scratch

One of the major adjustments for us (as I mentioned here) has been food stuff. You can't just go to the store and get whatever you need like we were use to. As I said before, I am not creative in the kitchen and so this has really stretched me! We have made things from scratch that I would have never even thought to try to make! It is so easy to buy hummus, salsa, pancake mix, cream of chicken soup, canned pumpkin... why make it from scratch?! BUT when you can't just buy it and the only way to eat it is to start from the beginning, it motivates us a lot more.

Have I tried a lot of things that have failed? YES

Have I gotten frustrated? Definitely

Am I learning a lot and hopefully getting better? I hope so

Have I enjoyed it? I really have!

I have really missed crafts and having projects to do. There isn't a Michaels (oh I miss the scrapbook paper aisle!) and crafty resources are limited (although I am finding some things to do). Baking and cooking and trying new recipes has been sort of a creative outlet for me. 

Here are a couple of the things we make here that we never made this way in the states...

We buy garbanzo beans, soak them overnight, pressure cook them and then make hummus. I had never made hummus before. 

One of the things I was super excited about was that they have pumpkins here. I guess I assumed they didn't. I was missing fall and Brandy made us some pumpkin syrup so that we could make our own pumpkin spice lattes (not even knowing I was missing fall). So sweet! Our teammates also told us how to cook pumpkin and encouraged me to try (it intimidated me!)  

 You can't buy brown sugar here, but you can make it! You just buy jaggery and melt it and mix it with regular sugar. 

One day we made brown sugar in order to make barbecue sauce in order to have a barbecue chicken braid for dinner. crazy!

 I tried several granola bar recipes in the past few months, because that is one of my favorite snacks and I really missed having bars to eat on the run or for breakfast. But lately one of the grocery stores here has had these nature valley ones. It made me SO excited to find them for sale here in our city... I stocked up!

We've really been surprised at how we haven't missed certain food things as much as we thought we would. 

Would we love to have a chick-fil-a sandwich or a reese's right now? Sure 

Do we wish we could just go to a Mexican restaurant? Sometimes 

...especially Los Tres Magueyes with the Moores :)

Are we excited to eat red meat in Thailand? Of course (41 days!)

Are we learning to be content with what we have? Trying to :)

our househelper

Let me introduce you to our househelper, Rhada...

Rhada comes to our home three times a week to do our dishes and sweep and mop our floors. She speaks no English at all! Now that monsoon season is over, everything is starting to get so dusty. We have talked about getting Rhada to come everyday, because the floors need it. If you sit down on our couch, a cloud of dust rises. gross. 

I was trying to take these pictures discreetly with my phone...

 Now, you may think it is strange that we have a househelper, but it is very common here. It is actually kind of expected. Brandy posted and described it well here. 

The nice thing is, Rhada lives downstairs. So it is very easy for her/us to have a flexible schedule. Her husband is the chowkidar (guard) for our building. They really help us to feel a lot safer and really look out for us. They have run off beggars who have followed us home, or people who are banging on our door asking for money. We are so thankful for this!

This is at the bottom of our stairs, where Rhada lives...

If I am ever complaining about our home, or how hard life here can be sometimes, I am always quickly reminded as we walk up to our apartment how good we have it and how thankful/content I should be. Why am I never just content with what I have!? This is a constant battle for me! I want my satisfaction to only be found in Christ, but I need so many reminders!

For the past couple of weeks, some of Rhada's children have been here visiting for the holiday (Diwali). It has been pretty loud with all the kids running around, but it has also been fun to meet her family. We love her little grandchildren...but it is a bit harder to love them when they wake us up screaming and playing in the mornings :)

Do you see the string she is holding/pulling below?  

She is pulling/rocking the hammock while her grandchild naps! 

(and that is our guard- Rhada's husband- napping on the bed as well)

Recently, with Amy's encouragement, Rhada has started making some meals for us. We just lay everything out and she comes right in and whips something up. Homecooked Indian food is so much better than restaurants!

On this day, her daughter, Mira, came with her as well. 

We watched them make roti- so cool! They put it right on the gas burner. I had never seen it made before.

Mira also brought her baby with her- so cute!!

