“Dal fry and one sweet Lassi, please”

If you are vegetarian you can eat quite good meals in India. The Indians like vegetarian food due to two reasons. One reason is that vegetarian food is much cheaper than non-vegetarian food. And the other reason is that Indians don’t eat beef at all coz cows are holly in India. Hence, dal, which consists of beans and peas, is the most popular food also coz it is cheap, very saturated and full of energy. When Indians eat meat then they eat chicken at the most. As a guy from Europe I had to form a habit of Indian food at first coz Indian food is usually except for some dishes, very spicy. You can not imagine how spicy it is. If you added just some pepper or curry on your dish in Europe, the Indians wouldn’t taste that kind of spice. In India it is much worse. An Indian sometime explained me why all the dishes are so spicy. In former times, the Indians were forced to eat more or less rotten vegetables coz hadn’t anything else to eat. So they added quite a lot of spice to the meal in order to digest easier. I have had some upset stomachs at the beginning, but that’s normal. A lot of us had problems and even diarrhoea, also due to the fact that the meals are often not so hygienically prepared than they are in Europe. In the meanwhile I have three favourite dishes. One is Paneer butter masala. It is made of cheese added with some gravy and masala. Masala is just a kind of spice which gives the dish a really good flavour. Usually you eat it with some bread. I prefer parotha, but chapatti is good as well. The bread does not look like the bread you know from Germany. It looks merely like a pancake as it is flat and round. The second one is chicken tikka gravy. You eat this dish with a kind of bread as well. And the most favourite one is masala dosa. It is just a dosa which is a kind of bread, I would say, flavoured with some malasa. Then it is wrapped and inside smashed potatoes are added. To flavour it even more, two tasty sauces are offered as well. Usually you eat all the Indian dishes with your fingers. Hence, you immerse the bread in the gravy and wrap the chicken or whatever with it. A spoon is usually offered to you but as for the Indians, they only use it in very rare cases. Indians are poor people, so having spoons or forks is a kind of luxury. And there is another reason for avoiding taking any cutlery. The Indians assume the cutlery not to be clean. Well, actually, they are right, coz you never know what has done with the cutlery before; if it has been really cleaned and if yes, how. So, when the Indians have washed their hands before eating, they know definitely that at least their fingers are clean. When they eat, they make sure that the food doesn’t touch their palm. The food is supposed to touch only the tip of the fingers, nothing else. For that reason they eat everything with their hands, even rice. It looks really disgusting when they mix the rice with gravy by using their fingers. Bye the way, as the Indians use the left hand for toilet affairs, only the right hand is used for eating, never the left hand. Of course, you have dirty fingers when you don’t’ use a fork or spoon. Therefore, after having finished your meal you will get a small bowl of hot water to which a little piece of lemon was added. Then you rub your greasy fingers on the lemon and bath them in the hot water and that’s it. The fingers become more or less clean, especially when you wipe them afterwards with a napkin. For drinking you get water from the tape for free. For any sealed water or soft drinks you have to pay. What I‘ve mentioned regarding the cutlery applies to the glasses as well. From this it follows that Indians drink out of the glasses by just pouring the water in their mouth; the egde is never touched with the lips. I tried to eat with fingers as well as to drink in that manner; I failed in both. Ok, I managed to eat with my fingers but you don’t want to know how it looked like. And I poured the water more or less over my shirt than in my mouth. A typical Indian or even better Asian drink is Lassi. It is made out of water or milk and yogurt which are mixed in a proportion of one to one. Apart from the most common ones, sweet and salt Lassi, it is served both with crashed fruits like banana, mango or pineapple and spice if you ask for it. I only can recommend you to try it once, it is very tasty. The dishes usually don’t cost more than 100 Rupees. Thus, as for me, I go out for dinner quite often coz I am not a good cook and in addition to that I don’t feel like cooking when I come back from work at about 8pm. Once you have finished your meal, you will get the bill immediately. But don’t be surprised when you ascertain an additional amount to be added to the regular prices of you dishes – it’s the tax. The tax is 12,24 % for food and is not included in the prices which you find in the menu. The bill is presented to you in a kind of wallet. Then you put some notes inside and return it without saying anything. After a while the servant returns and hands over the wallet including the change to you again. Then if you want to you can take the change of course or give the servants a small tip. We usually do the second one. By the way don’t be surprised if you sit close to Indians and all of a sudden hear them belching. In India it’s not unusual and nobody bothers about it. Thus, if you have ever searched for an opportunity to belch at table or in a restaurant, here it is. One day I went to McDonalds. Actually, I don’t like that food so much but when you spend some months in India, you feel like having this stuff. But I was a little bit surprised as I saw the menu. No Hamburger, no Big Mac. Instead the menu included some additional vegetarian items and for non-veg chicken is offered. Well, in fact, I should have known that as Indians don’t eat beef. Indians or better Hindi believe that they are reborn as cows. Not at McDonalds but of course at some places you get beef.