The day that we spent at Vijay's village was fun. It started at about 5 a.m. and we left at around noon. We walked around the village and saw the cows and goats. They really wanted to make a breakfast that our kids would eat. Vijay knows how our kids are and told his mom that we brought cold cereal for our kids. She got the milk from the local water buffalo. After milking the cow she boiled the milk for us. Then Vijay told her we like it cold. She sat there for about an hour pouring milk from one pot to another trying to cool it down. She was trying so hard to make it how we like it. They don't have refrigerators or ovens there. All of the cooking is done over a fire.
While she was making the breakfast, Vijay took us on a tour of the village. The tour took about as long as it would take to take someone on a tour of Woodruff. :) We were able to see quite a few things. We went to his brother's house who is the rice farmer. At his house he had a grinder that they use in the village. The let Ethan take a turn.
Vijay's brother's house. The one who is the fix-it-man in the village. He is also the one who climbed the tree.
Vijay's other brother's house. He is a rice farmer and he is a cook at a hotel. Here they call restaurants hotels.
In the background of this picture there is a building that is the only grocery store in the village.
Vijay's other brother also took us out into the rice fields and climbed the trees to get us this fruit. I'm not sure what it is called, but it grows in a tree like coconuts, but looks like the color of eggplant. It has 3-5 big seed things that you eat inside. You can also pop the seed thing and pour the juice out.
Vijay helping Ethan cut the top off of the fruit
Annie drinking the fruit juice. She really liked it and wanted more.
This is a toy that they made out of the fruit. They were running up and down the road with it. It reminded me of when you see kids running with a rimmed tire and you push it with a stick.
After his brother got the fruit for us Vijay had to show us that he can climb the tree too.
After Ethan played with the kids in the rice field for a while we got back into our car and drove to Lakshmi's village. We got there and they were having a village festival.
I've been working on this post for a long time so....BEWARE LONG POST
May 12th-15th our family got to have the experience of going to Vijay's village where he grew up. Most of our pictures were taken in the form of video so hopefully I can upload them all.
It is an 8 hour drive to the small village of Chinna Abbipuram in Andhra Pradesh. We left on Thursday night and drove half way and stayed in Tirupati. We pulled up to a really nice hotel and I was kind of excited that I had booked a great hotel without knowing what I was booking. As Alan went in to check us in they informed us that there are 2 hotels with the same name, and we were staying at the other one. :( We found our hotel (not quite as nice) around 10:00 p.m.
I have traveled with our kids around India enough to know that they won't eat the food so I of course packed bread, chips, mangos, cookies and a lot of drinks. I'm glad I did because we were so tired that we didn't want to go find food. We booked 3 rooms...1 for Vijay's family (yes, Lakshmi, Shravia and Shrinidi came in the car with us), and 2 for our family. Every time we book hotels here we have to get 2 rooms because we have too many kids.
Alan ventured out with Vijay to get food for his family and to see if there was anything our kids would eat. They ended up getting food at the train station that was across the street. By about 11:00 p.m. we were all finally showered, fed and in bed. We woke up the next morning and had some breakfast and decided that because we were in Tirupati, which has a famous temple with Balaji we would go and see that. When you make a promise to the God Balaji, if it comes true the people come to this temple and hike 10 kms to the Balaji god statue and shave their heads. Most of the people here were bald.
The line behind this guy is for a free meal once you have shaved your head.
As we pulled up to the area where the temple is our car started having some problems that we thought we had fixed. We decided to park the car and walk to the temple while we waited for the car to start again.
Once the car started again we headed back to the hotel to get our things. On the way to the hotel the car again broke down. We stopped at an internet cafe to print out some hotel reservation forms and to look up the Toyota Dealership in Tirupati. As we sat in the internet cafe we joked about how Al Quida ran their whole operations out a place like this. We had to take a few pictures for those of you who have never been in an internet cafe.
The guys who ran the internet cafe wanted to get a picture with us. I don't know why, they didn't have a camera.
We all piled into a rickshaw and went to the hotel while Vijay eased the car to the dealership. We rented another car to take us the rest of the way. Now we had 10 people in a 7 passenger car because when you rent a car here you have to rent the driver too. :)
We finally started off to the village at 6:00 Friday night. By the time we arrived at 11:00 p.m. Vijay's mom, Panchalama had dinner waiting for us.
Panchalama and our family in front of her house.
We ate and went off to bed. The original plan that Vijay had told us was that we were going to sleep inside Vijay's mom's house on the floor, that's were they all sleep, and Vijay's family would sleep outside. When we got there the power to the house had been turned off and the fans weren't working. It was extremely hot and humid so they decided that they would sleep on the ground outside and our family could sleep on the cots outside with them.
