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This past weekend Nikhil and I went up to the mountains north of us, to a town called Mussoorie, India. It's a town of 20k people with a few very good, internationally renowned schools. It's also got some really awesome views of the plains of India as well as the mountains to the north (it is on the southern edge of the Himalayan mountain range).
It took us about 7 hours to make our way the 209 kilometers (yep, that's an average of 18 per hour) from Meerut to the mountains. The road is said to have been improved, and we could definitely see signs of public works going on... but the speed attests to it's quality. Here's what a normal part of the trip might look like:
As we made our way into the mountains on Friday afternoon, the views were quite nice, although I didn't snap any pictures, banking on the weather report: Perfect all weekend.
It turned out to be raining quite a bit and because of the elevation we were in clouds the rest of the time. Bummer.
Some good news is that they have some really awesome omelet shops! Some are quite tiny, as you'll see in the video below, while others can be up to twice as big. Very tiny shops. Another one we went in, twice as big, seats about 5 people, and goes through up to 600 eggs in one day. Wow.
On Saturday, despite the rain, we decided to walk to the very top of the hill outside Mussoorie, in the hopes that the weather would clear. No dice. At least the rain was refreshing (I was about 50 degrees out and we were soaked and cold all weekend. Okay, now I won't mention that any more.).
That night, Nikhil introduced me to an after-dinner snack called paan. It's a digestive, and there's a great picture of a shopkeeper selling some at this wikipedia page. It was basically a green thick leaf, wrapped up with sugar and other "spices" (sometimes, but not in this case, tobacco), and then finally wrapped in a a thin leaf of some shiny metal. Which you put in your mouth. And it's kinda like chewing tobacco. But in a leaf. But its sugary. Fascinating.
Sunday we took our time coming home and drove through Dehra Dun to see the old clock tower.
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So you eat the tin foil too?? Doesn't that hurt?!
ReplyDeleteYeah, it was like a tin foil leaf type substance, really thin... I could taste it, but it seemed to dissolve. It's on the back of a lot of candies here. I really can't think that it's good for a person... but as with all things I try in new countries: If thousands or millions of people are doing it for decades or hundreds of years, me doing it once can't be that bad. :-)
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