Chicken Soup and the Macarena

So I went to the bookstore yesterday, and guess what I saw there?

Yeah I know. I didn't even realize such a book existed. Although I should have figured, they have Chicken Soup for every category existing. Although I just googled Chicken Soup for the Antarctic Soul, and they don't have that one :)

My other adventure yesterday: super fun! We celebrated a celebration called Basant, which was a blast. We went over to the house of Sam’s friend (someone he works with for his project) and we ate lots of delicious Indian food there. 

This is the five of us students with our new friends.

The decorations for Basant were beautiful. This is a chalk drawing, which they love to do here.

Honestly, it was kind of like Christmas. There were Christmas lights, and here is even a little tree with lights on it.

Then, we started to get to know some of the kids our age a little bit more. They were all guy friends of our host. They gave us these herb things that were wrapped up in leaves, which were supposed to help us digest better. It was interesting, it tasted a bit like bubblegum. It took the guys a while to get us to eat them (we Americans are not in the habit of eating strange things that are wrapped up in leaves, so it was a weird concept), but we gave in eventually (maybe because some of the boys were pretty cute – we couldn’t be complete wimps in front of them). Then we had lots of fun talking, learning names, taking pictures with their phones, etc. 

Things were winding down, and everyone was about to leave, but Sam and Amy Drake whipped out a dance they learned, to show the Indians how we dance. It was awesome, they are pros. Then a few of the Indian boys did a dance for us – it looked like it might have come off of a Bollywood movie they had seen. Then for some reason they wanted to see me dance too. Ha. Well, as everybody knows, I don’t even know how to dance, so I flat-out denied doing such a thing. But then Amy suggested that she and Sam and I could do the Macarena for them, which I partially remembered, so we did that. They liked it, so Amy taught them how to do it.

When it was time to leave, the boys were kind enough to help us find a rickshaw to get home in, which was a good thing because it was a little late for most rickshaws to be out. Sam thought he smelled alcohol when we got in the rickshaw, but we did end up getting home safely, which I am very glad about.