The day of the ‘Prawns in Heaven’

This morning I had breakfast with my roomie, Skandita and some of her friends in the guesthouse then we all got a cab together to work. I got to the fourth floor and answered my emails and carried on sorting out my high-res image pursuit for my current story.

After green tea trips and copious amounts of typing it was time for lunch. The girls and I decided to order in, as we’re all pretty sick of cafeteria food. We ordered from Mociambo’s Café. The menu was hilarious. Instead of just describing the meal, they named all the dishes very strangely. For instance, I was having fries with szechuan sauce, which is easy enough to explain as it’s a popular dish here, but they had to go and call it Spice ‘N Nice Fries. Not even Nice ‘N Spice. I was having breaded prawns with my fries, but obviously they couldn’t just be breaded prawns. They were called ‘Prawns in Heaven’. Sonam did the ordering and we found it hard to keep a straight face when she read out my meal. Thank God I didn’t have the ‘Tits and Bits Prawns’, God knows what that meal consists of.

Me, Ekta, Mamta, Sonam and Karen sat around the table eating our meals which were delicious. My fries were amazing. How we have cheesy chips in this country or chips with gravy, is how they have szechuan fries here, just covered in spicy sauce. My prawns were good, heavenly was a bit of an over-statement. We decided that seeing as we were working extra hard we should order some dessert to share. We got a ‘gooey chocolate cake’ and ‘cappuccino cup’. The chocolate cake, was chocolate cake, but the cappuccino cup was insanely good. It was a cappuccino cream served in a hard chocolate shell. Delicious!

After lunch I began editing a piece I did a few days ago. Some of the images had been changed to form a better layout, which meant more word space for me, awesome! I got to work finishing that and eventually we looked at the clock and it was six! I literally don’t know where the time went. We went up for snacks in the cafeteria. Today they had sambar! My one true love was served with idly though instead of vada, but que sera, sera. I’ll have some vada before I leave.

So basically today we did lots of awesome work, drank lots of awesome tea and ate LOTS of awesome food. At the end of the day Nandini, the editor had a meeting with us all about the cover, we all had to give input and opinion about the image and text that will be on the June issue. I thought it was really good how everyone’s opinion is valued, even if I am just an intern, they wanted to know what I thought just as much as everyone else.

I got out of the office, more or less bang on eight o’clock and got a cab back to my current position. My fingers may actually bleed from the amount of typing that I’m doing but it’s all worth it, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

My latest obsession and maybe the best thing that I’ve ever seen is the Bollywood movie ‘Dil Se’ that I watched today with the chef and the porter in the lounge, it’s part wonderful, part hilarious. Just watch this extract, all the way through and you’ll understand why I love it here so much! They’ve just suggested two more movies for me; ‘Diwale Dwhaniya Le Jayenge’ and ‘Dhadkan’, man I love India.

The best part of the film is below, a dance routine on a train to the song, ‘Chaaiya, Chaaiya’. Epic.