It's All About the Food.

 As some of you might imagine, India is very into it's food. We eat rice at almost every single meal without fail, and they are always asking if we are "veg" or "non-veg". It's a big deal here, because many Hindus are strictly veg. They assume that Americans are hardcore carnivores and are always shocked to learn that someone in my group is a vegetarian.

Trying a fresh coconut.

People here are big on breakfast. Literally the first thing people at school as you in the morning is "Had your breakfast?". Like, actually EVERYONE asks. Even all the way til lunchtime. It gets really awkward when I say that I haven't and they ask why and I have to explain that I don't really like eating breakfast and they ask if I don't like Indian breakfast foods and I have to say that I really don't eat breakfast anywhere and they act like it's the strangest thing they've ever heard (which it definitely ISN'T--you should see some of the bizarre articles published in the newspaper here!). I've concluded that much of the time, the simplest answer when anyone asks this question is "Yep!"

Classic "mess" (cafeteria) food.

 As per Indian custom, we eat with our hands here. You take your four fingers and mush some liquid into your rice, form a kind of ball and then lift it up with those fingers and push it into your mouth with your thumb. I'm terrible at it. I can't ever get my ball formed right, so I'm essentially just shoving fingerfuls of food into my mouth. It was really hard at first to be so bad at eating and have all the girls around me staring and giggling while I tried. It doesn't bother me as much anymore, either because I've gotten better at it or they've just gotten over it...I'm not sure which.

Cooking in the wok during cuisine.

The meal we made during my first practical cuisine class.

 I've gotten pretty good at eating all the spicy things they throw my way, although according to my cuisine teacher the Indian catering students we have class with use significantly less chiles when preparing dishes that the American students are going to be eating. And they're STILL hot! Not to mention we taste test everything here and my teacher likes to just plop some piping hot thing into your palm. A few times I've chickened out right before the food left the spoon and pulled my hand away. Whenever I do this, the Indian students think it is hilarious that I can't palm some curry or other that's been simmering for ages. They can all just pour things onto their hands no problem. But everything that we've made has been really delicious.

Making dinner in the apartment.

 On Wednesday and Friday nights, as well as weekends, we cook dinner for ourselves in our apartment. I've been making a lot of stir fries or simply heating up bagged curry dishes (the Indian equivalent of a microwave frozen dinner, I think) to eat over rice. I also bought some pasta, pine nuts, and sun dried tomatoes (those things all cost a fortune, but that's okay since it'll be nice to have a more American...okay, Italian... meal) that I'm really excited about cooking up. And then there was the one time that my apartment ordered some Pizza Hut delivery and watched a movie. That was so much fun and it was real pepperoni and it tasted ALMOST exactly like American Pizza Hut!

That one time I ordered Pizza Hut delivery in India...