, imaginative and tasty range of non-alcoholic drinks or 'mocktails' than UK bars, combined with the relatively high price of booze in bars, this makes it fairly easy to resist the hard stuff. And many restaurants just don't have a license....so in general this year has been very kinder to my liver than my life back home...probably the only way in which India has been better for my health!

Okay, gonna do my best to bring you up to speed with Monday and Tuesday of this week....but no guarantees! Will add some more photos to the album too.