Street kids, and our trip to the Taj Mahal.

This post will be mostly pictures because they pretty much explain themselves. And because we are just about to go out for supper. :)

Ok, so if you have Facebook, then you may have seen all or most of these pictures already, but they are just so darn cute that I have to put them on here as well! These are the kids that we spend our Saturday afternoons with. They live under a local flyover (or large highway overpass type thing). They are employed by their parents to look sad and hungry even if they aren't, and to ask as many people for money as possible. I don't think they like doing it at all, I can tell by how happy they are when they are free to run around and just play like kids should. We get in a lot of trouble from thier parents if we give them clothes, so we just give them little toys to play with and food and water. They are heartbreakingly beautiful.

















This last fella watched us most of the time, and he just cracked me up waay too much so I had to take a picture.

This next set were all taken at the Taj Mahal. They are also relatively self explanitory!




Alright, so that's that! We have our last day tomorrow, and we fly out to London at 12:30pm Delhi time Tuesday. This will be our last blog from here, sadly enough, but we are very excited to come home and re-unite with all of our friends and family whom we miss so much. So we will post about our adventures in England when we return, but don't expect it too soon after we return, there will be some recovery needed after our second Christmas and jet lag etc. So until then, farewell!

Neemrana Fort Palace

As some of you know, we were given a fantastic gift for Christmas this year. We got to stay for a night at Neemrana Fort-Palace, which is in a neighbouring state, Rajeshtan. It was a long 2 and a half hour ride from south New Delhi, but once we got there, we were struck with awe, and fascinated by the ancient architecture. This place was originally built in 1464, but fell to ruins after several wars and changing hands several times also. It was pretty well only a pile of rubble in 1986 when it was bought for restoration. Renovations commenced and in 1991 it opened for business with just 15 livable rooms. Since then it has one again become a magnificent Fort-Palace now with 11 levels of 45 suites, a pool, spa, gorgeous gardens, amphitheatre, restaurants and it's ancient jaw dropping views. Every room is unique, hard to find, and represents a period in history all the way from the 15th century to the 21st. I believe we had something in the middle. The rooms are named, not numbered, and if you forget the name and area, you will be searching for quite some time. But thankfully your room key has a large metal tag on it with the name of your room, so if you get lost you can just show the tag to someone who works there and they'll take you there, or if you like being lost like I do, you can wander around until you find it again!

This is our room. It was wonderfully cozy, had it's own front sitting room with a single bed in it, and had a fantastic view from the little terrace. The picture above with the amphitheatre in it was taken from our terrace, and the one to the right is our terrace. The lower of the two. Even the little bathroom windows had a spectacular view! I don't think I took any pictures of that though.













After a relaxing evening of exploring and eating, we retired to rest up for the next day. We found out late the evening before when we were wandering around that there were ruins of an old look-out fort at the top of the hill behind the fort. So we set off to find a way up at around nine thirty in the morning. It turns out that not many people wish to trek up their on their own because we found the gate described to us by the registration office, but it was boarded up and locked. It took nearly an hour and a half for someone to scare up the keys to unlock said gate, and once we got going, it was after eleven. With checkout at 12, we hurried up the mountain, took a bunch of photos, explored as much as we could and hurried back down. As it turns out, we could have meandered a bit more, since they are very relaxed about check out times. We learned this after returning from our hurried trek. Oh well, so be it! We still enjoyed ourselves. As you can see the view was spectacular. Just as we reached the lookout, the fog began to lift and we could see the farmland stretching out across the horizon. It made me miss Christmas hill and Mt. Finlayson and looking out over Victoria. It made me smile to see green and yellow fields, green trees not completely caked in dirt and dust, and flowers, after being in this dust bowl of a city for so long. I may just start crying when I step onto the ferry and see the ocean, trees and mountains once again.

The count is now on, and with only 13 days left here in India, we are going to try and squeeze in a trip to Agra (the Taj Mahal) and Jaipur in the next week or so. Then we're off to London for three days before returning home. It is just so hard to believe that it's almost over. I don't know if I'm ready, but I suppose I'll have to be. I will most likely write next after we've gone to Agra and Jaipur. And so until then, farewell.

Some goodies for your New Year?

Well folks, here we are already, a brand spanking new year ahead of us, and one filled with fantastic memories and experiences behind us. With all that the last couple of years have held, this one promises to be just as wonderful and filled with adventure also.