One of our meals

We are thankful for their family. Pray that they would come to know Jesus as their Lord and Savior!

daily differences: drugstore

There aren't CVS stores, RiteAid stores or Walgreens here. We get everything medicine related from the chemist. Chemists are basically little stalls full of all sorts of drugstore type things (face wash, lotions, medicines...) There are chemists all over town and this one is right around the corner from us. A HUGE bonus is that our chemist speaks decent English. We have been to him for several things such as calamine lotion, cough drops, some vitamins and other things. You can get antibiotics there also, but thankfully we haven't had to use him for that. You just have to know what kind of antibiotic you need and you ask for it.  A huge perk of these little stalls is that stuff is so cheap and it is very convenient. 

(Of course there are drawbacks also)

Doesn't he look sweet!? 

(I asked him if I could take his picture and in his thick Hindi accent he said "why not?")

Most recently he has been working with me on finding "hair vitamins". Brandy mentioned that she was going to get some at GNC in Delhi, but they were kind of pricey. Neither one of us got any. I didn't really know you could take hair vitamins. Several of us on our team are dealing with losing A LOT of hair. Not real sure the reason for this (the hard water? lack of nutrients in food/meat here? not enough protein?) He has given me several different vitamins that contain biotin to try. It is really interesting to watch him rustle through boxes of strips of pills. He pulls out a few strips and gives them to me to try. 

There are lots of different pill strips in each box. 

These are the latest ones he gave me. I always research whatever is in them before I take them. Just to be sure. 

Just a little different from running into CVS or having to visit the doctor to get an antibiotic. 

goodbye monsoon!

I think I can officially say that the monsoon is on its way out, or gone for good (until next year). I have never lived in a monsoon area before, but my goodness, it is so much rain!  

The monsoon brings about a lot of good (about 80% of the rainfall in India, waters the crops, lowers the temperature, isn't so dusty...) but it also brings some not-so-fun things.

We spent a lot of time in raincoats over the past couple months (thankful for good raincoats!) 

 Let's just say owning a scooter in the rainy season isn't the best.

Fortunately our teammates gave us a lot of rides so we didn't always have to go out in the rain on the scooter. 

There is no mercy here for people walking, or on scooters or bikes (which is a lot of people!). Drivers just fly through puddles and flooded roads no matter who is around. We have been splashed so much. One day, a car splashed Chad and soaked him in nasty water from head to toe and in his words it is the "maddest he's ever been".

These are some pictures from the past couple months from our balcony. There isn't a good drainage system, so the water just sits in the roads. 

With all the rain, it also brings lots of humidity. North Carolina is pretty humid, so it didn't bother me that much except for two things. 

1. my hair

 I pretty much stopped drying and fixing it and just put it up everyday. wasn't even worth it. (Rach, Ash, Brooke- you don't know how many times I have thought "your hair is inexplicable!" or "It's the humidity!"-in Monica's voice)

2. the mold

Not going to lie, it took me a little while to get use to the mold. I would just find it randomly on our things and just get so grossed out. I would lay in bed at night and tell Chad "i just feel like it's in my lungs, I'm breathing it all in." But I got over it and became use to it. Don't get me wrong, it still grosses me out. It seems to like certain things/materials. Especially my rainbows. I had just cleaned them like 3 days before I took the picture below. 

...just keeping it real

I have spent a couple days this week cleaning everything in our house. just in case. 

We have enjoyed the monsoon because everything is so green and there is so much in bloom. I'm sure in the next couple of months when everything is dry and dusty I will wish it was monsoon season again. Isn't that how it always goes?

daily differences: food edition

One of the things we have had to learn about/adjust to since moving here is food. 

Thankfully, our teammates have given us lots of wisdom/advice about so many different things... from shopping for food items to substitutions we can use and everything in between.  

All produce we get that we do not peel (cilantro, tomatoes, grapes, peppers, etc.), we soak in this stuff...

This is one of those things I would have NO CLUE about had someone not taught me! We buy this stuff from the chemist and soak our produce in it for about 20 minutes before we eat it. It cleans it and makes it safe for us to eat. We then just rinse it with filtered water and it is good to go.

Anything that we can peel is fine for us to eat. Like pomegranates! This is a new favorite.

Some of the basics are packaged quite differently from what we are used to. The picture below on the left is our milk. The nice thing is it doesn't have to be refrigerated until you open it, so we can stock up and always have milk on hand! 

