Travels with Tavish

On our first day in Ahmedabad, 6/17, we had an academic session in the morning. Lunch was paratha, pancakes filled with various vegetables and spices, served with lassi. In the afternoon, we visited the Natinal Institute of Design. I had dinner at a delicious thali restaurant serving traditional Gujarati food.                                                6/18 was the most exciting day of the trip! The morning began with a visit to a temple in Ahmedabad, lunch at Aditi, the delicious thali place from the previous day, and a few minutes to pack our stuff before leaving for the train station for our 14-hour overnight journey to Delhi. The plan was to visit Ghandi’s ashram on the way to the train station, but due to some complications with the group check-out we did not have time so instead set off for the station directly. On the way to the station we stopped at a lake and had some coconut water. My coconut was cold—a lifesaver in the 104 degree F weather. The water tasted especia

In the morning on 6/14, we visited the city palace in Udaipur. The most interesting decorations in the palace were painted peacocks that adorned doorways and peacock mosaics made of miniscule fragments of glass. Our guide at the palace was a little misinformed about certain subjects related to Indian history and expressed his opinions about other “scientific” facts. One such fact was that women “vomit up their emotions,” whereas men do not. Professor Ganguly told us to only listen to the guide if he was telling us facts about the palace, otherwise ignore him. For lunch a group of around 10 of us went downtown to walk around. We had had a lot of thali recently, so we were looking for something new. I spotted a place called “The Egg World,” a miniscule store front only big enough to store a cooler with drinks; all the cooking happened in front of the building on the sidewalk. I led the group across a busy street to the restaurant, where we proceeded to look at the menu for a while,