January
30
Daily life & food
This week I decided I would dye my hair at home!!! What a challenge!! Happy had to help me wash the dye out with a bucket and jug and it took us an hour!!!! I am becoming a pro at the bucket&jug shower these days and it doesn’t bother me as much anymore.
We also don’t have a washing machine and our last lot of washing we took to the shop over the road and they washed & ironed it all for us but it was quite expensive to get done regularly so we decided we would just hand wash everything! Happy was explaining to me how to do it with the bucket and this special hand washing brush etc and I said to him I AM NOT STUPID!!!! As you can assume he ended up doing most of it because I was clearly useless at it and kept complaining hahhaa!!! I said to him life is hard here sometimes!!! He just rolled his eyes and said we are on holidays who cares if it takes a while longer we are not doing anything else! Mums words of “act useless otherwise you don’t get any help” kept coming to my mind!!!
Food shopping is also quite a challenge, there is no one stop shop like Coles at home! We do most of our shopping at a place called Big Bazaar but they don’t have eggs and have usually run out of toilet paper! So we buy those things at the general store near our house and sometimes buy milk somewhere else if there’s none left ( we usually end up having to go to about 3 shops to get everything we need every few days!). I now buy long life milk because the milk you buy here in small packages expires the next day and it is hard to pour out of????
Bread comes in a small packet as well and is basically stale by the time you get it home haha! But we just use it for toast – which I toast on the chapati pan because we don’t have a toaster!
Eggs either come in a tray or just LOOSE in a plastic bag and you just have to hope to god it’s not a bag of yolk by the time you get home!!
As I think I have mentioned before, None of the food shops here sell meat, we did find one “poultry dealer” yesterday but the car park in front of the shop was covered in feathers which put me off and when I asked happy where the mans fridge was happy said “let’s just not”. Hahaha so we are basically vegetarian but we buy take away some nights because it’s basically cheaper to eat out and Happy always gets chicken Curry then and we have a few regular places we go to that are just small restaurants (about 8 tables inside) and it’s cheap, and all the food here is always delicious!
We had McDonalds for dinner one night this week, haven’t had it in so long and it was actually nice eating something not spicey haha! Their menu was all chicken burgers, veggie burgers and paneer burgers!
At Elante mall there is lots of restaurants and take away places and we sometimes go to Chillis which is Mexican and so yum!!
At home we mainly cook Punjabi food because it’s easy to find the ingredients for it… I make Chana Masala (chickpeas) or Aloo Gobi (potato and cauliflower) or Aloo mattar (potato and peas) or egg bhurji (egg with tomato onion & spices) .. All with yoghurt… And we eat eggs everyday for breakfast !
You can buy different snacks here too, all chips are spicy chilli flavoured which I am not a huge fan of.
These are two of the popular drinks here – Limca & Thumbs up basically coke & solo but taste slightly different but nice!
We have been on a few long 3 hour walks this week because the weather has been nicer and on every corner there are men getting shaved! People set up a little shaving shop under a tree with a mirror nailed into the tree!!
I also saw this man selling ice cream in the street, his bike had no seat and the tyre no air he was just pushing it along !
A few people have asked if we have motorbike helmets, yes mums we do have helmets!! Mine is bright yellow so now I stand out even more than I did already, whoops!
These are the local shops opposite our house, there is a general store, florists, bottle shops, a few random watch shops, a sari/suit maker, a cafe, ice cream shop and a take away food shop and one shop selling cooked Maggi noodles night and day for 20c! (Masala flavoured)
There are a few tuktuks parked there and if we don’t use the bike we use the same man every day to take us around he’s always there waiting and it costs about $1 for a half an hour ride.
We will travel back to Amritsar again this weekend for a few days to celebrate Happy’s birthday with his family, looking forward to seeing them again and the bottomless cups of tea! As we don’t have an oven (and none of his family have ovens either) there is no way of baking here! So I am going to make rocky road slice to take with us! As you can imagine it was a MISSION trying to find ingredients for it so I hope they like it!!
Balle Balle 