Christmas came and went without great fanfare, aside from the frightening Santa that is... We spent Christmas morning sleeping in, and the afternoon at "The Park" five star hotel eating lots of great food and sipping champagne and fresh squeezed orange juice with friends. This Santa fellow was having some issues with his mustache, so he decided it was best to forgo it all together and just pull his beard all the way up to his nose. As it was it looked funny but as he walked and the wind blew, the thin strands of white plastic "hair" would part, and expose his three-day-old stubble and tooth-rotting smile. He also had a large bell that he would ring as he yelled "MERRY CHRISTMAS HAPPY HOLIDAYS!!" (with vigor but no spirit). However, the sound which emanated from this bell was such that we all wanted to get up, take it from him and throw it over the 10 foot fence. And with the lofty open marble room we were dining in, this piercing chiming would resonate and threaten to shatter our bones. Thankfully we had all enjoyed a glass or two of Champagne, and we were able to laugh heartily at him.

This is Dave and I laughing very heartily at him. Alright, so not entirely at him per say, but mostly at him "gifting" us some chocolates that appeared to be wrapped by people with no fingers, and were warm and melty from his back pocket. Note that Davies face is nearly the colour of my Salwar suit.

Once the wind got too chilly for us to bear any longer, we moved ourselves to the indoors. Truthfully, we only ate outside because we wanted to boast to all of you in cold Canada that we ate outside on Christmas day in the nice warm sun. But as it was, some clouds rolled in shortly after we arrived, and a crisp wind was blowing our hair into our food as we delicately shoveled steak and prawns into our mouths. So we took the fun indoors.


Johnathan and Fosia were wonderful company, and delightfully photogenic. We were the few remaining people out of our group of friends still in Delhi for the holidays, so we were very thankful to have them to be with.


The suit I am wearing is one of two I bought to go to a wedding, but we never made it to the second day, and therefore I decided this was a suitable event to sport it. Who knows when I'll get another chance. There are no more big holidays, and I don't know of any more weddings we are invited to, so I thought, heck, why not? It may be the only use it gets.

While I'm on a roll, I may as well show you what the finished product (the bakery) looks like.With scrumptious goodies filling the cold case and the dry case, peoples mouths water as soon as they step foot into our tantalizing little sanctum. Here you can find Fresh Fruit Flans topped with pineapple, kiwi, oranges and pomegranate, Double Chocolate Cake, various tarts, an assortment of fresh every morning muffins and breads, and much much more.












As for Staff, if you arrive before 2:oo in the afternoon, you will see this smiling face as you enter, and these three making the goods in the back.

This is Ganesh on the left, and Anwar on the right. They are our prep/cleaning guys, and they are fantastic, indispensable and all around wonderful. We would be completely lost without them. The guy in the middle is Rahul, and he lasted two days. he lived fairly far away, and it was going to cost him a fortune in time and money to try and get himself to and from work every day. We just so happened to take this picture on his first day.

Well, that's all I can do for now, I hope this post finds you all well, and we are looking forward to seeing you all again in only a few short weeks!

Merry Christmas to all, and to all, Baked Goods!!

Well, here we are, Christmas in two short days, and it can't come fast enough. We are closing the shop for Christmas Day, and honestly, we could all really use the break. Between setting up the shop here, trying out systems and recipes, and setting up the shop in Greater Noida in Honey Money Top (a grocery store), we have been going non-stop for weeks now, barely getting time enough to sleep. The Boys come in at three in the morning, and bake all the breads and pastries for the day, and are often here till as late as six in the evening. Anna and I arrive at eight or eight thirty in the morning depending how fast we find a rickshaw, and stay most nights until eleven preparing things for the Honey Money order the next day. It's a crazy life, but this is the way it will be until we can find reliable employees to open and close shop for us so we can leave at a reasonable hour. Thus far we have gone through two full time front end employees, both of which came and worked for two days and didn't return on the third. The fellow we have at the moment, Pintu, is only part-time, but works hard and is fairly punctual and very loyal. He used to be one of the street kids at the community center near our house, but has since grown up, cleaned himself up and got an apartment with some friends and is going to school and works here. He's a great guy. So far it seems as though everyone we hire that has some sort of degree or lots of experience turns out to be a bit of a bust, so we are now just going for former street kids or villagers who live here in the city and send their money home to their families. They are loyal hard workers, and tend to learn quickly as well.

As Christmas draws closer I am reminded of what Christmas is really about. Although consumerism is as much of an epidemic here as at home, the mad rush to get everyone piles of things that they don't need and will never use isn't quite as prominent. There is a mad rush like that at all times anyway. The only Christmas lights I have seen so far besides the ones in our front window and on the Christmas tree at home are at the Holy Family Hospital down the way form our house. It was started by Catholics I believe, and they have some lights up. So without the millions of coloured lights, hundreds of Santas ringing bells on street corners, gift wrap and bows being sold out in every shop, and thousands of Fathers out on Christmas eve attempting to scrounge the bare shelves of the local toy store in a last minute attempt to finish their Christmas shopping, it just doesn't feel like the holidays. So I guess when you take all that away, you are left with the original meaning of it all. I look around at all the dark faces and think to myself that Jesus was born just 3500km west of where we are right now, and that he might have looked a bit like some of these people do. His house may have been similar to some of those I have seen, and he probably worked much harder than the millions of people I see every day sitting at the side of the road watching people drive by for hours on end. And his smile was probably just as radiant as the ones I see on the faces of the street children that we give our day-old baked goods to. His hair was probably all dusty like theirs too, and he probably had dirt and mud caked on his bare toes like them too. But I bet he didn't say "praise Jesus!" when someone gave him a loaf of bread. I bet you his laugh was just as contagious as theirs though! I like the Christmas season even more now, not because of the gifts and decorations, but because it reminds me of my savior, the one who was once a child like the ones we play with in the streets, unspoiled and without great wealth to blind him from reality. Possibly a dirty but happy kid who is content to play with a chunk of wood on the end of a string or a pile of rocks for days, and never get bored of them. It makes me smile, and it makes him all the more real.

