Morning chai

We slept through the night much better, as we had a working air conditioning! Rahul got up some time around 6a, and I rolled out of bed around 8:30ish. We did not have a huge day planned; we just had a few things we wanted to see, so there was no rush to be out of the door early.

After we got ready, we took the metro into Chandni Chauk and stopped by a sweet shop for breakfast. That is right, I am on vacation, and I can have sweets in the morning if I want to! Well the real reason we stopped in for sweets was Raksha Bandhan, a festival that day where sisters tie knots on their brother’s wrists, give them sweets, and then demand rupees at knife point. Crazy I know. Well the last part about the knife is not true, but the brothers do commonly give the sisters money. So for breakfast we had a few somosas, kachauris, dhokla, and a few sweets. Kachauris are fried wheat cakes stuffed with lentils and spices, and dhokla is a Gujarati dish made of a cake soaked in some spicy oil topped with chopped greens like cilantro. Out of every dish I have eaten so far, dhokla is the first Indian dish that I just could not handle. I think it is the combination of flavors and textures that just do not seem edible after you start to chew on it. The sweets that we purchased were cashew paste filled with some dried fruit, a drop of saffron juice, and big sugar cubes all wrapped in a piece of silver foil. They say the silver is good for your health, I did not really see any benefit minus making my fingers shiny. Even without the added health benefits, they were mighty tasty.

After breakfast, we stopped by Gaurav’s Tea Emporium for our obligatory cup of morning chai, said hello, and chatted a bit. The special chai here is something I will surely miss when we leave Delhi.