..SouthAsiaRocks..

At Christmas time it is pretty normal to see people selling "Santa Gear" at the red lights... but the other day I saw something I hadn't seen paired with Santa Hats before... haha!  You never know what you'll see... :)

So this is going to be a random post... but I finally found a good way to "store" my jewelry and I thought I'd share :)  I found this fun hook thing and hung my necklaces on it.  I finally got a bangle stand to put my bangles on too...  I used to store my earrings in a box but I never remembered what I had and I always had to look for the match... NOW, I can see all of them and they stay together!  My mom mailed me one of those plastic sheets that you can do cross stitch on (and things like that) and I had it framed without glass!  I know this is random - thought I'd share :) haha!

My favorite kind of "Funny Things" pictures are nose picking pictures... this time I caught my own daughter in the pick :) This picture (below) isn't funny because the restaurant is called "Yo! China" (it's actually a huge chain and pretty good!!!)... I think it's funny because of the huge sign next to it that says "Calories"... it must say something else in the fine print, but I'd say that their advertising scheme is lacking something.... "Come to Yo! China and you can have Calories!!!" :) haha!  We went to the American Embassy School for their Fall Festival and I saw this... it cracked me up :) This makes me smile every time I see it!!  This guy in the advertisement is so happy!  I love it! :) More to come...

This year for Thanksgiving we went to the Mountains again :)  Our train was 3 hours late leaving... so we spent some time in the train station before getting on the train :)  BUT...we made it!!  The air was clean & cool, the sky was blue, the water was awesome... it was fun an relaxing!   We had lots of opportunities to hang out with friends and play!!  Here is a pic of a fun game of Frisbee Golf :)  And of course, a Thanksgiving Day Football game!  Here we are eating our Thanksgiving meal :)  It was super fun :)  We went on a safari one day.  We were looking for tigers.  We never saw one, but we saw lot of tiger tracks!  In this pic you can see tiger tracks AND peacock tracks! :)  We stopped at a little store in the middle of the safari (that was surrounded by an electric fence!) and when we got out of our jeeps, the monkeys came running in and looked for things to take!  One monkey...

I bought some of these off this cart the other day... When we first got here, I saw them all around (especially this time of year) and had no idea what they were... Now, I buy them all the time - they're a great snack and fun to cook with... Do you know what they are???....  Water Chestnuts !!!!  It's popularly known as the "Water Fruit" here.  They are those fun white, sliced circle shaped things that are in a stir fry and other dishes :)  Anyway, I had no idea this is what they looked like in their "original" form :) haha!    This is another fruit that I really like... It's bit of a pain to eat, but it's yummy!  This is a Custard Apple!  It's super sweet but has lots of big annoying black seeds haha!  It's really good though and full of Vitamin C :)  (you can tell how sweet it is... if you look closely you can see the bees on it!).

We have a small mall that has opened up in the last 6 months near our house.  It's not full of shops yet (only about 10 stores or so are open) but it has a good mini-wal-mart-like-store and a play area for the kids!   It also has.... Sno Cones (or Shave Ice, Shaved Ice, Snow Cones, etc) :) They are so fun!!!  You can find snow cone type things all over the city, but it's usually made with unfiltered water.... this is made with filtered water! whoo hoo!  It's the little things.... :)

Last week was Guru Nanak's Birthday.  This is a big holiday for Sikhs.  Guru Nanak was the founder of the Sikh religion and the first of their 10 Gurus.  In many ways, this holiday is a celebration of the beginning of Sikhism.  We live in a neighborhood that has a very high population of Sikhs, so our neighborhood is abuzz with all the festivities! The other day (a few days before his birthday), I walked out of my house to see this: It was one of the many parades that took place last week.  We had at least one parade a day for a week!  Some days there were multiple parades.   Since it's an important date then there were also a lot of  weddings as well.  It was quite an exciting week!! Here are some of the kids getting ready for the parade. This is one of the trucks for the parade. There are multiple Sikh Schools in our neighborhood and they each had something to do in the parade. Here are a few of the groups marchi...

So, the other day when we were at the airport about to fly to Kerala, I got to meet two famous people!  I met two of the contestants from Indian Idol Season 5!!!  It's the most recent season that just finished airing.  I met Sreerama Chandra Mynampati (on the right) - he was the Indian Idol Winner! ... and I met Bhoomi Trivedi (the girl on the left) - she was the 2nd place winner!!  Cool hunh? Click HERE to see other famous people we've met while living in South Asia :)   You never know who you're going to run into :)

 Lighthouse Beach is called that because it has a lighthouse on it :) haha!  Here is the lighthouse on the beach :)  We were told you could climb to the top of the lighthouse, so we walked up the hill to see it... There was this door (below) that we walked through to get up... (when we went to walk down, that door was locked and we had to figure out another way to get down - haha!)...  At the lighthouse there was a little playground :)  My girls (especially Diya) LOVE to swing, so they had a great time :)  We decided to climb to the top of the lighthouse... There was a long spiral staircase to get up to the top.  The view on the way up was really great!  There were windows on the way up where you could look out - it was so neat!  Awesome view of Lighthouse Beach!  The view from the window - cool hunh?  Out one side you could see a small peninsula.  It had these 2 mosques at the end of it. ...