Lunch in Laos

Well we are here in Vientiane, Laos on the weekend of Bun Awk Phansa and Bun Nam. Bun Awk Phansa is the celebration of the end of 3 months of fasting and retreat by the monks, everyone parties to celebrate and sends little banana leaf boats down the Mekong filled with flowers, incense and candles.  The day after is Bun Nam which is a day of boat races between various teams from the countries on the Mekong. Lots more partying and good times. This includes miles of street stalls selling clothes, purses, shoes, laundry soap (!), mobile phones, and food everywhere, all accompanied by booming music, karaoke and firecrackers. There are midway rides and carnival games – pop the balloon with the dart being the favourite. We were downtown this evening with everyone from Vientiane (pop. 234,000) and from miles around, pushing, dancing and mingling with the throngs. All good fun topped off with some cotton candy! Luckily our hotel is a bit away from downtown so we have been getting the best sleeps on the whole trip at the Beau Rivage Hotel.

Fermenting Indigo for dye

Weaver doing intricate silk work on the loom

For the crafters…

Yesterday Catherine, Ian’s sister, who is teaching grade 6 here, met up with us for lunch and we headed out to visit her friend Nikone who owns a Handcraft Centre where she has revived traditional Lao silk dyeing and weaving. They use all organic dyes and her tour was very interesting. Some beautiful silk pieces are coming home with us.

In addition to taking in the boat festival happenings and going to Nikone’s, we have explored town with Cate and Bow taking pictures of all the flowers and the Wats, and Hesquiat, Bow and I went to a spa for reflexology, pedicure and Thai massage.

For those foodies…

We also had a wonderful lunch at Cafe Croissant d’or which served great sandwiches. We discovered it earlier in the day when we were dying from the heat ( was it 38*?) and stumbled in for some cool shade and iced lemons and coffee. Yum all round.

While we were lunching on baguettes others more adventurous were enjoying local delicacies – see below:

yum for some!

Other sights, imagine sounds and smells below, more on flowers and Wats in later posts.

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Chai and Chapati

Thought we would share our favourite simple recipes from our cooking class at Spice Box

Cate rolling chapati

cooking school.

Chai Masala (for 3 small cups)

Chai Masala or tea spice includes green cardamon, black pepper, clove, nutmeg, mace, and dry ginger (equal parts). To make the tea:

1 cup water, 1/2 tsp chai masala, 1 tsp assam tea powder, 2 tsp sugar and 1/2 cup skim milk. Put water on to boil. When water boils add chai masala. Continue to boil for 1 minute then add tea powder and sugar. Boil again and in 1 minute add milk. Once it starts to boil, boil up and down, for 5 to 7 minutes on low and high heat. Then take off heat and cover for 2 minutes. After 2 minutes, strain in to a cup or pot.

Chapati (Roti)

Ingredients:  100g whole wheat flour or millet flour, pinch of salt, 1/2 c water.

Method: Put flour in large plate and add salt and mix. Add 1/4 of water and mix with hands. Continue adding water a teaspoon at a time until mixture is a dough. Form into ping pong sized balls. Roll in flour and then roll with a rolling pin until about 5-6″ – always using flour. It can be a nice round or ok if shaped like India continent as it will round out as it cooks. Heat dry pan – no oil. Place round chapati on one side and cook until small bubbles show then flip over gentlely. When starts to rise pat down with a clean dish cloth and twist so roundly cooks. As it rises flip and cook on other side. This all happens fairly quickly so remove from heat as soon as cooked so chapati does not burn. Repeat!

To make Naan breads – the recipe is the same but use refined white flour instead and add 1/2 egg to the mixture, 1 tsp sugar and pinch of salt. Roll out thicker than for chapati and cook on lower heat for a little longer. To add flavour you can add potatoe or garlic when rolling and fold over and roll out again, then cook.

Enjoy!

 

Ranch Adventures

by Cate

Hesquiat's Tiger

I’m sitting on the veranda of our guesthouse in Palolem  in a tropical rainforest by the sea.  It is a sharp contrast to the weather on the ranch we visited for a couple of days outside of Udaipur.  It was very dry and scorching hot on the ranch with no A/C for the wimpy tourists and there may have been a bug or two around.  Nevertheless, we thoroughly enjoyed the horseback riding through villages around the ranch and the food was great.  Hesquiat is becoming a spicy boy and Bow is very content with the large selection of vegetarian food everywhere we go. 

Bow's elephant

After two days on the ranch we flew through Mumbai to Goa.  On our flight here we didn’t stop in Mumbai but we did see the slums around the airport, reminiscent of the scenes from Slumdog Millionaire.

