The first couple of jet-lagged days are definitely hard to remember, but I shall do my best.
After our first night at the hostel, we woke up just in time for bed. Well, at least it felt that way - it was about 9 am in Vellore, and about 9:30 pm at home.
Attempting to start the day off right, we went for breakfast at the college canteen conveniently located next door to our hostel.
The way this party works is, you order at the window on the left after you've been given looks as if you were the village idiot for trying to order. All of the items are completely foreign so of course I have no idea what to get: rava dosa, masala dosa, chapatti, biriyani, idly, it all sounds the same to me since I didn't come into this trip with a passion for Indian food. Then, you pay at the window on the left and are handed a receipt. I'm not sure if it's considered a game to the employees and natives or what, but they don't tell you what to do when it's your first time ordering. When somebody hands you a receipt, the next thing you expect them to give you is your food, right? Wrong. But nobody's going to explain the operation, ever. After you sit down with your receipt for a healthy amount of time and looking like the village idiot again, you figure out what you were supposed to do.
You were to take this receipt to the second window, the one on the right, and give it to the men you see behind the counter. This is where they will make your meal of deliciousness after you elbow your way to the countertop and shove your receipt towards somebody. The college canteen, where these pics are from, wasn't too bad about this, but the canteens on the hospital campus were terrible. Getting to order, and then getting your food was a sport.
So, I decided to go the safe route and order an omelette - my choices were egg omelette or cheese omelette. Assuming egg is what made up the omelette in the first place, I went with cheese: Luckily, I was right for once. I also decided to try a little fresh squeezed apple juice.
Surprisingly to me, the omelette was edible. The apple juice was another story, and a funny one at that - funny in the let's-make-fun-of-Western-culture sort of way.
If you were to put a couple of apples in the blender and choose puree, my apple juice, that day, is what you would get. I could hardly drink it, it was so strange! In the U.S., we're so used to apple juice consisting of only approximately 10% juice that real apple juice tastes horrid.
Hello multiple types of cancer from chemicals in store bought apple juice, diabetes from the amount of sugar, and obesity. What are we coming to these days? People grow up not actually knowing what the fruit tastes like, just the artificially flavored version!
Regardless, quick note to self: no more apple juice in India.
Namaste.
