Day 2 - Pune

We started the day by relaxing on the balcony. Yes, we had a balcony also. With a palm tree. This is how we spent pretty much every morning after crawling out of bed. Sweet!



After the early morning tanning lesson we headed downtown for more money-spending activities. This time to Laxmi road.



Laxmi is the goddess of wealth. And boy this street was full of clothes shops. The girlz freaked out, the boys behaved and we all ended up with some proper Indian street ware. Before we come to the highlights of the day, let me show you a typical situation that took place 24/7. Check out this picture of the two fit birds that we have all come to know already. Can you see anything peculiar on this picture?



Yes – those men are actually staring at the girls as if they had just miraculously jumped out of a lotus flower! This happened to us (or just the girls actually) all the time wherever we went around in the city. Must be nice to be stared at like a celebrity, I guess...
While some of us bought everything they liked Simone did a much more efficient way of shopping and after trying on half the shop went for a single outfit.



I guess after a while I was going on the nerves of everybody with my passion of documenting every minute of the trip. Preeti made me aware of this with a single face expression.



So it was time again to start taking photos of the city around us. We found a strange ad for problems “down there” which left both Eugenio and me puzzled as the before and after pictures kind of did not make sense to us (except for some minor anatomical absurdities)



The highlight of the day was this small shop full of bracelets. We spent 3 full days in it and the girls (well mostly Blanca actually) tried on 3,234,762 different sets of bracelets and decided to only buy 1,079,231 pieces which left the shop owners pretty devastated. Here is a picture of happy Blanca after the bracelet-fitting-session which has left her hands scarred for life and temporarily blue from the artificial colours. Oh, almost forgot – Eugenio did manage to kick some bracelets off the counter which smashed into small pieces :-)



We continued towards the male section of the street and passed by a spice lottery. Hmm, what will it be today - hot, hotter or shall I go for the tongue-killers?



As a next obstacle the gods have decided to test my ability to say NO to strange men offering fruits on the street. Needless to say that I failed miserably and decided for the joy of the moment and the pain later… I don’t know what it was that I tried but it was d-e-l-i-c-i-o-u-s!



10 minutes later Eugenio and I had chosen our outfits showing the girls how to do proper shopping.



As at this moment Eugenio had spent already 3 consecutive days without proper Italian food we decided to go for La Pizzeria in Pune. I am happy to report that with Maike on our side we were the most Indian looking group at the place. The food was good, the waiters Italian miserable.



We spent the late afternoon shopping in another part of the town, watching wrestling on TV in a bar full of cartoons stolen out of a MAD magazine (a VERY bloody wrestling match I must say) and partly in further clothes shops (mainly done by the girls). For the evening we got invited to Paritosh’s place and so went home to rest a bit and try on the catches of the day.



Unfortunately I did not take my camera with me to Paritoshs, so at this point I have to use a pictures from the internet to describe the place. It looked a little bit like this I think (well, not really, but I like this photo somehow...)



I can pretty much say that if you can call a rickshaw your own, you pretty much made it in India. Needless to say the Sarda family had a rickshaw at the front lawn. Plus we had the best food of the whole trip at this evening – it was simply amazing…

To be continued ...

Here are the photos of Day 2