We’ve already made some friends here among the beach vendors.  Two gals chatted us up when we were walking together on the beach yesterday.  They are awaiting our return to their stretch of beach and promise to sell us  jewelry, clothing, henna etc – actually anything we need and it will be the best in India!  We’ll look forward to that interaction a little later today.

Here are some snaps from the ranch and countryside around Udaipur.  We can look back on it fondly now that we have clean rooms, a/c, t.v. and wifi access!

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India Airmail?

We have now sent our second parcel home. Airmail India style was a great DT adventure today. Here is the package as it looked at the end: 

It started with weighing everything, then getting the approximate cost. Then pay the sewer to sew everything into a cloth-wrapped package. Then the seams of the package are sealed with wax and a stamp. While this was happening Hesquiat and Bow lined up in the stamp and mail line. By the time the stitching and waxing got done, they had reached the front of the mailing line. We paid our 1435 rupees, about $30 to send it on our way. It is addressed to both Amy and I so if it reaches home before we do (???!!!) then Amy can pick it up. We have also mailed a parcel home in Rome. We have been sending our cold weather clothes until we only have left our clothes suitable for 35* weather. And we continue to keep our souvenirs. By the time we fly home we will have very few clothes and just our favourite trinkets! We’ll let you know how Poste Italia and Poste India perform.

P.S. Christine reports that Poste Italia has delivered. They said 3 weeks and it was even faster than that! yahoo.

 

Hesquiat’s Blog – The Animals in India

Varanasi to Jaipur (October the 4^th, 2010)

Me with a Bollywood friend

 Well… So far, since we got into Varanasi, we’ve kind of lazed about. We went on a few adventures, but nothing much. We’ve had some adventures with a few of the animals here, and some with the residents of Varanasi. The first adventure was with a female monkey then a male. There were quite a few of monkeys where we were staying. We noticed them when we went to our rooms for the first time. We looked out into the dark, and saw some creatures moving about. Our ‘porters’ noticed our actions and told us a little bit about the monkeys. Apparently, there’s one big mean male monkey that scares everything except the crazy cows and the goats. He got a nice nick-name:  ‘Boss Man’ because he’s super aggressive. I found that he was quite intimidating, quite a bit after our ‘meeting’. I use that term lightly, I’ll tell you why. Bow and I woke up the next morning, before we met any of the crazy animals, after a while, Bow went downstairs and asked where could we both feed the monkeys. The man at the front desk told her that when she was ready, he would try to call them down so we could feed them. When Bow ran up and told me that, we decided to do it right away (this was around lunch time… I think). So Bow and I went downstairs, went to the front desk, only to find out that he didn’t want to at the time, I think that he was confused about what we were saying though ( No one speaks English that well in India, and none of us speak Hindi, so it makes it sort of hard to communicate sometimes….  Or maybe it’s most of the time, I don’t really pay enough attention to that sort of thing).

Boss-man

 Off Bow and I went to go and feed the monkeys, Right before we left the building though, someone else stopped us… Uh oh! More communication problems, or so I thought it would be. Nope! The next guy to stop us was very helpful. He told us where we should stand if we would like to see the monkeys. Bow and I strolled out to the one spot we were told to be, looked up the tree and waited, and waited, and waited… Then finally a female monkey showed up, she was on another building to our left when we were looking at our front steps. Way way up the monkey kind of sat down on a ledge. I decided to get its attention by doing the following:

1.  I grabbed a banana from Bow
2. I looked up at the monkey and started to wave the banana at her
3. I yelled ‘Hey, monkey! ……. Banana!’
4. I started to put the banana on a ledge where it could get to

After my fabulous way to get a monkey’s attention, I picked the banana back up and waited for the monkey to come down. As it was descending, I tried to follow its movement with my eyes, but failed, majorly. It was in front of me before my eyes were halfway down the tree! Well almost, I just put the banana back where I originally put it… and unexpectedly, it took the banana and booked it halfway up the tree on the opposite side of the tree! I was a bit disappointed in the monkey for not staying and eating in front of Bow and I. ‘Oh well’ I thought, and went for another banana, next thing I see is a male monkey moving faster than lightening down the tree, arriving from the same direction as the female did.