We had packed a blowup mat because we are wimpy so Vijay and his family ended up sleeping on it. The people in the village had never seen such a thing as an air mattress and were very curious the next morning. As I said, we slept outside in the "front yard" on cots. I was one of the first people to wake up from our family the next morning, and as I opened my eyes, I saw four little brown faces staring down at me. I closed my eyes again and pretended to sleep a little longer. I heard some wrustiling around me and I took another peek around me. There were 3-4 more people watching us sleep and one lady was poking at the air mattress that Lakshmi was still sleeping on. I got out of bed and found my flip video. Here is the video of how we slept and I tried to slyly show some of the people as they watched Alan and my kids sleeping.
When we first decided to go and visit Vijay's village he told us there was only 1 problem with coming. There are no toilets in the village. Everyone just uses a field. Alan came up with a solution and told Vijay that we could just bring a bucket with us and turn it upside down and cut a hole in the bottom. Whoala, homemade toilet!! Vijay laughed and thought Alan was really funny. We joked about it for a few weeks before we went. Vijay thought we were being goofy, but we thought we had a good idea. I kept telling Vijay that everyone in the village is going to be jealous of my bucket. Once they see it, everyone is going to want one. He would joke back about how we needed to decorate it with devil faces so that the jealousy wouldn't break the bucket.
Well, that morning when I first woke up there was a lady there ready to help me. Apparently our problems were told to the village.
This lady in a weird way made me homesick for my granny. She was the only one in the village that really tried to laugh and joke with us. Luckily we didn't have need for "the bucket" while we were there.
I have been trying to learn a few of Baby's Indian recipes. She told me finally to video her making it and I can watch over and over until I get it right. Here are two of them and I still need to video her Butter Chicken recipe.
If you try making these and you are in the US, the Indian spices are much stronger so you will need to go to an Indian store to buy the spices. I know there is one called India Unlimited on Foothill Drive if you are in Salt Lake area. It is much like a Nilgris here in India.
So yes, even though we leave in a month, we have to renew our visas because they expire on May 30th. Last year it took us 3 trips to the police station and a couple of all day trips to the commissioners office. This year I was prepared to go to the police station and wait. I brought my camera so that I could get some fun pictures again. I only really had time to snap a few shots and we were done! WOW that was a lot better this time. One thing that was different this year was that they required us to have a marriage certificate. I am lucky to have a husband that was thoughtful enough when we first got married to have ours framed. I don't think I'd have brought a copy with me if I didnt' have it hanging on my wall in our bedroom. Anyone who follows our blog and is preparing to come here, you might want to bring a copy of this just in case.
I snapped this picture as we pulled into the police station. It had the sign that I was going to use for this great blog post that I thought I'd have after sitting for hours. In the background you can see an ambulance.
This is the only other picture that I got. We were really only there 20 minutes tops this time. This is a picture of the different classes of crime. I thought it was funny that they classified mobile robbery (robbery of ones cell phone) in the same class as murder.
Most of the expat kids here have these very HUGE birthday parties. Our kids have been invited to many of them because they invite their whole classes. We decided this year to let Ethan have his "once in a lifetime" Indian Birthday party. We invited all the boys in his class, the Christensen family, the MacDonald family, the Chadwick family, and Baby and Vijay's families. I think we ended up with about 30 kids and 10 adults.
The day started out with Ethan so excited to open presents that he couldn't even get dressed first. The night before his birthday the girls walked down to the store by our house and bought him gifts with their own money. They got him notebooks and markers, and a squishy rubber ball and cricket cards. He also asked for a beyblade stadium. I'm not sure how popular these are in the U.S., but here they are really the "in" thing. They remind me of the game crossfire from when I was little.
When I asked Ethan what type of cake he wanted for his birthday party he told me he wanted a "BeyBlade" cake. I had no clue how I was going to pull this off and asked my friend Kathrina if she had any ideas. She is an amazing cake decorator. She told me that she wanted to try and make it, and it turned out GREAT!!!
The party had everything a kid could want...
Bounce house slide...
Tatoo artist...
Food...
Friends...
Magician...
Gifts...
And we couldn't leave out the camel rides...
Baby didn't want to ride the camel after seeing the video of Katie and Tracy. I kept teasing her all morning telling her she had to ride it. She refused until Annie walked into the room and asked her to ride it with her.
Annie loved the camel so much. She wouldn't get off when it was over. When we finally finished the party she cried and then turned to the camel and said. "I love you camel"
