The Wandering Two: Ganpati!

Yesterday was the first day of Ganpati. We had the day off work and a friend of ours, who also volunteers with Wake Up Pune, invited us and some other friends to his home for a traditional lunch for Ganpati. At his home, his family had set up a large table beautifully decorated with flowers and offerings surrounding an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh (remover of obstacles). On our way to his house we saw many people carrying idols of Ganesh to their homes. The idols remain in the homes for 10 days and then are immersed in water. Sadly we are going to be in Kerala on the 10^th day so we’ll miss it because Ganpati is mostly celebrated in Maharashtra (the state we live in). Shame, though we are excited about our trip to Kerala… Following a delicious lunch we walked through town and saw a few of the installations set up for the festival showing Ganesh in different scenes with different themes and all of them are set up with huge speakers blaring music. It’s quite a production. We’re going to try to see as many as we can during the festival. Throughout the day and night we’ve been hearing drums and fireworks and the party is only just started.

We’ve also been spending a lot of time with a Baha’I couple, Farshad and Yeeteng, who will be living in Pune after their wedding in a few weeks. They have a car which is always nice. They took us to the newest (and nicest) mall in Pune and they had a Lacoste store. At first I said we didn’t have to go in, even though it’s my favorite store because I know how expensive Lacoste can be and I know how much money we do NOT have in our bank account for Lacoste… Fate, however, led us back to Lacoste after circling the mall a few times. Long story short, everything is about $50 cheaper or more here because the factory is in India. We want to find out where the factory is and go there to buy some things haha! I’m excited to go back and do some shopping when we have more time. So I buy jerseys and Lacoste clothing and Olivia can get all the salwar kameezis that she wants!

We discovered a few days ago that because of the monsoon and potentially the placement of our room, quite a lot of mold has started to grow on some of our clothes and suitcases and backpacks… Tomorrow we’re moving into a different room that the girls living in just left from. They didn’t have a problem with mold in there so hopefully we’ll be fine in there.

We’re going on a trip this weekend to Panchgani with Farshad and Yeeteng and we’re very excited to get out of the city!

Love,

The Wandering Two