Rajasthan Adventure Part 1 from Squeezy on Vimeo.
The first 7 days of my trip to Rajasthan in January 2009. We did the GAP Adventures tour: Rajasthan Adventure.
This video covers: Old Delhi, Jodhpur, Ranakpur and Udaipur.
Ingredients
milk and water mixture (ratio 1:1. I'm guessing 2 cups of milk, 2 cups of water)
1 teaspoon of loose leaf tea (add more if the colour is too light, less if the colour is too dark)
1 to 2 teaspoons of sugar
1 small piece of cinnamon
Spices
2 or 3 Green cardamon
2 cloves
2 or 3 black pepper corns
1 small piece of ginger (1 cm in length approximately)
Method
1. Put the milk and water mixture in a saucepan on medium-high heat to boil for 5 to 10 minutes. Add in the tea. Do not cover.
2. Put all the spices in a mortar and pestle and pulverize. If you think it's done then smash for a minute longer. Look for the ginger to be broken down (not a single piece anymore).
3. Add the sugar and the cinnamon to the saucepan of boiling milk/water.
4. Then add the pulverized spices to the saucepan.
5. Stir occasionally.
6. When you judge it ready then strain into serving cups.
This is the recipe as taught to Kat, Megan and myself in Udaipur. We guessed the measurements while furiously recording everything as our teacher eyeballed everything.
Have a headache and it's a bit miserable weather wise outside. Wanting to stay in bed today but it's the last full day of vacation. So the big buddah is being delayed - hopefully the weather will cheer up a bit.
A day in Hongkers is a day that alternates between bliss and total sensory overload. We've taken the tram to Victoria Peak - so glad that the tram was there as it was really steep. We've wandered around Central on Hong Kong Island, which caters to Ferragamo fanatics, market maniacs and chain store chicas.
We tried some local specialties: milk tea (think over brewed tea with a big splash of milk with optional sugar), stir fried beef and rice noodles (there was a yummy hint of ginger), hot ribena (this was so good I almost stole it from Mike) and baked pork on rice (there was a plain tomato sauce which was surprisingly tasty). So all up I'd say that Hongkers is the culinary equal of Shanghai or Bangkok.
We stayed in our room to watch the laser show, with the radio broadcast and it was pretty darn spectacular! I'd love to video it all but I don't think I have enough time. I'll settle for capturing some flashing buildings and the finale lasers.
After dinner we walked to the temple market and saw lots of stuff but nothing we haven't seen online or in other markets. It was interesting to see and it was wonderfully hassle free.
There are two annoyances on the streets here: Indian tailors or fake watch sellers and foot massage pamphlet pushers. Mike has taken to asking for a suit made from crappy shiney material to deal with the former and I've taken to accepting every pamphlet as the simplest way to deal with the latter. Sadly I'd really love to have a foot massage but I'm yet to see a place that looks even a bit nice - they've all been dodge central. I guess that can be my mission for tomorrow after the big buddah.
Today I said goodbye to our new friends and hopped in a cab. During the 45 minute long trip I realized that I didn't feel sad to be leaving India. We saw some brilliant stuff, were visited by the evil bug Delhi Belly more times than was reasonable and made new friends. I just haven't been moved or touched by this country in a good way.
The photos will be stunning - even with my hideous über zit... I tried to avoid being in photos with good reason. My video should be an improvement on previous efforts. But I feel as though India didn't really like us.
So when will we return to India? Not anytime soon. We've been twice now to very different areas and I can't in all honesty say that I loved it. There are too many other cool and exciting places to go.
The flight. Oh Cathay Pacific may you rise up and conquer all inferior airlines so that they too may offer the wonderous economy service that you do. The plane we had was a new one with new seats that were very comfortable. Very, very, very comfy. The food was ok, neuter offensive nor sublime; except the cheesecake that wasn't. Poor Mike the not cheese cake was covered in passionfruit - not his thing really.
So now it's after midnight, local time, in Hong Kong and I'm watching a landscape of shiny twinkling buildings go by from the bus. It brilliant to be somewhere new and exciting again.