I held the banana in front of it expecting a nervous but eager monkey, but I was part shocked to find out that this monkey was demanding and vicious! Its hand was on the banana before I could even move my hand towards it! I was about to pull the banana away from it when it pulled the banana towards it. I thought to myself ‘I better just let go, before something else happens’, and so I let go. The male took 3 or 4 huge bites of the banana and put it in its mouth to slowly digest, then ate the rest by little nibbles right in front of me. I thought to myself yet again ‘It’s probably afraid of a bigger monkey that terrorizes every other monkey around here’ as I threw the third and final banana at it. Halfway through the third banana, Bow tried to get a better picture of him, so she decided to move the camera about an inch forwards. This male didn’t like her actions one bit, he bared his teeth, made some sort of noise, and sort of lurched forwards at her! Sheesh, what a mean monkey! I found out soon that he was ‘ Boss Man’, pretty much everyone else calls him that, and for a good reason. He wasn’t afraid of some other monkey, he just wanted all the bananas we had left! So that’s why the female rushed off so quickly, to get away from the big meanie! Gah! Some things get simpler, the more complex they get eh? Confused? I was for quite a long time.

     By the way, I’m writing this about 3 or 4 days after the event, we’ve been out of Varanasi for almost 4 days now. Therefore, my crazy details won’t be so crazy anymore, if anyone knows what I mean.   

    Back to the animals in India… The next couple of animals we saw were the dogs, tons of dogs in Varanasi, and most of them aren’t taken well care of. That’s the really sad part, even sadder is that there are very cute little teeny tiny puppies that are so skinny that you can see pretty much every bone in their bodies!

Me and a watchful Varanasi goat

Varanasi street dogs

My family and I had to stop on our way back in the middle of the road to pet a little grey puppy. No one really cared much, until we pulled out some tasty rice for it. Then a soldier came over to us and told us that the dogs here do not eat the rice, just meat. That was kind of a shocker since our dogs love rice in there dinner (mom’s fault… darn super spoiled dogs). As we headed to our hotel the same day, we saw another dog. It had slept in the same spot for 4 days, as soon as we woke it up, it wagged its tail! I thought it made sense, but then mom told us that the children here in Varanasi abuse the dogs for fun! Holly Shmoly! I’ve seen a couple kids trying to club the dogs, and then smile as soon as the dogs were out of reach as if they were having fun. All of this is very upsetting for me, and probably for multiple others also. In victoria, dogs are well taken care of, not many are that skinny until they hit a very old age. But here it hits them almost right away! We have only seen one fairly big dog in India, and that was in Agra at the Taj Mahal. He was a guard dog on the watch lying down on a bench! Hahaha, he was a very funny dog!

The Taj Mahal "Guard" Dog

    The final animal(s) that were interesting for my family in Varanasi were the cows and bulls. All over the city, tons of them! It’s good karma to give some food to the cows, and bulls (most people are scared of the bulls though, so they leave them alone, Chickens). Bow and I fed multiple cows while we were there, it was quite interesting. Although they feed the cows a lot, some of the cows are unlucky because they find themselves in a very small ally where no one looks down/ goes through. After a while of doing this, these cows become quite skinny, while others on the main street become McDonalds size cows… huge bowling balls with 4 legs and a small head.

Cow on the street in Varanasi

 The Taj was fabulous as some of you might have guessed. My family snagged some fab pictures here.  This is also the place where we saw the dog on the bench. We took a hike in the Taj gardens before we left for Jaipur in a nice little Toyota van with air-conditioning. The trip was about 5ish hours, but to me, it was about 2… you see, I have this problem when I’m in a car I get a little sleepy, like a baby. When it’s a long drive, and we’re not going to Tofino, I usually fall asleep. This is exactly what I did on this trip, for about 3 hours I believe.  Our driver was a nice guy, he didn’t really talk much though, and I think he was just leaving us in peace.

  For my birthday in Jaipur India, we went to an observatory, outdoors. With fascinating, pretty much everything was made of stone, if not it was a metal. And everything was as accurate as you can get, down to the exact 2 seconds. At first I thought that that was kind of crazy, but the more time we spent there the more I began to like it. All of us thought that the guy who built all of this, including his co-workers, as some sort of genius. We went out for dinner at an Italian, for pizza and pasta! Then book-shopping two floors down from where we were eating, and that was it.

One of the amazing instruments in the observatory

We are in a very nice hotel in Jaipur now.  There are even animals that are treated very well. 2 cats and 2 dogs, the cats aren’t the cuddliest, and the older dog I have named Snarls. For a good reason too, I was only a couple feet from it, going nice and slow towards it… keeping it casual, you know, nice and easy. Then it snarled at me, and stumped off. The other dog is a big lab puppy, very playful during the late evening and night. I play with it a lot, with my hands, or make it chase me around the pool! Bow got sick the day after my birthday… so she’s been taking it easy in our room.

Thank you all for supporting us and following our adventures!

