Christmas and New Years Eve

After a long time, here is another story about current and past events in a country far, far away, let us call it India.
Recently, as probably all of you know, there was this holiday called Christmas. India is a multi-cultural country with I'd say a lot of different religions. Christmas does exist, actually, but not in way you are used to when you are from a western country dominated by Christianity. What I missed a lot was the snow...honestly, although I don't miss the cold temperatures, I have to admit that falling snow comes in quite handy regarding cosy and merry ambience. Obviously, the part of India I live in currently does not have any snow. Well, we might have temperatures of about 25°C and yes, it is hardly raining, so that could be considered awesome preconditions for a merry Christmas. On the other hand there are no Christmas trees! Wait, there are Christmas trees, made out of plastic, more decoration covering the tree than it can actually carry. One could say, that the decoration is decorated with the Christmas tree! Some families have a Christmas tree, so that is quite nice. But however the atmosphere is not the same as in Germany.
So what exactly do you do when you are in India and you would like to be part of the Indian Christmas? What three other interns and me did was joining a festive buffet in the Oberoi Hotel in Bangalore. On the menue there was a lot of European dishes like roasted turkey, duck, plum pudding and so on and so on! It was an awesome evening accompanied by loads of delicious food. Interesting fact: around 80% of all people attending the event were German ;-)
On 25th all German interns were preparing dishes for a nice and cosy evening. We had Käsespätzle, as a dessert apple pie and mulled wine (Glühwein) for drinks. Great food, great beverages as well and a very nice evening with all interns.


Unfortunately holidays do not really apply to the festive season. Although a lot of the kids who go to school are on holidays, many employees (and employers as well) are working. Especially when you are used to the holidays/lecture break it is kind of strange, when you have to work on 24th and 31st of December.


So what about New Years Eve...however, since there is also Diwali in India, which is to some people also kind of New Years and some people use different calenders and start the year on different dates, New Years is nevertheless an opportunity to go to a lot of parties. Most of them are quite expensive. This is why you should consider joining a private party. And this is exactly what we did. We were invited by an Indian trainee. All people invited to the party hardly knew more than 4-5 people, that made it easy to get to know a lot of different people very well. In order to have a party that is supposed to last longer than 1pm, a farm house was being rented for the occasion. It has been way outside the city and just finding it was kind of an adventure. Collecting all people with cars and coordinating all of them took several hours. This is why we arrived only 40min prior to New Years Eve. Well, I guess this is why most of us were having a blast till about 6am...Unfortunately we had to leave the farm house at 8 o'clock in the morning again...which we didn't know and the wake up call came quite from nowhere.
As soon as I have any pictures I'll upload them to share all impressions as usual :-)