So despite the madness, tiredness, and all of us being completely overworked, Christmas day will be a day of rest and feasting. We plan on getting all dressed up and going with a few friends to a five star hotel where they have turkey. Hopefully the usual turkey hangover won't be too bad! Or else the boys' three o-clock shift will be a mighty tough one.

I apologies for not having any pictures to go along with this entry, but I don't have the cable for my camera here, and Dave and Anna's camera is dead and without the power cord to re-charge it. I'll see if I can post some pics of the staff and the finished Bakery in a few days.

Have a very Merry Christmas all of you, we miss you greatly, and look forward to when we can see all of your beautiful faces once again.

Cookies for the lovely, and the wicked.

I believe I can now officially say that The Bakery is complete. Everything is functional, wait… not it’s not, I lied. The small gas stove works all right, but it has a bad gas leak at one of the welds. So the people who supplied it will be coming tomorrow to fix it. But despite the various setbacks, we managed to get a couple batches of cookies, a few kinds of bread, and butter tarts baked! Nearly all the ingredients have arrived, and the shelves are stocked with everything necessary to make cookies, breads, pastries, and pies. It all feels more real and possible now, that we may be actually providing the neighborhood with delicious baked goods in a week or so. We put together cute little bags of the cookies we made, and gave them out to our fellow shops in the complex. Some didn’t even know we were here, (where they have they been, we don’t know, cuz we’ve made enough noise and hey, we’re white…) and some were overjoyed to be amongst the privileged few who got to taste test the very first batches of cookies to ever come out of Red Moon Bakery. But alas, as we have found out over the last few days, nearly everyone in this area is a strict vegetarian. That means no egg. So the cookies may have just been tossed, but heck, it's the thought that counts right? Those are the cookies for the lovely.

The cookies for the wicked were for our neighbors, J.I.T.I. It must be an acronym for something evil, we don’t know what, but you can make it up for yourselves and get back to us as to what you think it should be. It’s a computer training place, and draws a good amount of young people to our end of the complex. We are happy about this because it is potentially great clientele. The owner is psycho though. One day he is all friendly and happy-go-lucky, and the next he threatens to rip apart our signs at night so that he can put his where ours are. He had a giant sign for his place on our front wall, and we had it taken down to put our sign up. It is our wall, we are allowed to do whatever we want with it. Apparently he wasn’t thrilled about this. We gave him a few days to take it down himself, and when he didn’t, we did. It is still fine, there is no damage to it, and he can easily put it up somewhere else. But we gave them a bunch of cookies anyway. “Love your enemies,” right? “and it will be like heaping hot coals on his head.” Or something to that effect. Not the exact words, I know. So now (as you can see from the picture at the beginning) his sign is leaning against the wall beneath ours. Not the greatest, but at least our signs are still intact.

From now onward we will be working here at various different things at nearly every hour of the day. Marc and Dave will most likely be here from 3:00am to 12pm or so, and Anna and I probably from 8:00am to... whenever we can't go on. Maybe 5:00pm, maybe 8:00 pm. I don't know yet. These are the uniforms. I have a black golf shirt type one with a red moon logo stitched over the pocket, and a little black half apron with the logo embroidered down the side. This will be the front-end staff get-up. Marc is in the bakers uniform, complete with a black bandana. Pretty cute huh?

Here are a few more pictures of the action around this crazy place, and some of the goods that are being tested.

There you be. All relatively self explanatory. I am now going to create a Red Moon Bakery blogspot. It will be http://www.redmoonbakery.blogspot.com/. You can check it out, and any feedback is appreciated. My posts will definitely be getting fewer and farther between due to the whole working factor, so if you don't see anything for a week and a half and you are getting worried, facebook me. Wish us luck, and pray for our sanity and against sleep deprivation!

Hmm...odd.

Something seems to have gone a bit wonkey with this thing... I have it still set at anyone can publish a comment, but for some reason it is saying that you must have a blogger account. I apologize for this inconvenience, and will try to amend it as soon as possible. As for those cats you can jeep for tren years, they need to learn how to read through their posts before publishing them.