Delhi or Mumbai. Everything that I didn't like about Mumbai one year ago- I find that I don't like the same things in Delhi. Over crowded everything, dirty, polluted, over zealously persistent touts, sad street little urchins and beggars.
I'm looking forward to the overnight train ride tonight.
Fortunately I've already been through the massive culture shock so I'm quite blasé and accepting. I'm enjoying myself much more this time.
Today we went to Gurudwara Sisganj ( a Sikh temple) then Jama Masjid (a murgal Muslim Mosque ). Both were interesting and beautiful in their own ways.
Sadly our tour guide then wanted us to go to the same place for lunch that we'd been to dinner last night.
tbc... the story explaining the title will be added shortly
We were lucky to land this morning, a thick fog was covering Delhi airport. The pilot said the visibility was only 75 meters and that the taxiing into the terminal would be slow. He wasn't joking, it felt like we spent an hour or so creeping on the runway but was really only 30 minutes. I say we are lucky for 2 reasons. 1 when we alighted from the plane and the cabin door was open, we both looked out through the pilots windscreen and couldn't see much. So thanks to the pilot for a bumpy but safe landing. 2. The local news this morning is reporting that many planes were diverted or delayed. We must have just snuck in! The telling thing about the fog at 2am this morning was that even our taxi driver slowed down and drove with his hazards on. From this I take the fog was really bad.
We met a few people from our tour group over breakfast, which was nice. We get to meet everyone else tonight. Fingers crossed it's a good group.
Hilariously I managed to buy 2 brand new Samsung batteries for my camcorder for 15,000 won. They are normally 30,000 won and that's a price that I'm happy to pay! Mike & I had spent much of the previous day searching Seoul for these very batteries and couldn't find anyone who stocked them- let alone had a good price!
Hong Kong airport feels very expensive but really it's just more expensive than Incheon -like everywhere else. We really are so spoiled in Korea when it comes to price jacking up. It doesn't seem to happen often and when it does it's a laughable increase.
The food is delicious! We share a Ginger beef noodle soup, some wonderful wontons and some soy rice-noodle with goose. We pretty well burned through 100,000 won in the 4 and a half hours. Easy come, easy go.
I seem to have lost my new eye mask already - darn it. Obviously this is Mike's doing... I just don't know how yet.
I'm getting ready for our trip to India and wanting to get back into regular blogging, so I'm testing out Blogwrite lite. So far so good :)
There once was a supervisor and once upon a time she decreed that there would be a Hangeul (Korean written language) test. She made some books and she made a test. Then she made us take it. Here's the video made by the reporters that "may" be at the test. Two TV programs showed the video in slightly different versions, so here they both are.
If you've seen one... you've not seen Theresa :)
In the interest of this blog being somewhat understandable; I'll start with me! I'm an EPIK Teacher in Taebaek City, Gangwon Province, South Korea.
Being an English teacher in a small city (town really) means smaller schools and smaller classes. That's a big advantage, particularly as no-one in my school wants me to go anywhere, so I don't have another school to teach at. I was told the other day that the Principal gets "worried" anytime I leave the school. He must have had a heart attack when I came back from my one day visit to Kaeseong, North Korea and said "Guess where I went on the weekend!"
Today has been pretty typical, I have one scheduled class and one *bonus* conversation class. I just found out that my normal class is cancelled due to the province wide exams that will be happening next Thursday. I'm cool with that. None of my material is tested and there is enormous pressure on these kids (my students) to achieve 100% in the exams.
But there is an issue with cancelling my classes.. I get bored. Very bored. What to do? Well there's facebook to mess around on, then there are the wedding videos that I've been making (on pause until I complete my hard drive upgrade), Aussie newspapers to read, skype chat with Mike, games to play, oh and yes - lessons to plan. The trouble is that with being bored is that I'm just not motivated to prepare some lessons. So far today, I've made some photocopies of a lesson that's completely ready to go and started on making an answer sheet for the next picture story. I've also read the news, spent a little time on Facebook and played 5 games. What will happen when I move back to Australia? I'm currently not expected to work much and so have formed the expectation that I don't need to do much work at all.
