All about CHEESE

Happy HOLY!! That is the festival today. "Holy" is the festival of colour. It is to celebrate the colour of life and to remind ourselves that what life is. and to recharge ourselves after daily life challenges.
India has so many festivals.
I considered myself particularily brave hitting the streets this morning as I have been advised by several people that no one is safe in the street today. During Holy, everyone runs around with coloured powder and douses everyone they see with it. Sometimes they have liquid colour in water guns or super soakers!!! Can you imagine? Kids in Canada would love this! And you can do it. I mean, anyone is free game. If you are in the street, you are free game. OPEN SEASON!!!

So i feel so brave. I have snuck out early, right after breakfast, hopefully to beat the rush, to beat the kids to the street and hopefully get back before the melee begins. All the shops are closed (for obvious reasons, you don't want all your merchandise covered in colour and all the store fronts are open air, so vulnerable to attack or "shrapnel" or "spray")
Everyone partakes, but kids are the worst (read: most dangerous) of course. I wore dark coloured old clothes and covered my head and kept my eyes sharply peeled for any sign of danger, fully prepared to face the consequences of my excursion should I encounter an entourage of colour-toting rapscallions. My desire to write was THAT strong this morning, I couldn't not venture out. ha haah. ("ha" means "yes" in hindi, so ha ha means "ya, ya"). So you better all appreciate the risk I took to blog-on today.

Last night I did something really crazy! I ate cheddar cheese with pickles on rice crackers!!!! can you believe that?!! AND.....a ginger beer (like ginger ale but yummier). I finally broke down and went to the store that sells all kinds of things that only foreigners eat and i splurged. I spent around 15 dollars on treats and snacks that I haven't had in over 6 months. And boy was it fun. I just sat in my room and had a little hors' deuvres party with myself.

I have been so inundated with social interaction these days. people, people, people. I had my own room for a few days and then they gave me a new roommate the other day, a young "professional" from Los Angeles.... she didn't last a day. She stayed one night in my room and then apparently she was feeling so sick that she moved to a guesthouse where a friend was staying. Poor thing. But I was happy because I had my room back to myself.

I find I need that personal space to feel balanced. When there is people constantly everywhere, in the ashram, in the street, and there is nowhere you can go where you can be alone and uninterrupted..... i find, for me, it is a little bit harder to keep balance. Of course, you get used to it, sharing a room, and you learn to be alone even when you are with someone else. But personally, i really like the peace. In India, as i have said before, you are never alone, and people are always talking to you, singing to you, staring at you or interacting with you in one way or another whether you like it or not. So of course this is a challenge for my Canadian sensibilities. Canadians who have so much space, physically and emotionally.

So, although I was sorry that the L.A. girl was sick, I was glad to have my room back and I celebrated a little, the solitude, with cheddar cheese and ginger beer. haha. Cheddar, by the way, is a very rare commodity. Hard to find and expensive. The nice thing is that with the Indians being as ingenious as they are... once they discover there is a demand for such a thing, and that foreigners will pay, what is to them, a very pretty penny, then they waste no time in figuring out how to produce and make the cheese, producing a very high quality of cheese too, local, and delicious, without the chemicals and preservatives that mass produced cheeses in western supermarkets have. So its a win win situation, for me, the cheese craver, and for them, the ingenious cheese manufacturer. My cheese didn't even have a label on it, it was THAT grassroots. It was just in a plastic bag, sold by my grocer buddy "Kewal" along with his assurance that if i didn't like it, i could bring it back. wow. Thanks Kewal. And it was VERY good.

So instead of boring you with more tales of cheese I think I will go and work on more youtube videos..... (you don't know how much you, the cheese lover, take cheese for granted until you stay in a country like Japan or India).... Now "paneer", that's Indian cheese... that's another story.... I'll save that for later.