Diwali - still trying to catch up

There is so much to catch up on and tell everyone about. This is a post that I should have completed in early November, but never got the video edited.

Diwali is the biggest holiday in India. It is really fun and is sort of like Christmas, Thanksgiving and the 4th of July all rolled into one. It is the time for exchanging gifts, getting bonuses, and celebrating like there is no tomorrow. This was our first Diwali in India and we had a hard time figuring some things out - like how much of a bonus we give our housekeeper, driver, the guards out front, whether to bring a gift when we went over to someone's house, where to buy fireworks, and a million other things. Thank heavens for good notes left by Marty and Donna, the folks that were here before us!

As to why folks here celebrate Diwali, read the Wikipedia link above. I asked many people and no one could give me a really good answer. Rather, everyone I asked gave me a different answer. I guess it depends on what part of India you are from as there are several mythologies that go along with the holiday. I just decided to not really worry about why it was celebrated, and just join in and enjoy the experience.

Leading up to the day, there is a general sense of excitement. Everyone seems excited and you can tell there are lots of preparations going on. Around the city, lights get strung and things start looking very festive. Some flats and houses around the neighborhood get strung with lights like at Christmas. Markets get busy and light up really pretty.

We were invited to a friend's home for Diwali. Lakshmi and his family are from southern India and they celebrate with a brunch, which they were kind enough to invite us to. At the brunch they served traditional southern Indian food, modified a bit for us westerners. In south India, they tend to eat with their fingers. A banana leaf is the traditional 'plate'. In deference to us, we had a large platter type plate, and they gave us silverware. Of course, all of them ate with their fingers. :)

The food was good and varied between too spicy for me to eat and very mild. Since Lakshmi and his family are vegetarian, the whole bunch had only vegetarian dishes. In south India, the staple of the diet is rice, so that featured prominently in the meal, with plain rice, coconut rice (really, really good) and tamarind rice (a bit too spicy for me) all served at various times. There was a great potato dish and some flat bread as well along with more food than I can remember. All I can say is that I ate until I couldn't move, and then ate a bit more for good measure.

We then came home to prepare for our own Diwali party. The house was decorated, and looked very festive. (I can't believe we didn't take any pictures, but I sure can't find any!) We had lots of friends over, and the food selection was pure american. Like Thanksgiving, we again ate way too much, but it was absolutely wonderful.

After dinner, we headed up to the terrace and watched and listened to the fireworks. It was like nothing I have ever seen. There are absolutely no restrictions on the type of fireworks you can buy here in India. There is everything from the huge rockets that you see at Disneyland to things that sounded like they were dropped out of a military aircraft. If you were just listening, there probably isn't a lot of difference between a military invasion and what we saw from the roof. Just imagine, 14 million people in Delhi, with absolutely no restrictions on the type of fireworks that people can buy and you'll get a pretty good idea of what it was like. (There is an expat that rides with us on Saturday sometimes. He works for a concrete company. He said he showed up to one job site and there were a ring of workers standing around seeing how high they could blow a 5-10 kg (11-22 lb) block into the air.)

At one point, we could tell that a pretty good fire was burning a little ways away from our flat. A couple of us headed out to see if we could find what was burning. We never found what was burning, but saw lots of people throwing huge fireworks around the street. I think that next year, I'll just watch from the terrace!

The fireworks continued all night long and for several days after.

Here's a short video that I cut together to give you a sense for what Diwali was like. Click here to watch.

Thanksgiving in India

Well, here it is the day after Thanksgiving and I'm having a real hard time getting into the holiday spirit. It is interesting living in a country where Thanksgiving and Christmas are not celebrated. I'm not sure if it is the weather (which really feels more like mid September than the end of November), the lack of Christmas music wherever you go, the lack of Christmas decorations around the house, the fact that we don't have all the TV commercials reminding us to go buy that perfect gift for that special someone, or exactly what. However it is clear that the whole holiday season thing hasn't really sunk in yet for me.

Michelle and Becca are gone to the market to purchase a Christmas Tree (artificial, of course) and we'll start decorating later today or tomorrow. We didn't bring our Christmas decorations (see the previous post about the interesting things that come when you move around the world and the things that get left behind), so we are missing the tradition of redecorating the house with the turn of the season. So I figure the lack of the holiday spirit is a temporary situation that will be remedied soon.

While Michelle and Becca are gone, I put on Christmas music, gathered all the photos we took yesterday, and figured I would sit and write about our Thanksgiving yesterday.

We were invited to spend Thanksgiving with our friends, the Cleggs. So even though we missed our children and all of our family and friends in the US, we had a place to go and share our Thanksgiving. It was a really wonderful event and we are really thankful to the Clegg family for hosting the event.

After a morning where Michelle baked pies, a turkey, cookies, and rolls, we headed out the door. When we arrived, we saw some traditional Indian festive decorations.

Strings of flowers on the gates and a walk lined with fragrant flower petals.

Large decorative bowels with floating flower petals and candles.

But once you came through the front door, it looked (almost) all like a traditional American Thanksgiving. Friends hanging out in the kitchen, kids all over the place, conversation, food. It was a wonderful time! One thing that made it even better, the Clegg family had a caterer set up tables, bring (and wash) the dishes, decorate, bring flowers, provide the juice and clean up everything after it was all over. Laura Clegg said it was the best and easiest Thanksgiving ever! The cost on the caterer was about double the cost that we paid for our turkey. Caterer ~ $180, turkey ~$70.

Carving the $70 turkey!

Friends in the kitchen. From left to right, Teresa Osorio (good friend), Sister Ann Jackson (the Mission President's wife and good friend), Laura Clegg (good friend)

Almost all the kids - there were so many, I'm sure there are a bunch that aren't in the picture.

The tables and chairs that the caterers set up.

Yummy!

Why do we always take pictures of people eating? They really aren't very flattering.

It's Amazing What Moves when You Move

By now everyone has heard that all of our stuff finally cleared customs and has been moved into our flat. In fact, as I type this, Michelle is unpacking the last box and helping me organize the stuff that moved over for the office. I have to say, I LOVE sleeping in my bed, rather than the air mattress.

Remember one of my first posts pondering the question about why we have so much stuff? Well, I thought we had made some good headway before we moved by getting rid of a LOT of stuff that just didn't seem that important anymore. I think we actually did make some good headway. But we still kept things that we weren't quite ready to part with. Stuff that held memories for us, things like that. We marked those type of things for storage, because it was clear to us that we didn't need them with us here in India. But it didn't seem to matter much.

Things that got marked for India must have gone somewhere else, because they didn't make it here. Things that got marked for storage did end up here. We got a big chuckle out of some of the things that made it to India. Michelle took a picture of some of the things that we just couldn't live without -- apparently.

In the front row you can see Michelle and my graduation tassels, two from our High School graduations, the others from our University days. Then we have 'burn baby' the doll that Rebecca carried when she was a very little girl. (Ask her to tell you why she is called 'burn baby'. It is a good story.) On the back row we have art projects from Rebecca (the tall green figure), Jameson (we think - the brown clay thing with three cups) and Brenton (the clay square cup), Michelle's Barbie and Ken dolls, and Brenton and Jameson's arrows of light from Webelos days. I don't think we could have made it for three years without these things so I'm really glad that they got shipped here by mistake.

So what should we do with all of these treasures while we are here? Remember the travel photos with the garden gnome? Maybe we should have the "adventures of Burn Baby in India" or something similar.

On the other hand, all the toothpaste that our Dentist prescribed for us all seems to have gone to storage.

Isn't moving an adventure?