Does this mean I'm lazy in the classroom? Heck NO! I love the time that I have with my students and I give it my all when I'm in the classroom. When I'm teaching I feel alive and I really feel that I'm doing something that's not just for my own financial gain. These students don't deserve a second rate education and it's programs like EPIK that can make a difference. At least I have the delusion that it's possible.
But the staffroom? Am I lazy in the staffroom? When the students are in their classes? I may as well bring in a pillow and have a sleep. I wonder if my toy Kangaroo would be comfortable?
It's hot here. It's been hot for a while and.. I don't like it!
I'm prepared to make an exception for Thailand, which will have summer but, to compensate, there will be stunning beaches, showers (from the sky variety), wonderful thai food and glorious thai massages. Oh the massages..... Just rub my feet and smack me around with some mystery herb balls.
I'm really excited about the flight, thai airways YEAH! And the hotel sounds cool - the windows are in the shape of a L. Nearby there is a bar, where there are no chairs only beds. Sounds weird but cool. I hope Mike can get in, they might look at his hair and say "you've got to be kidding". I hope not though. I'm going to get the pink back in my hair before we travel - not that it lasts a long time but I like it.
After thailand and some very serious relaxing, we'll be in Sydney, for a day then on to Tassy! We realised that if we were going to do any touristy stuff in Australia then we should get out of Sydney. And at the beginning when Mike's family are away. I'm really looking forward to seeing my family and hugging them all. A few times each.
Tassy. The Gangwon-do of Australia. If that gives you any ideas of what Gangwon-do is like, you're probably right. Except that women are famed for their beauty.
Tassy will be great, Mike's found us a cafe in Hobart to visit. He got talking to the owner when he was watching the World Barista Championship. So we'll be paying a visit to Tasmania's Champion Barista. I'm really hoping that they'll be open for breakfast. The plan is Hobart for 2 days then we'll be heading up to Launceston to visit our friends there. Launceston was lovely last time we visited and we're hoping to chill out while exploring the area a bit further.
So I really should get back to packing & setting up my ipod. Enough procrastination!!
Speaking of procrastination.... here are the photos from the English Camp that Mike & I taught at on Sunday and Monday.
Last november I started a diet. I have a traditional medicine doctor who monitors me, gives me some herbal tablets to take and has helped me keep on track. I check in with him twice a week, I get on the fancy super scales which give not just my weight & height but also my body fat percentage, hip to waist ratio, muscle percentage in limbs and torso, endermal fat number, some other fat number (which refers to fat on my organs - seems the darn stuff is everywhere!), a bunch of other readings, a comparison to the last 9 weigh ins, my fitness rating (?) and how much weight it says I still need to lose. So I'm getting a lot of information, which helps makes sense of what's going on with my body. We have a chat and he checks what I'm eating (that would be the diet part) and how much exercise I'm getting.
To begin with, I struggled. But stick to the diet I did - well 90% of the time. It really did help me to start losing weight, as opposed to putting it on! However, I did start to worry, what happens when I come off the diet. Will I turn into the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters? That would be horrible. So seeing as the diet does help, I taken a less strict approach with the herbal stuff and really used it to help me change some bad habits.
One of those bad habits has been intermittant to non-existant regular exercise. There's a podcast I've been using called yogamazing, it's free and the instructor is really good. I started by doing one yoga session, 25 to 30 minutes long, in the morning. I got up to 2 yoga sessions before realising I'd best get back to going to the gym. I was stuck above 70 kgs and really didn't want to be. So I plan out a weekdays the gym, weekend yoga or walking or tennis. I'm trying to do yoga at night to balance the gym in the morning, it's something I really need to proritise.
This week has been a yoga week, I've had trouble sleeping and felt that yoga was a better choice than the gym. I get up at 6:30 am for yoga, 5:30 am for the gym. Next week I'm going back to the gym, it could well mess with my weight and that's ok. So long as those body fat percentages keep going down.
So why blog about it? Because today for the first time since I started university, my weight was less than 70kgs!! To put this in perspective my final target weight is between 63 and 65 kgs (to be decided on as I get closer to it).