The picture on the right is yogurt. This is something I just bought recently because I didn't realize it was yogurt. It is in a bag and definitely isn't the same as American yogurt (It is kind of chunky and isn't sweet. It kind of has a sour taste). 

EVERYTHING here is labeled veg or non-veg. Those two terms are on everything. A lot of people here are strictly veg because of religious beliefs. Menus are broken up into veg/non-veg categories, restaurants even advertise it in their name such as "Udipi King: pure veg" or "Kareems: best veg and non-veg restaurant"

This works out great for me since I mostly eat veg

We also get our chicken delivered. We call a chicken place and place our order and in a couple hours they deliver the order to our door. We usually order small boneless, skinless chicken breast pieces and ground chicken.

We definitely eat a lot less meat here than we used to and it is all chicken... no beef whatsoever. We are already excited to get hamburgers in Thailand on our visa run in December.

Another difference is that pretty much all you can buy here is instant coffee. We have found one place where we can buy ground coffee, but thats it. And a lot of the restaurants only serve instant coffee. This country is all about the chai!

Even though there are a lot of differences, we can get a lot of similar stuff! Here are some of our groceries...

(notice the green dots advertising things are 100% veg)

and here is some of the candy we can get here (this tray always has candy in it). Chad's favorite is definitely Alpenliebe- it is a hard caramel candy. The gems are M & M-like... but not the same and the Cadbury chocolate bars I cut up for chocolate chips.  

So there you have it, some food differences. We eat very good here (that seems to be a popular question- what do you eat?), just not exactly the same. I especially have had to learn to be a little more creative with recipes and such. This stretches me because I am very much a go-by-the-exact-recipe kind of girl. We have made stuff from scratch that I never would have thought to even try to make from scratch! But that is another post for another day...

daily differences- appliance edition

Some of the basics of daily living are a bit different. I thought I would post about some of them so that you can see a little into our daily life and so that one day we will remember these smaller things! Our moms may be the only people interested in this, everyone else may want to skip this post :) 

These are some of the appliances in our apartment. Even though they may be a little different and it may take a little getting used to, we are SO THANKFUL to have each of them! Especially because the only one we had to buy was the microwave and we bought it from someone for a great price. 

Below is our oven and microwave. It has been an adjustment to have an oven that is more like a toaster oven to us. An 8 x 8 dish is the largest thing that will fit in our oven so we have had to adjust a lot of recipes (because they are for 9 x 13).  

I have never had gas burners before!

 This is our hot water heater in our bathroom. It is a 10 liter tank (think of 5 2-liter cokes). That is all the hot water it holds. When we want to take a shower, we flip a switch that is outside the bathroom and wait about 10 minutes for the tank to heat up. Then you have as long a hot shower as water is in the tank. After that it gets COLD! I am not a fan of a cold shower, so I shower a lot faster than I used to. I was pretty good at taking loooonnnggg, really hot showers, so this has been an adjustment. Again, we are thankful to have a water heater at all.

 There is no hot water in the sinks. So to wash my face or wash dishes we use cold water- or whatever comes out of the faucet. I definitely didn't appreciate having hot water to wash dishes with enough. It is hard to wash oil or melted butter off dishes with cold water!

This is our air condition unit. There is a unit like this in both of the bedrooms (we only use one bedroom). We turn it on before we go to bed each night. Right now we don't turn it on because we are hot, more so because it helps keep the humidity down during monsoon season. All of the other rooms in our apartment have ceiling fans. 

 Here is our washing machine. A lot of people have asked why it is on the porch and to be honest, I'm not really sure. But after washing clothes in the bathtub, I don't care where it is! I'm just thankful to be able to use it. 

 View from our porch as we do laundry

 A big difference is that we hang our clothes to dry. This has been a source of frustration for me because stuff isn't drying well because of all the humidity. Some of it smells worse after we wash it than it did before. The monsoon should be over in a couple weeks so hopefully this won't continue to be an issue. Sometimes I can wash and hang up stuff the same way I did it the time before and it will smell so much worse than the last load. The way that had been working best was to wash it at night before I went to bed and then put the drying rack in our bedroom with the AC on. That worked a few times, but then this last time it smelled like mildew again. Any suggestions?!?