Outings, a great store and a new restaurant

Father’s Day

June 19 2016

We went out to lunch at one of our favorite places that offers light fare. We celebrated Father’s Day by going to Lokayatan Folk Museum, small local museum that had a wonderful collection of tribal wood carvings, ceramics, metalwork and our all  time favorite, exquisitely embroidered and tie-dyed textiles. I was caught drooling on the glass display cases. 

Another museum with festival masks, another Bergman favorite, costumes and an elephant skeleton were on display. Both were set in the peaceful grounds of the Shreyas Foundation. Peacocks were everywhere as were other birds including the Rosy Ringed parakeet. Neither museum was air conditioned so I limited my time as I still don’t have much tolerance for the heat. As the monsoons approach the humidity is rising and the temperature is going down. Today was the first day I actually felt cool in the morning. It is all relative as the temperature was still above 100. Each week the monsoons are predicted to arrive. So far they haven’t.

Life is getting easier every day and our stress has dropped considerably. India is just hard for us. Literally every time someone is scheduled to come to the house to work on some problem, they do not come. A man who is supposed to hook up the home theater projector with permanent cables as opposed to a temporary fix using cords on the floor was scheduled for Thursday. He was a no show but showed up on Sunday but didn’t finish the job so he will schedule again and we will wait for his arrival and most likely he will not show. This gets old when it happens every time. When we tell Indians about this they laugh because it is just an accepted practice and no one seems to find it troublesome. Since we do not have live-in servants or full time servants it requires one of us to hang around waiting. OK enough complaining. I continue to be surprised at the lack of common goods here. Yesterday I wanted to buy a glass or metal mixing bowl. I went to the high end household goods store and all they had were glass decorative bowls. I went to the supermarket that has a house wares section and found a metal bowl one size only. There were other metal bowls but they had straight sides which isn’t a good design for bowls. Obviously it was made for some purpose that I don’t know about here.

Tuesday June 21, 2016

Today’s local paper had an article about an online store that helped rural women by allowing them to work in their homes and earn money by making clothing and accessories. The company uses designers to create clothing. The store sends out kits with all the needed items for the women to sew the items that will be sold online. I was excited by the mission and the products so I went on line to read more about the store. I learned that it was headquartered here in Ahmedabad and according to their website there were two stores in town so I called to make sure the addresses had not changed. I have learned from previous experiences here to confirm hours and location as websites are NEVER maintained. Sure enough they do not have any stores in town. I told the person on the phone that was not what their website said. HA! Later I got response to an earlier inquiry over the internet and was told I had two options: on line or shop at the office location! You have to love India!

Tonight we tried a restaurant that opened recently. They serve Italian and North Indian cuisines. OMG what a treat. We order four dishes and each one was great. If you didn’t guess we stuck with the Italian part of the menu. We had Crunchy Cigar Rolls, phyllo dough wrapped around a mixture of walnuts and spinach. YUM! Beet and pear salad with feta, another rwinner, and mushroom and pine nut ravioli. The mushroom sauce had milk in it so I asked for a substitute and they recommended a lemon butter sauce which was divine and to our surprise they had Ron’s favorite dessert bread pudding. We will make this place a regular stop. It is near our house and everything was delicious. If we go when they open for dinner at 7:00 we have the place to ourselves. The décor was what I would call Modern Italian with lots of glass and mirrors. We decided this was the best restaurant we have been to here thus far.