Chandigarh, India

What a unique city and super hosts we had. Chandigarh is the nicest city we have visited in India so far. By nicest i mean, beautiful parks and tree lined boulevards along with all the ammenities of a Western style city. It is a very different place to other areas of India we have visited, very clean and green, and the roads were well paved. This was very special for us, as we normally get around a city in cycle-rickshaws which are normally quite a bumpy ride, but in Chandigarh it was a lovely, smooth and even a romantic ride, traveling along the rickshaw-only-lanes under canopies of trees. The clothing people wore in Chandigarth had a heavy western influence and there were many more nice cars on the road than we are used to seeing.

By far, the nicest thing of all about Chandigarh was Dr. and Mrs. Vijay, our fabulous hosts. They were very friendly and wonderful to talk to. Dr. Vijay is a Physics professor and also Head of the Department of sciences at the Punjab University. Mrs. Vijay's kindness and thoughtfulness towards us was much appreciated and we were dazzled by her wonderful cooking skills. She prepared easily the best Indian cuisine we have enjoyed in India. Each day we had varying meals of traditional home-cooked Indian food, made with locally available ingredients (often very local, being from her garden). Also, each night after our meal we would finish off with a plate of sliced fresh ripe mango, usually a couple of different varieties, sweet and juicy, yum! It is probably no surprise that they take mangos very seriously here in India and many varieties are available. The mango pickle we have eaten has been especially good, which is made from unripened mangos, then pickled and spiced. Tasty!

In Chandigarh, we checked out the usual tourist sights, the city museum (interesting because Chandigarh is a entirely planned city, circa 1950), the unique and creative rock garden, the lake and war memorial...all from the upstairs of a super fun open-top double decker bus. What made the tour extra special was that we were the only tourists along with about 40, aged 10 years old, school children on a field trip!! They starred at us for a bit, then started practicing their limited English on us by asking any question they could think of, touching our white skin and basically surrounding us for the whole tour. They really wanted us to sing for them, but I certainly cannot sing, so i did a few silly dances for them, which went over really, really well. We felt like celebrities!