We've been in Mumbai for a week for our friend's wedding, so there have been no posts. It was a lot of fun, we hung out with our friends from America, saw the ancient caves at Ellora and Ajanta, attended a wedding, were pampered by the bride's family, and I ate a hamburger for the first time in 6 months.

More details will come in the next few days!

I know that it is snowing in many parts of the US, and the first snowfall came over a month ago, but here it was 88 degrees 2 days ago. Today was our first chilly day.

Yesterday when I woke up, it was raining, but by mid-morning the skies had cleared and it was pleasant 70 degree day. This morning started the same way, so I left the house in a short sleeved shirt, anticipating another sunny day. However, it didn't get much past 60, so I was chilly most of the day.

I spend most of the day indoors, but the buildings here are made to allow air to circulate in the monsoon season, and not to keep in warm air on the colder days. Some windows are holes in the wall with no way of closing them, and other windows are permanently open due to the positioning of coolers, etc. There are no heating in the buildings, so that is out of the question.

But I warmed up when I got home with a sweater and a cup of tea, and tomorrow night we leave for Bombay, where the weather report said it was 88 degrees today.

Our food situation has been getting better as we find our way around the local offerings. We have learned how to make proper chutney, and explored some of the unfamiliar spices and vegetables. This information does not always come easy... we have to ask the cook what is needed and we don't always know the words for foods that aren't in America, so we have to go to the store and hope we get the right things. Also, new foods come in and out of season, including the sita phil (pictured) also known as a "custard apple", which has sweet, gooey insides.

We also got a blender (called a mixee here), which means that we have been having much better masalas. Instead of tomato and onion chunks floating around with the vegetables, we can have a thick, flavorful gravy. I also found out how to make a pancake/flatbread out of rice and lentils soaked overnight... basically use the mixee to grind them into flour, add water, and cook like pancakes. We also learned about roasted eggplant (cook it directly on the burner first), and how to make good tomato chutney (use a mortar and pestle, not the mixee).

Jackfruit has also shown up in the local market, and it makes an excellent curry. It looks a lot like pulled pork, and though not as good as slow cooked swine, is a nice dish. Between having a cook make us fresh food every night, and the amount of oil used to cook/fry things, I have put back most of the weight I lost. I still miss the variety of meats, but I will be going to Bombay later this week, and I have been told where to find bacon!

There are two main types of meat available here, chicken and mutton. We usually eat chicken when we eat meat (which we eat every week or two) because it is more consistent in its taste and preparation. Good mutton is very good, and bad mutton is stringy and gamey, whereas good chicken is pretty good, and bad chicken is just tasteless. We have had mutton a few times, both in curries and briyanis (a rice dish), and the best so far has been one prepared by Dolly's cousin for Diwale.

What we found out recently is that the mutton we've been eating isn't sheep! I didn't even know that "mutton" could mean anything else, but what we've been served as mutton has been goat. In retrospect, this makes a lot of sense. There are goats everywhere, and its too hot for sheep. Dolly will now not eat anymore mutton, but I don't see too much different between the two... and in this area its the only red meat around!

There's a donkey that lives by the side of the road in the first town past Bilaspur. There's a main commercial strip, and the donkey stays on the edge of it. Its there almost everyday, and it sticks out because while cows are common, donkeys are not. It is usually standing there, not moving just kind of looking at the ground like a sad animal.

Last week, the doctors noticed it sitting in the same place on the side of the road for a few days in a row. One of the doctors is an animal lover, and the thought of the donkey slowly dying of thirst worried her. She suspected a spinal injury. After seeing it there repeatedly, her husband stopped and talked to the people around to try to find out who owned the donkey and what was happening. It turns out the donkey had some kind of infection but was being treated with bandages and medecine. It wasn't moving much, but was getting up to take water and what not.

It is kind of surprising to see such a fuss over an animal, when there is so much human suffering going on in the same stretch of land. The doctors are very sensitive to that suffering, devoting the majority of their time to addressing it. The surprising part is that after all of that they still have time and energy to check out the condition of a helpless animal.

Dolly is in Dhamtari for a few days interviewing farmers as part of a project to collect stories of SRI farmers across Chattisgargh. That area has some level of Naxal activity, and it seems that lately there has been more focus on the Naxals, Maoist rebels who are active in the remote forest areas.

Yesterday as we approached the JSS campus, there were soldiers sitting every few yards with their rifles. There is an army training compound in the area, and it was part of the training. In the evening a few soldiers waved down our vehicle. I thought at first it may have been a checkpoint, but it turned out they were just tired and asking for a ride.

I started my tabla lessons today. We learned "na", "ghe", and "da", although I spent the better part of an hour just trying to get the basic hit. Learning an instrument is never as fun as actually playing it. Dolly had her singing lesson at the same time, so I got to listen to her first attempts to sing on key in front of an audience.

On Sunday we went to lunch with some visitors. They are from the Tata Trust and part of their management program, and they are here for 6 weeks. They spend a year visiting different parts of the Tata empire as training, and after that they are placed into permanent jobs. They have the phone numbers of two different auto drivers who they can call up for rides. Dolly and I usually just walk to the main road and grab who happens to be there.

On the ride over we saw preparations for yet another festival. We asked the driver what the occasion was, and he didn't know. He said something about how different castes have different celebrations. The festivals are really starting to border on ridiculous - they've been going on for two months, and now they're so many that people don't even know what they all are.