                                                                        Hesquiat (with pictures by Bow)

 

Varanasi’s Vehicles

Travel Advice by Hesquiat & Bow

Photos by Bow & Cate

Hesquiat wants everyone to know that if they’re coming to Varanasi they might want to bring nose plugs because there are quite a few animals who poop on the street.  Also, at night the bulls can get a little aggressive so you’ll want to avoid any confrontations,  Better to get lost at night than to try to pass a mad bull.  His third piece of advice to visitors is that although a sitar lesson can be quite enjoyable, you’ll have to enjoy both music and torture to enjoy a sitar lesson.  He complains that both index fingers, his knees, foot and hip are still aching from our 1 hour lesson.

Bow picked the traffic theme for our picture essay because she thought it would be interesting.  However, she discovered this morning when we headed out on our artistic project that wanting pictures of vehicles and getting them were two different things.  First, tons of people walked in front of us blocking the view, second the vehicles themselves were going too fast despite the crowd so it was hard to get a good picture, and third, she had to fend off offers of marriage from eligible shop owners.  Hard to take a picture and say no to a potential groom at the same time.

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The Streets of Varanasi

By Anne Marie & Cate

Today was our first day wandering the streets of Varanasi. Thanks to Thomas and Janice for encouraging us with their high praise of the mystic adventures to be found here. However, before we start on today we must share one of our first Indian experiences – the nearest big street is closed to car traffic after 3pm but a simple slip of some rupees to the police and we were on the way to our hotel. No problem.

We spent the morning with a tour guide walking various streets and ghats. The Ganges River is very high due to the end of the monsoon season so we cannot walk the ghats (others who have been here would know what this means) but we can meander the streets and visit various ghats. The colours of flowers, saris and painted temples, the smells of cow and goat dung, the cooking smells mixed with intermittent wafting garbage smells mixed with the holy and ubiquitous shrines, gods, and goddesses – the streets of Varanasi.

We are all enjoying ourselves and looking forward to the next 3 days without a tourguide, just bumbling along. We have plans for picture taking, a music lesson, ayurvedic head massage, reflexology, swimming at an expensive hotel and perhaps a bit of shopping.  Here are some pictures from our first day about town.

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Shopping in the Grand Bazaar

by Cate & Bow

We spent a few hours in the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul this week.  This bazaar is clearly just for tourist, lots of jewelry, carpets, lamps, dishes, t-shirts and other tourist items.  Bow and I both took pictures in the bazaar and here they are – our first joint artistic effort.   Bow says she took the picture of the cat because his mooching reminded her of a certain little jack russell.

We were warned by the guide books to prepare to bargain and to never pay the asking price.  We didn’t find too many bargains – stuff was actually cheaper on the streets than in the market.  But we had a great time wandering around.  Hesquiat did buy himself a leather jacket and we got a few other little souvenirs and gifts (not to ruin any surprises or anything).  

We’re off to Delhi tonight and then after a 10 hour layover, on to Veranasi (wish us luck!),

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Wandering in Istanbul

By Cate

The Blue Mosque

We’re heading to Doha, Qatar today where the temperature is 39 C today!   Before we leave Istanbul, here are a few pictures from the streets and from the beautiful Aya Sofia. The Aya Sofia was built something like 1500 years ago and was a Christian church for almost 1000 years before it became  a mosque for 500 years.  There is a combination of art from both religions inside and the stone ramp to the second floor was amazing.

 Istanbul is a city filled with hungry stray cats, Rome and Paris are cities filled with well-fed dogs, quite a contrast.  We snuck bits of our dinners out of restaurants and fed the cats.  Kenn we haven’t had a chance to read the local paper but we did get to experience internet policing when we were forbidden to look at the video of Jill Johnson’s escapades in the 70’s from the New York Times website.  Also, there are very few women running or working in businesses, we deal almost exclusively with men here who stand on the street and try to enitce us into their shops.  Anne Marie and I are oddly immune to their charms.   We took a boat tour on the Bosphorous sea, walked around the old city and dove into the Grand Bazaar – all good stuff.  None of the city maps we found actually have street names on all of the streets – probably because more than 1/2 the streets don’t have any street signs.  We thought we’d get more lost in this city than we once did in Hanoi but we managed to find our hotel every evening so it was all good.

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Pictures of Us In Istanbul

By Cate

Well it seems none of us really like to get our photo  taken but some of us still manage to ham it up for the camera.  Here are a few snaps of us all in Istanbul.  Snaps of the city and of our adventures in the Turkish Bazaar are next on the list.  Thank you all for your comments, we all enjoy them and look forward to hearing from you.

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