Mumbai - Day 2: Food...and a little work
Part I: It must be Monday

I haven't talked much about the food yet. Whenever I'm in another country I try to eat their food, their way. In China I have Chinese food (yes that means noodles for breakfast - YUM!) Thus in India, today I had a dosa for breakfast. A dosa is a crisp South Indian rice and lentil pancake that's filled with turmeric potatoes and served with a lentil stew. The dosa is served as shown in the top right photo, all rolled up covering the tasty potatoes inside. You rip off pieces of the dosa and pick up bits of the turmeric potatoes with it, eating it with your hands. The second photo on the right shows it about half finished after I'd uncovered it enough to take a snap shot of the inside.

As shown to the lower left, I also had some bread (the round ball), Aloo Gobi (potato and peas), fresh Mango juice (SOOO YUM!), Parantha (the triangle of bread with mint and maybe chickpeas in it), Coconut Chutney (in the small bowl), fruit and coffee. Yum yummy yum!!









Sadly I can't show you Dan's meal as he awoke feeling increasingly lousy and decided to rest in for the day since he had the opportunity to do so and hopefully kick this bug before we reach Sri Lanka on Wednesday.

The schedule ended up changing a little today. The work part of the trip where I design a number of items and work out the details for sampling etcetera took hours longer than it should have. There are many reasons for this. One of them is the breaking of my new camera. No, not by me. There are other reasons that I won't go into - they don't make me happy and I want this to be a happy post. I finished my work, but alas there was no time to get to the knitting factory. So that has been moved to tomorrow.

Part of me is happy about this as perhaps Dan will be feeling well by then. He really enjoyed yesterdays factories and I'm sure he'd be interested to see this one too!

Dan was feeling better enough by evening to join us all (vendor, his wife, my boss and I) for dinner at Masala Kraft located at The Taj (the fanciest hotel in town.) Contemporary Indian food.

Paneer, some of the BEST cauliflower I've ever had and various other vegetarian dishes were served. Yum!! We also tried a nice local 2004 Sauvignon Blanc by Sula Vineyards, located about 180km northeast of Mumbai in Nashik. A very new vineyard indeed, the first bottles sold in 2000 (if you are interested in a young vineyard read there About Us section on the link above). This one was light and crisp. Well paired with the spicy veg courses.

We were also treated to a local favorite cardamom ice cream dessert. Mmmms all around!!

Half-way through dinner our host told us that the son of a friend of his was getting married a few moments down the road (between the park where we watched the cricket match and our hotel) and if we wanted to, we could stop into the reception after dinner. Weddings are a HUGE deal in India... so I shall post this and take proper time for Part II: Weddings.