The first moment of excitment I had was, at the hospital having some health tests done (for my visa renewal), my blood pressure was 120/70 which was a good sign and then the scales had me at 69kgs. I pulled Mike over and said "look at that!!". Then proceeded to do a little jump for joy as there were lots of koreans watching us and I didn't want to be too weird (not that purple hair is...). After the initial elation cleared a little, I realised I couldn't really take the 69kgs as fact, I had my phone in my pocket, a bunch of coins and some other bits and pieces. Also this isn't the super scale that I've been hopping on and off with regularity. I had to have my normal weigh in.
So as soon as the hospital stuff was done, we nipped over to the traditional medicine doctor's office and had my weigh in there. That's when I was happy then sad. You see I can understand some of the super scale's read outs but I always need to wait until we can compare the print out with the previous one. That's when it gives me something useful and understandable. So when I saw 69.8kgs I was thrilled but saddened when I saw something that usually indicates my muscle mass has dwindled and my body fat has increased. There was no little jump of joy here. I trudged into the doc's office and asked him "what's the story?" He looked at it and then double checked. He told me I'd not only broken the 70kg barrier but it was 80% fat reduction and 20% muscle. He gave me the papers to check and all my results, except for the fittness test were substantially better than the last weigh in. I jumped around and gave Mike a slap on the shoulder. It somehow seemed fitting!
I am totally thrilled to have gotten to this point and now I have a party to look forward to. The doctor and his family and friends had said one night that we'd have a party when I broke the 70kg barrier. It'll probably be next week but I don't care. I'm going to wear my pink dress - even if it is far too raunchy in Korea. It's going to be great - so long as there's a side salad to be had :)
If you read this far, I think you deserve a before and after photo.
I chose these photos because Mike (not his hair) is a constant.
We flew in to Mumbai's Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport on one of Thai Airway's pov pack planes. We were surprised to find ourselves in an airport (in fairness: under renovation) that closely resembled a large bomb shelter. We walked through, regaining the use of our limbs and hoping like hell we didn't get hit up for a bribe or as it is more quaintly referred to a Baksheesh. I located the baggage carousel and we were introduced to the Indian queuing system; a system where the least pushy is last. Then we walked outside, Mike to find an ATM and I to guard the bags. To say the heaving mass of people was a shock would be about right - I mean who brings their entire family to pick up one person at the airport at 1 in the morning? Fortunately Mike finds an ATM that is plugged in (the one in arrivals wasn't) and secures us a fixed price taxi.
We thought we'd gotten away without having to pay baksheesh. Or so we thought, it was just short of 500Rupees for the taxi to our hotel and the guy who got our taxi changed (so that we wouldn't have to wait) wanted a tip. First he said 100Rps then he saw Mike open his wallet (holding all the rupees that we had) and suddenly he wants 500Rps! Mike gave him 250Rps as we weren't about to tip more than the fare! While all this was going on, I was staggered by the yellow & black cabs (non-air conditioned) that were parked across from us and went on for as far as I could see. It was a sea of parked cabs!
Mumbai drivers are something else! It wasn't just that they are constantly on the horn, it was that I thought we would crash so many times. Playing chicken It seems that India drivers operate on a "if you don't crash it doesn't matter how much you miss by" mentality. I noticed that many taxis don't have side-view mirrors - no points for guessing how they got removed. Finally we arrived at the Hotel Manama. We had booked a deluxe room but ended up with a tiny room with a renovated bathroom. I was feeling ripped off and ready to do battle with the front desk but Mike checked out the other rooms that were available and he said we had the best of what was left. I mean Mike could almost touch the wall while laying on his bed. It was all too much but knowing that tomorrow was a new day gave me hope and helped me sleep.
We ventured upstairs to the Manama restaurant for breakfast. If last nights less than helpful service was a downer then the food and help from the solo waiter was a bit upper. Mike discovered his first favourite dish of the trip Aloo Chaat, it was full of potatoes, coriander and cumin - other spices too I'm sure. It was so delicious I completely forgot to take a photo of it - oops!
