..SouthAsiaRocks..

This week we took a mini-trip "out of town". We were actually still in the Capital, but a little over an hour away from where we live, so we stayed in a hotel in that part of the city. A bunch of fun college students were in town and we were helping with their orientation :) On our way over to the Hotel, we saw this: That same thing is on the back of our 500 rps Bill. I didn't know there was a statue of it. It was pretty cool to see. It's actually a statue of the Salt March to Dandi on March 12, 1930 which was a part of the Salt Satyagraha. I know that probably lost most of you, but this was actually a pretty big event in our county when they were a Colony of the Brittish. It was actually a non-violent protest against the Brittish Salt Tax. Over 80,000 people were jailed as a result of it. The campaign had a significant effect on changing world and British attitudes toward independence in this country, and caused large numbers of South Asians to actively join the figh...

Here are a few random pics from this past week :) This little boy is living at the construction site next door - his mom is working at it. He's really cute :) We had House Meeting at our house this week. We told a story from the Book and decided to act it out with Aashini's puppets so that it could help us learn it better :) Aashini thought it was so cool! She jumped up on the "puppet stage" and went crazy over the puppets :) Afterwards we played a little Wii... When people play Wii, you can get some pretty fun pictures :) Another Wii picture :) This time of year there are these beautiful yellow flower trees blooming! They are so cool!!!

Have you ever heard of "Fish Therapy"?? My friend Sharon in Southeast Asia wrote about it on her blog about a year ago (click if you want to see her post) and I thought it looked so interesting and I really wanted to try it but we didn't have it here. Well, today during our Sunday afternoon fun time, we went to the mall. We kept seeing advertisements for Fish Therapy so we had to go check it out and at least look at it! We got there and they said I could do a 30 minute session for about $5 so I just had to try it!! . So what is fish therapy?? Basically there are these special fish - Garra Rufa (from Turkey) that are in a big tank. You put your feet in the tank and the fish attack your feet and eat off all the dead skin and calluses! OK, so here's a pic of me when I first put my feet in... it tickled BIG TIME when I first put my feet in!!!! Then, after a minute it quit tickling and it felt like my feet were kinda tingling... They went crazy on my feet!! (that'...

I wrote about these a long time ago, but since then I've learned a lot more about them so I thought I'd re-share... besides, they're really interesting to me :) I hadn't seen (or heard) of purple carrots until we arrived here in South Asia. I remember learning the word for Carrot and then going to the veggie seller guy to ask for carrots. When I asked him, he pointed to some red carrot-looking things and some purple carrot-looking things. I thought he didn't understand my Hindi, so I repeated the word but got the same response. So, I decided to try the purple carrots. I read up a little on them (there's not much out there), but aparently they originated in the Middle East around Afghanistan and then made their way over to South Asia. I also read that carrots used to be very thin, red, purple and black - and terribly bitter. The orange color didn't appear until the 16th century when enterprising Dutch growers used a mutated yellow carrot seed from North Afri...

Well, being pregnant, Adam is always on the lookout for things that I'll eat (I'm the pickiest eater when I'm in the early part of pregnancy)... Anyway, at the hospital there is a little food area called "Whole Foods" (different from the big "Whole Foods" stores in America). Anyway, the other day they had Toasted Watermellon Seeds - I didn't know you could eat those! They were pretty good. They had Masala flavor on them too :) haha!

Before we went to the states, they started tearing down the house next door ... since houses here touch walls, our wall was somewhat exposed when they tore down the house next door... sooo... when it rained, our walls would get wet... That's why Our Wall fell apart not too long ago... ANYWAY, they finally started building the house next door... This might be boring for some of you, but building houses over here is VERY different than building in the states... There's one BIG thing missing... but we'll get to that... First, they got rid of all the debris and started to dig... it was fun to watch - I felt like I was watching an archaeological dig... they kept uncovering random brick formations! They kinda gave up on some of the brick formations and just left them and started to make the support beams. These beams our made out of rebar and have a pretty solid concrete & rebar base. This is the guy that was in charge of the begining part of the construction. He's fro...