After being in India for almost 3 weeks already we have tasted quite a lot of Indian food and we came across many interesting stuff. In the meanwhile eating with our hands became a more natural habit and we realized that they put spices on literally everything, even watermelon; we bought a watermelon alongside the street and they added salt and pepper on it. It turns out that not only people eat a lot of rice here but even animals; our host family’s dog gets bowls of rice as food.

Before I went to India I already prepared myself mentally on the fact that the Indian food is going to be very spicy. In fact, my dad put it into practice and he made sure that I was even more prepared by adding more and more peppers and spices into our meals. And to be fair I am quite happy about it.

In the first couple of days our host family took into account that we come from a Western country and so the corn flakes were ready for breakfast and surprisingly the food was not that spicy at first. But this did not last long. One morning we just finished our corn flakes and suddenly two cooks walked in with three bowls of real Indian food. They took away our bowls, from which we just completed our corn flakes, and we started our second breakfast. I can assure you that if you are not awake yet the Indian breakfasts definitely will wake you up. From that moment on we now have 3 warm meals a day. But you can’t hear me complaining, which you might understand when looking at the following pictures.

Every meal is a surprise what it will be. Although it is a pretty good guess to say the meal will be rice, with chicken, sauce and vegetables.Eating rice and vegetables every day may sound boring until you come to India. It is crazy how creative they are with food and they combine anything with rice. We have been here for already 2,5 weeks but we still did not have the same meal twice. And if you want to become a vegetarian, then India is the place to be. I normally love meat but here you won’t even miss it (not that I became a vegetarian by the way).

That we are not used to this type of food becomes clear when we are getting food at school. We still need some explanation from the teachers about what we are actually eating and how we are supposed to eat it. On one of our first days there was a particular sauce and we thought it is just as any other sauce, so we took quite a lot of it on our plate. My mentor teacher saw it happening and she rushed towards us and with a worried smile she said “no, no, no, that is very spicy, it is meant for the taste only, so take one small spoon”. Every time it is a trial and error about whether we took to much of something or not.

Also when we go out we love to try and taste new things, especially streetfood even though we know we might get a stomach ache. I almost feel ashamed by the price which we pay out here for food. For only 45 roepies, which is about 60 cents, we got a whole meal which fills you way better than a McDonald’s menu. And we ate in a 4-star restaurant where 4 waiters came and served us enormous bowls of food for not even 4 euros per person. Again they did not let us down.

This is the meal for only 50 cents.