Harpreet visits from Mumbai

In the picture from left to right - can't remember the first guys' name, Harpreet, me, Ruchi, Kunal, Vivek, and Dharmesh. 2nd picture is me and Ruchi. Did I mention I love India?? So apparently Ahmedabad has no storm water drainage system which is not so good when it rains like it has all day today! The streets become rivers, it’s really bad! Harpreet came up from Mumbai this weekend, so I went to see him at CEPT so there was a big group, and we all ended up going to lunch at this Punjabi place, Navrang, near CEPT. It was me, Caryn, Harpreet’s friend Amit, Dharmesh, and Nihal. After that we went back to CEPT and were all trying to figure out what to do next.

They keep helping me to learn more Hindi though, but it’s funny because Dharmesh was copying my accent and was like, “Who is Dharmesh?” –pronouncing it as I do. It took forever to figure out which movie to go see and when and which theater. Finally we decided to see this movie Quick gun Murugun which was like this Indian comedy parodying the old west and cowboys and everything. The funny thing was that the bad guy was forcing all the restaurants in town to serve meat – which many, many people here are vegetarian, so this guy was forcing them to eat beef. So then this guy started this restaurant like McDonald’s only it served Dosas – this kind of Indian crunchy crepe. They wanted the best Dosa recipe and decided mothers made the best dosas so they caught all these mothers and made them cook dosas to find the best ones. The main cowboy guy wore this ridiculous leopeord print vest and orange pants and a pink bandana. He had this pink lipstick and blush that apparently mimicked old bollywood films, but it was pretty ridiculous! The theater was way out on S.G. Road north on the way to Gandhinagar where all this new development is happening, but it’s still way less dense than the rest of the city. So then we went to this restaurant called Tomatoes than Nihal kept telling me to go to. It was decorated kind of like an Applebee’s with all these old American movie posters and stuff and kind of had a bit of a diner décor. They also had Mexican food and Chinese and all this stuff in addition to typical Indian food. But it was fun – they started telling all these funning stories from school and professors. Even they were saying how they had a hard time understanding their professor Utpal. He’s from Bengali and his accent is quite different – it made me feel better because I too have a terrible time understanding. When we got out though, it was raining so hard and the streets were flooded. The rickshaw were almost all full, and none of them would take us where we wanted to go. We all had to get plastic bags to put our bags in so everything wouldn’t get wet. Two of the guys had their motorcycles, so they ended up having to drive us home on those! I was absolutely drenched when I got home!