We've come to really appreciate our leisure time here in India.  Craig regularly takes in the sun on the top deck and has read at least 15 novels in the past few months. He jogs or cycles four to five mornings a week; he's looking tan and fit.  In fact he recently volunteered to assist with the track team, as he has more free time than he's ever had in his life.  Imagine Craig without his tools, without a mechanical or carpentry or electrical project.  He doesn't even hammar a nail to hang a picture - we have people for that.  I haven't cleaned a dish in 7 months, nor even have done the grocery shopping.  My after work time is utterly my own.  Imagine - leisure time....aaahhhh.

So I take classes, like the cooking class pictured above.  We learned to make paneer, the lovely, dense goat cheese which is a staple here, especially for vegetarians, which most Hindus are.  You see my Korean classmate above, who volunteered to demonstrate tofu-making, a process akin to paneer-making.  There are women from several countries in the class, one of the things I love about being an expat.

Craig and I cycle to work each day, probably less than a five minute ride, but I enjoy the still coolish breeze, the flowering trees, birdsong, and the now familiar homeless cats, dogs, and even monkeys we encounter on the way.  We've had a couple of monkey visits to our apartment recently.  One morning our housekeeper discovered a monkey sitting serenely on the dining room table, dipping it's fingers into the butter and licking them, and picking up Evan's strawberries one by one from the bowl he had just left behind in his haste to make it to school on time (not always successfully, despite our vicinity to school).  One morning last week Craig saw another monkey on the deck, knocking over the furniture in his search for free food - word had gotten out.  We're careful now to lock the doors behind us.  Cute as they are, you don't want an unpleasant encounter with these cunning creatures, or it means hours in hospital getting rabies shots. 

The photo of the guy on horseback, busy on his cellphone, is another one of those sights on the way to school I don't quite know how to interpret.  Perhaps he's on his way to a wedding, or a community celebration of sorts.  There are scenes like this pretty regularly, where I can't draw from my own background knowledge to make meaning of the event.  I do my best, as I've just done, to speculate about what is going on, and will often ask someone about it, but the inexplicable still happens in waves, lap after lap of moments that just wash over me.  There are thousands of years of history on every street corner here.  I'm blissfully aware of my ignorance, astonished at how my new world mindset sees chaos where locals know the oldest order of things actually reigns.