Friends with Benefits

Last night we had our friends Shah and Fiona over for a Mardi Gras dinner of shrimp creole, salad and crusty French bread with brownies and ice cream for dessert.  They came armed with delicious wine from Spain (they have a home there and just visited a couple of weeks ago) and a sack full of vegetables from their garden.  Beautiful & leafy Swiss chard, a fennel bulb (can’t find those in the market), perfectly white cauliflower and bunches broccoli rabe.

Ah, the variety!  I’ve been looking up recipes and thought this one looked particularly good for the chard.  I think I may just roast the cauliflower with olive oil & salt until it gets crunchy and toasty.

Any other suggestions for preparing these delicious goodies?

It’s morning time and I’m already hungry for dinner!

Firsts

We celebrated our three-month anniversary in Delhi on Sunday.  Can you believe it?  I can’t! The time has gone by so quickly but August 1st seems like it was ages ago.  Funny how time plays tricks on the mind.

We’ve had a lot of “firsts” while we’ve been here.  We’re getting excited for our first visitor – Susan (Mark’s sister).  She arrives on Friday night and we’re going to take her to Jaipur and Agra next week – firsts for all of us. Then Patricia and Katharina follow a few days later and we’ll see sites with them through new eyes.

This is exactly what we’ve been waiting for – to see our family & friends, the people who know us best who will ease pangs of loneliness or homesickness that passes over us at any given moment. To share a part of our lives; to see and hear and taste and smell the things that we can’t explain on blogs or emails or Skype.  We appreciate the investment in time and money and hope that the experience will not disappoint.

Dinner Party

Last night Mark and I had a few of his colleagues over for dinner.  Mark works with Karthik at AIIMS.  Niveditha works at the Public Health Foundation of India and under their umbrella is the Center for Chronic Disease Control (CCDC) where Seema is a Fogarty Scholar and Mark is doing research there.  I kind of forgot how fun it is to entertain…creating a menu, preparations, and finally the fun!

Seema and me

Karthik, Gautam, Niveditha

Since our guests are Indian we decided not to attempt Indian food (we’re still learning) and went for our Thai favorites – veg. spring rolls with peanut sauce, green curry and cabbage/carrot salad and fruit salad and Haagen Dazs ice cream for dessert.  There were few leftovers which I’ll take as a good sign.

King

I found 550 ml (approx. 20 oz) bottles of Budweiser beer at a posh grocery market the other day and snatched up a couple of bottles.  Bud is not a beer that I typically drink or buy but when I saw them all lined up in the refrigerated case looking so cold and refreshing, I couldn’t resist.  To be honest it’s been the best beer I’ve had in Delhi.  Maybe it’s the homesickness or the hops but if one good thing came out of that Inbev deal…Budweiser in India!

A little St. Louis in New Delhi

Setting up home

It’s our two week anniversary in our apartment…here’s a little about it.  If you want the full on house tour, you’ll have to Skype us.  We’ve honed our skills over the past couple of days.  Getting back to the apartment…

Many of the places we looked at were unfurnished as in furniture, all major appliances and utilities (gas, water mainly) which meant that we were responsible to purchase bedroom, dining & living room furniture, stove top, fridge, microwave, toaster oven (ovens are not common here), wash machine, A/C units, inverter and batteries (as back-up for when the power goes out) plus go to the gas company and beg for a gas cylinder and hook-up and get a water purification unit installed.  It was going to take some coordination and effort and we were willing to take on the responsibility even for our short stay.

Mr. Kumar was our apartment broker and he showed us a couple of really nice places.  The one we wanted was unfurnished and we were okay with that but the landlord was insistent on a two-year lease.  That was our deal breaker.  We went back to the apartment several times but Mr. Landlord just wouldn’t budge.  Back to the drawing board.  On Sunday, Mr. Kumar took us to a furnished place in Green Park Main that had everything and when I mean everything, I mean it.  Three bedrooms (each with their own bathrooms), 4 A/C units, inverter and two batteries, stove, fridge, dining & living room furniture, beds, TV, good lighting (by that I mean incandescent lighting fixtures) and it was approximately 3 times the size of our Chicago apartment.  We wanted to know why Mr. Kumar had been hiding this little gem from us!

We negotiated a price and talked over the lease agreement with our landlord (he and his wife live on the ground floor (zero floor) and their son & daughter-in-law live on the first floor (second floor in US terms), we’re on the second floor (third floor).  We moved in on Thursday, August 14 and so far, it’s been great.  We got the gas hooked up, the water purifier installed and the wash machine fixed a week ago Monday and have been able to cook our meals every night this week.  The inverter and batteries were also installed and checked this week, too.  We have power outages nearly everyday and without them, it gets hot pretty darn quick…even the ceiling fans make a huge difference.  Our landlord and his wife have been so helpful with the move-in and getting many of these things done for us.

The outside:

Our Apartment in Green Park

Street view:

Looking left - the yellow things are gates that close at night

The Kitchen & water purifier (it doesn’t seem exciting but at least we haven’t gotten sick!)

The Kitchen

It's ugly but it works!

There’s a dedicated space for a dining room but it’s not air conditioned.  Instead all the furniture fits nicely into the living room.  We went to a place called Fabindia and picked up some fabrics to cover the chairs.

Here's the living room half

The dining room half

Our bedroom:

Those are built in closets on that far wall

Standing guard

I took pictures of the other rooms but they aren’t very exciting.  One is used as a drying rack (electric dryers are hard to come by in these parts and it’s freakin’ hot and there are power outages) and the other one we’re still working on for all our friends and family who are planning visits. 🙂

The location is great, too.  We’re a few minutes from Mark’s work, steps away from the main market shopping (which is okay, not great) but it does have a couple of nice cafes and pretty centrally located to the areas we want to go to.  Our next task is to purchase a cheap car and hire a driver.  Keep your fingers crossed on that one!

Socializing

There’s an expat group here called Delhi Network and they meet every Tuesday morning for coffee.  The web site was helpful so we decided to give it a shot and membership has already paid for itself!  We met some very interesting people who have been in Delhi for various amounts of time.  It is an international group and members are from Europe, Australia & New Zealand and the U.S.  The group was quite large – around 50 or so and toward the end we had to introduce ourselves.  This turned out quite well and the other American members sought us out.   The amounts of information is overwhelming (hiring house staff, drivers, water purification, how to thoroughly wash fruits and veg) but has been helpful already.  I look forward to going back next Tuesday!

We also dropped off our application for a social membership at the American Club.  While we were planning to join, a couple of the Americans I met at the coffee strongly recommended it as a way to meet people and escape some of the hecticness of daily Delhi life.  We’re having a tour of the facility on Thursday.  Can’t wait!