A tiffin and cricket

Hi everyone…hope you all have a great weekend!  We finished up our shift at work at 6 am Saturday and I took a quick 1.5 hour power nap before we were picked up at our hotel at 9 am.  We went over to the home of Vineet, the supervisor of the people in our training class.  He served us a tiffin, which is a light meal.  He made idly, which are small, circular rice cakes.  The idly is served with chutney…we had one chutney made with tomatos and chiles and another made with coconut.  The tomato/chile chutney was very good but the spice gradually increased as I ate more.  He also made Maggi, which is like our Ramen noodles, and we drank litchi juice (Yum).  Sadly his wife and daughter are out of town right now so we didn’t get to see them but he did tell us stories about how they met in college and that they have a love marriage and not an arranged marriage.  He explained that they were in different castes but both sets of parents agreed to the marriage.  We went through a large photo album with pictures from their wedding and it was very interesting to see all of the pictures!

After the tiffin, we went to see a cricket match at a local park.  Vineet organized this match for us to see today as Kristen had expressed an interest in seeing a match.  The UHC office over here has a few teams that compete in tournaments so we were watching two of the UHC teams play each other.  I had never watched a cricket match before so I feel like I learned a bit today!  I had a chance to swing the cricket paddle and hit the ball and it was fun!  Kristen took a pic of me hitting the ball on her camera so I’ll load that once I get it from her.  It was nice to be outside in the daytime here and enjoy the beautiful weather!  After the match Vineet took us out to dinner at a local restaurant and we had delicious food including a dessert new to me called moong dal halwa.  Dal is lentils but the dessert was rich and sweet.

Kristen and I went to the mall near our hotel to do some shopping after dinner.  The mall was busy tonight and it was interesting to see the stores that were there.  Some are stores that we have in the US like United Colors of Benetton, Puma, and Reebok.  The bottom level of the mall is a store with everything you could imagine, like a Super WalMart.  We bought a few snack items there including some litchi juice which we had and enjoyed this morning.  It was a full and fun day and we experienced some great hospitality!  I’m going to add a few new photos so please check them out!