With sweets in hand, we first visited Dr. Mehra, a neighbor on the other side of the block. She introduced herself to us one day at our local Sukun park a while back and invited us over. My answer to nearly every invitation/opportunity here is, "sure". So, for a little under two hours, Samantha and I sat and chatted with Dr. Mehra, who is still a practicing gynecologist at 75, and her husband, also a doctor who had to retire due to a poor back. It was a really nice time talking about how they met each other at the hospital across the street from the Defence Colony, their life in the neighborhood, and life in Delhi in general. They were also strongly of the opinion that I should be giving Samantha solid food! At one point they called their pediatrician friends to check in since I am still exclusively breast feeding. As you can see, it's a controversial topic here!
Unfortunately, I don't have pictures of this excursion for you all, but I will put up photos next time I see the Mehras.
Next, Samantha and I headed to one of my most treasured new friends in Delhi, Seema. Seema kindly carpools with me to yoga, even though I don't reciprocate the carpooling. She lives a block away with her husband and daughter Ananya, who's a freshman in high school.
Seema & Samantha
Seema's daughter, Ananya, holding Samantha
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I have to admit that we didn't take any pictures on Christmas because I wasn't feeling my best (after a full five days of serious Delhi belly, I'm better)! We did have a very nice afternoon lunch at our home with Miles. It was our quietest Christmas ever, despite lots of skyping. We knew that we had a little holiday to look forward to after the holiday, as we'd won a FREE two night stay at a fancy hotel just south of Delhi. Andy and I were looking forward to the temperature controlled rooms (it's cold right now in our home with no central heat in the Delhi winter), a king sized bed (instead of our two twin mattresses pushed up next to each other), no laundry to wash in the shower in our bucket and no floors to clean daily. And, admittedly, we were also looking forward to watching some bad TV. The hotel is adjacent to a huge mall, so we walked there for a little bit when we left the room, but mostly we chilled out in our room while Andy tried to get some work done.
Here's what Samantha and I did most of the two days. Notice the holiday looking lights out the window? That's traffic headed into Delhi.
Samantha & Andy pretending like they don't know each other (just kidding!)... enjoying the good brunch at the hotel. Our new entertainment for her at meals is to give her a spoon. This was her first highchair attempt that lasted just long enough for me to take this picture.
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Forgive me for moving back in time a little, but there were a few things I wanted to show you that happened before Christmas, before Sara and Roberto left! One of Sara's goals on this visit to India was to see the International Museum of Toilets. Yes, it exists here in New Delhi. So, we rented a taxi for the day from our local taxi stand (I am going to include a picture of these taxi men soon, we are developing a relationship) and headed out to west Delhi to check out the Shulabi International Toilet Museum.
The Toilet Museum. It has a lot of iterations of the toilet from throughout the world.
Roberto, ever the professor, did a great job of taking our guide very seriously throughout the tour.
Not sure if I can say the same about Sara on the tour! Or myself for that matter!
This woman (I didn't get her name) was our tour guide for the exterior portion of the museum. Here she's showing us all of the different types of toilets Mr. Shulabi (the founder of the museum) has developed. I was happy to discover days later that every metro station has a Shulabi Toilet Complex where you pay a few rupees to use (and subsequently fund the museum among other things).
The word "excreta" was peppered throughout our tour. At one point, our tour guide had to leave and go eat her lunch from the "excreta kitchen". All in all we left Shulabi a little suspicious given that there were no other visitors to the museum and there was just a weird vibe. To their credit, it was a free museum and the guides were perfectly informative. Maybe it was that the place seemed a little strange, with some strange excreta humor. I will leave it at that...
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Before Aunty Sara left she gave Samantha her first haircut.
Post haircut with curls styled.
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Wedding preparations in our neighborhood. Aren't the colors amazing?
Wedding entrance decorations.
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Happy New Year!
