Wednesday, January 5, 2011

Home Comforts

Those who haven’t left Australian shores will find it hard to understand the way that Aussie things can be missed.

Not meaning that they are there and they are ‘missed’ by being unnoticed, but rather that they aren’t there and the fact that I notice their absence cause me to miss them. Confused? So are many Indians when I speak, so I'm used to that.

In the land of curries, chapatis and butter naans; tasty food is easy to find, but for the same reason that I don’t frequent the local Indian restaurant for lunch and dinner every day at home, I occasionally go looking for something else. As I said, this food is good, but having it for every meal means that even those who love the stuff can grow tired of it.

For a westerner used to food which doesn’t use a tremendous amount of spice, there are certain other ‘consequences’ of a diet laden with the subcontinent’s finest powdery produce. I’m sure this doesn’t require too much imagination on your behalf.

Despite this picture making it look like a
600ml bottle it is actually 1.2L.
In the background (top) you can see
the rest of my exemplary diet.
In response to this, I try to find a taste of home. Buying coke and other well known soft drinks is all well and good, but it isn’t quite the same as they are mixed and bottled locally. In case you were wondering, my beverage of choice over here is a Mango flavoured, un-aerated drink called Maaza. My only story of note involving this drink happened at a local restaurant where I grabbed a bottle on my way to the Vision Rescue office one morning. As I later found out, when you purchase a drink in a glass bottle you are required to return the bottle to the store (they then send the empty bottle back to the soft drink company who re-fills it etc. etc.) it took the poor bloke from the restaurant a minute or two to realise that I wasn’t coming back, and then he came after me. I don’t know how he worked out what office I was going to, but he found me about 5 minutes later and didn’t look particularly impressed by my escapade antics.



The point of this blog though was to inform you all that I have found a shop from where I can purchase Australian Cadbury chocolate. It requires a significantly deeper pocket than the local Cadbury produce but the return on investment to my spice-abused taste buds is more than worth the initial outlay. I went for the ‘Crunchie’ variety of the dairy milk block which set me back 325 Rupees ($7.20). This may or may not seem a lot to you, but to put it in perspective, an airtel sim-card holder can phone someone for over 9 hours with that much money or I could purchase 20 return trips to Churchgate station (50 minutes away) and still have change to spare. A dinner at the cafeteria of the place I am staying costs me 50 Rupees, so you should be starting to see that this is an expensive block of chocolate. Nevertheless, I'm sure it won't be the last one I buy.

As an update on my VR work, I have now talked to one of the guys from the Mumbai Indians, so after exchanging email addresses, it is now a case of whether they are interested in what we have to offer. Please keep praying!!!

Prayer Points

  • Thank God for enabling me to speak to MI

  • Ask God that they will be interested in the proposal we have given them

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