The Dinner Epilogue – 8/27/14

                After attending a 4-day pre-departure orientation at Princeton and meeting all of the other 34 Bridge Year (BYP) participants (especially bonding with the 6 other students going to India with me), we endured a 14-hour-long flight from Newark to Delhi. The plane was decked out in personal TVs and had food service twice, a dinner at the beginning and a breakfast at the end. It is slightly strange that we took off at close to 9 PM in the USA and landed close to 9 PM in Delhi but still had dinner and breakfast rather than dinner and dinner.

                The food they served us had an Indian flare, so me and two other BYP students sitting next to me (Chase and Ben) decided to try to eat everything on our little airplane plates. I had thought that both the vegetarian and chicken main dish options were curry after smelling it all throughout the cabin, so I got the chicken option only to find out that it was actually a pasta dish with white sauce. The meal came with a roll with butter, a side of yogurt, a salad, pickled vegetables, angur basundi (an Indian dessert), and a “Dinner Epilogue.” The vegetable curry went really well with the yogurt, especially because it kept the spicy-hot flavor of the food down. Since I had the bland chicken dish, I didn’t really eat a lot of the plain yogurt at first, but later it came in handy. After finishing my salad (which included these things that looked like French fries but didn’t taste like them) I noticed that both Ben and I had picked out the pepper that was in it. We decided that we would eat it at the same time and popped them in our mouths. Spoiler alert: they werevery very very very hot. No amount of cooling yogurt could extinguish the fire in our mouths – a fire that burned for a solid 5-10 minutes. After the effects of it had mostly worn off, we decided to try the pickled vegetables. We opened the container expecting to see, well, pickled vegetables. What we got, however, was a reddish paste. Undaunted, the three of us took a spoonful and swallowed, only to find that these pickled vegetables tasted pretty unpleasant. The phrase that crossed my mind as I forced myself to chew and swallow was “this tastes like death” (a saying that my little brother originally coined when accidentally eating an olive in his salad). Now, don’t be fooled by my grim descriptions of the food, overall it was very good and this whole time we were laughing at ourselves – how could we already be in culture shock and not even in the country yet? Anyway, next to eat was angur basundi, a dish described as “cheese dumplings served in a rich saffron flavored milk.” My first reaction was that I didn’t really like it, but after multiple bites the dessert definitely grew on me. The cheese dumplings weren’t made of the kind of cheese that you find in the USA, rather, they were sweet and crumbly.

My friends and I were proud that we had finished most of the meal (the pickled vegetables were left largely untouched) and then found the “Dinner Epilogue” with our moist toilettes. It was a mix of spices that is supposed to cleanse the palate and help with digestion. A little Indian girl sitting in the row across from us happily munched away on it, so we followed her lead and shook a small amount of the spice mixture into the palms of our hands and then ate it. To me, it tasted like gritty soap or maybe like potpourri. Ben thought it was more like eating pine needles, and Chase chose to refer to it as just plain “foul.” Now, I don’t know why Chase felt that because Ben and I had suffered through the pepper incident she needed to dump the entire packet of spices into her mouth, but she did and winced pretty constantly as she slowly chewed and swallowed the mix. Needless to say, we were glad to have some mint gum to get rid of the bizarre taste.