We walked out of the hotel with a spring in our step and a plan. A walking tour plan! We were armed with LP's Best of Mumbai and had found the walking tour called "Footsteps of the Raj"; seeing as we were staying next to the end point of this walking tour, we decided to do it in reverse! We saw some cool stuff and took plenty of photos! The photos miss out on one important thing: The Maiden Oval. There is an amazing number of boys & men playing cricket, some in whites, others wearing tees and shorts. There are batting nets - all in use and more games than I can count. This seems to go on all day long. Cricket rules Mumbai.
It's that time again... time for a new watched list! So in order of watching:
Movies
This year Mike & I shared Christmas with a Korean family, Lee's family. Here are a few photos as taken by Mike or Lee on Christmas Eve (that's the party) and Christmas Day.
I've been away.. from my blog. There is so much that's happened since my last proper post that I'm not sure where to start. And not being sure where to start has given me the excuse to procrastinate. A lot.
So to bring you kind-of sort-of up to date; here goes.
I've been to Australia, caught up with some friends and family. Missed quite a few people and met other friends in person for the first time. I played the tourist in Tasmania and found it to be a beautiful place filled with absolute sweethearts. (Course can't tell the guys that they are the sweethearts probably ruining their macho rep.)
We went up to the blue mountains with family. Enjoyed the wood fires and the food, oh sigh the food!!! Finally got around to finishing the tennis grudge match against my brother, turns out he's quite good at sledging but not so good at finishing out a long game of tennis. I won by the way! Yeah me!!
We ate Galbi and Samgyeobsal with my Dad and brother. It wasn't all that bad for Korean food but the surprise on the waitress' face when Mike asked for Denjangjjigae was priceless!
I coloured my hair pink. It was going to be a hilarious surprise for Mike but he decided to visit me at the hairdressers - while I had black looking goo on my head. You win some, you lose some...
We got back to Taebaek, packed up our apartment and ran off to Orientation. We had a brilliant five days getting to know all the new people. Which concluded with our wedding anniversary. The ACs (Alex's Cronies) got together and organised a cake, a speech, some red wine. It was lovely. I almost cried but thankfully didn't! I made the video to show what Orientation was like. Everyone liked it. Or they told me they did...
We had major dramas with our new massage parlour apartment and ended up being moved into a second new apartment. Our new place has crappy water pressure and is an extra 10 minutes out of town and we can smell the pig farms when the wind blows the right way. However the new place is lovely, we have great big windows so we can see our view (across the valley and up the mountain), it's quiet in a way that is relaxing and I finally have my own desk!! Anyone who suggests that Mike & I could possibly share a desk doesn't know Mike very well!
Last month I had to teach a demo class, which means I get to be watched and scrutinized. However many of the teachers that should have been there didn't turn up so it was less of an event for me. The teachers that were there thought I did a wonderful job with my co-teacher and that we had actually demonstrated team teaching. Which was fantastic as I wasn't all that worried if we showed a good example, I was trying to show different activities that could be used successfully in the classroom.
Last weekend was the Kotesol conference, it was full of books, lectures, publishers, writers and English teachers. Mike & I ended up with some heavy bags and I'm hoping that we'll be able to put these new materials to good use. I can but hope.
Being in Seoul means there's always a party to go to and last Saturday night was no exception. Mike & I enjoyed a spot of decent thai food before joining up with everyone at Geckos in Itaewon, Seoul. While walking over, I slipped on my pink angel wings as I figured I may as well dress up for a Halloween party. I'd already applied the glitter so I was ready to go. We found the bar and just before we headed upstairs, we stopped to watch a sneaky spiderman scaring people with his web (a piece of netting). I was amazed that people kept walking past a tree where large group of people were standing around laughing. It was all in good fun and the scarees seemed to think it funny too. So we joined up with approximately 35 EPIKers from Gangwon-do and had a great time. I chatted with people, met some gorgeous Korean women, took a bunch of photos then surrendered my camera to Mike and myself to the dance floor. There are quite a few photos that I was surprised (to say the least) to see when I downloaded the contents of the memory card. I'm sure you can work out which is which!
That's as much as I'm willing to talk about now :)
