22nd Birthday, November 14

On Thursday the 13th it was holiday for all the schools, hospitals, and government run places. Guru Purav birthday, he was the first guru of the seek religion so we had holiday, no work yay. Ever since I have reached India I have been craving homemade chocolate cake, and have not been able to make it because most families in India do not own ovens, baking is not done in every home. So I had to ask all the families that live on campus, some of the married older couples had but none of the bachelors, they were lucky if they had food in the house let alone an oven. I finally found Dilpreet family had an oven but when I say oven its not like what your thinking trust me. It is a stand alone circular metal container. I have never seen an oven like this before and Dilpreet says her family never uses it so be careful not get zapped, so this made me feel even more comfortable right. So I went out and bought the ingredients and this was an adventure as well trying to figure out the hindi names, all food is a little different here, and they don’t have fine sugar only the rocks so I was a little confused. Kerry and I went over to Praven’s house and started making this cake it was such a funny time not having the nice equipment that I am use to. Now Praven is a bachelor so he does not have any baking equipment not even a measuring cup, and everything is measured in grams not cups so that throws me off completely. So we finally figured everything out and we started to pre-heat the oven and all of a sudden kerry says “what is that smell and noise.” You will not believe me, bugs were being popped in the oven they came out of the cracks so we did not see it we were so scared and freaked out, so now you know how long since this oven was used. Both of us were to grossed out to get the oven roasted bugs out so I called Ashish over to be our Knight. He thankfully cleaned the 10 bugs or so out and laughed the whole time. We finally got the cake in the free bug zone oven and it took forever to bake almost and hour and half instead of 45 min it should have taken in the states. So the time it should have taken was an hour took around three. While we were making the cake the boys Denyl, Ashish, Viraj, Kevin, and Praveen were making the food. We finally ate lunch at 3:30 but we all had a great time together and they sang me happy birthday a day early. That night I went shopping with dilpreet at the market and stayed over her house for the night. She is a dentist at ruby nelson at only 22 yrs old. Her brother and sister speak English but usually they only speak Hindi, her mother and grandmother cant speak English But they all sang me happy birthday at midnight and gave me a candle to blow out onto of some ice cream, it was so funny seeing grandma sing in English. India has a tradition when it is your birthday everyone at the party feeds you a spoon of cake or ice cream. Now I thought this was very strange but I allowed dilpreet and her mother. I appreciated this so much this family has taken me in and treated me like family and I really needed that on my birthday being so far from my home and family.