Day 3 - Wednesday/Budhwar - Why You Don't Take 9 Women To A Clothes Shop

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Slept very well last night - it rained eavily, and loudly, which was very soothing! Got up for breakfast of cornflakes with warm sweetened milk (just not the same), rice dumpling/pancake things, and a spicy curry sauce. Yum!

We had another chat about the projects, in particular the teaching (rough summary - assisting the teacher = run a class of 20-30 students!) and were also shown a strange combination of origami skills and quick sketches of Indian animals. I suppose if all else fails and the children start rebelling against the hopeless English teachers, as a last line of defence we've got something we can show them . . .
"OK children - lets make paper aeroplanes! No? OK, I'm going to draw on the board - can you tell what it is yet?"
Methinks not. . .

Anyway, after that we took a trip out to the market. We sent a lot of time waitng around outside a sari shop while the girls chose material for saris, although the owner, realising how bored us menfolk were and how much money he was going to make from the 20 saris worth of silk he was flogging, brought us massala chai - indian spiced tea, which is really nice! after an hour at the cloth merchants, we went to the tailors upstairs and waited another hour for them to be measured for their saris . . . Women! Shopping! Is there a worse combination?!?!?

On the way back from the market (having bought nothing and actually not gone much further than the clothes shops) the heavens opened - and I mean it was like someone had turned on a tap! Before you could get your umbrella open you were soaked to the skin! But at least it was warm rain, very cooling in the heat, and not 24/7 like the last group apparently. Luckily we'd all been given umbrellas by IDEX in case of such an ocurrence but it was funny to see Dipu and Krishan, who'd resolutely stated "No, no, we no need umbrella", dive under mine and Keiths like little schoolgirls at the first spots of rain! I chatted to Dipu on the way back, about family and life back home, but called him Kirshan all the way. Oops!

After going to our rooms to change and dry off a bit, we had dinner of greasy bread rolls coated in ghee (clarified butter) and a spiced lentil soup/stew - not great, give me some meat any day! Later that evening we watched a subtitled Bollywood film, Omkara. I've been told it's a reworking of Othello (thanks Nikki), but it's been done to highlight Indian youth's frustration with the system of arranged marriages and the problems when caste stands in the way - and it's actually a very good! I'd definitely watch it again. During the film the hotel brought a couple of crates of beer in, so we had a few kingfshers while we watched, in all had a very good night!

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