Research, research and more research!

When we finally had our task given to us, Nick and I dove right in! We have been finding out all sorts of corrupt ways that this city is run and the poor reasoning behind certain "necessary" bills they have enacted. Right now our main research has to do with the street vendors (also know as hawkers) on the streets of New Delhi. The national government passed a bill called the Food Safety and Standards Bill of 2005. This bill takes away the rights of the hundreds of thousands of food vendors that depend on this hawking for their livelihood. There is a great upheaval in the city about this issue but the government does not seem to be paying much attention to the opposition. We have a bit more to do with finalizing our assignment but once we have we will be sure to post it so you can all see what we have been working on.

Nick, hard at work at Navdanya

Lets see... what else have we been up to? I left off last time with the great cooking that Tasnim had prepared for us... well the following night she out did herself once again! We had another absolutely fantastic home cooked meal with fresh mango's to follow! We were very sad to hear that she was leaving town for the next few days, until the first of July, to visit her family. Happy for her to see her family... sad for our stomachs and the loss of great company!! The following day we went home and cleaned our apartment. It no longer smells like dirt every time we enter so we are very pleased about that! A little elbow grease and we had a brand new.. still not so shiny... apartment. It seemed that no matter how hard we scrubbed we could not get the look of dirt off the floors... but our feet could definitely tell the difference when walking from room to room!!!

Cleaning the bathroom! Yuck!

Tasnim had left her key with Manu so that we could go eat and cook in her apartment. So after we were finished cleaning we headed over to her place. Since none of us are very good cooks we just heated up all of the left overs from the past few nights and had a small feast (Tasnim told us to! I promise)! We are still trying to get use to the time change... so we were really tired by about 9:30 and headed off to bed. The jet lag keeps getting better and better but our internal time clocks are not quite back to normal yet. Other than that not much has been going on. Work has been taking up most of our time. We walk about a mile there every morning and a mile home. Most of the time it is a very enjoyable walk but lately it has been getting much hotter. Even in the heat the walk is refreshing in the morning. Nick got a little sick (they like to call it Delhi Belly over here) but he is feeling much better now!

Other than that life has been nice and slow and easy! July 7th and 8th (I think?) we will be heading to Dehra Dun for the mango festival and to see the school so things will get exciting once again in a little bit!

On a side note... thanks to everyone who has been e-mailing and leaving comments about the blog! We love reading the comments and seeing that a few people seem to be enjoying our stories! So keep it up! Also, some people have e-mailed us to tell us that they could not leave a comment because they were not a part of the Blogger community. So, if you want to leave a comment you can e-mail us as kris.gunderson@gmail.com! We would love to hear what you have to say and what you have been up to! Take Care!