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I should probably start with a belated MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR!! I hope that everyone's holidays have been merry and joyful and that (if you're in England reading this) the weather wasn't too cold and miserable :-) Spending Christmas in India is always different from celebrating the holidays back home - I've written before about my lack of Christmas spirit leading up to the event - but in the end the important parts were the same: excellent food, beautiful wine (more about that later), good company and the odd gift. The best gift of the day being the arrival of my older sister Kim who appeared at my dad's house at just after 11am on Christmas day morning. I realised that I hadn't actually seen her in the flesh since July so I couldn't wait for her to get here. I thought her being in India for the holidays was gift enough but when she pulled six bottles of Spanish red wine out of her suitcase I could have kissed her. You see, I've been brought up in a wine drinking household, predominantly red wine, and we're talking about a lot of it. My parents used to go on weekend trips to France and come back with six hundred bottles to last them the next few months so I'm not exaggerating when I say wine had some significance in our upbringing. When most of my friends were still trying to even stomach red wine (it is an acquired taste after all) I was happily drinking glasses of it and have regularly enjoyed it ever since. Drinking good red wine in India though is very difficult and rather expensive comparative to drinking other types of alcohol. In a place like Goa where bottles of spirits are sold for less than two pounds and the tonic water costs more than the gin, a decent bottle of wine is the one thing that's actually more expensive than home and therefore doesn't often factor into our drinking regime. Christmas time however is the one time of year when red wine is a necessity - when you're eating fillet steak for Christmas dinner (which incidentally costs less than £6 for 3½ kilos of prime beef if you buy it fresh from the butcher) it really would be a travesty to not have a decent glass of red to wash it all down with. Talk of wine aside (I just realised how many words I'd written just about red wine), we had a lovely day with friends and family and despite the lack of 'proper' Christmas spirit, we had a very merry time.
Christmas dinner was a traditional affair of beef, roast potatoes and mash, Yorkshire puddings, bacon wrapped sausages, stuffing and vegetables but that's not a typical meal over here in India. Because I've got a bit of a reputation as a fussy eater, people always ask me what I eat when I come here. I'm not heavily into super spicy food but I'm not averse to a good curry. I eat far too much butter chicken but who wouldn't, it's DELICIOUS! I don't like rice (a statement that never fails to shock) and I am a big fan of the cheese garlic naan as an accompaniment. Actually not even as an accompaniment sometimes, I'm ashamed to admit that a chip sandwich was created by my very hand from a cheese naan and some fries only a few weeks ago. However, in Goa especially, I'm so spoilt for choice with food that I can honestly eat whatever I want most of the time. I've had excellent Chinese, Thai, Tibetan, Italian, you name it, you can probably get it here, you can even have a Dominos pizza or a Subway sandwich if the fancy takes you (the fancy usually taking you after you've been ill for five days and you're too scared to eat anything else). The other fail safe choice is fillet steak - widely available, ludicrously cheap and always one of the biggest steaks you've ever eaten outside of the USA. We took Kim, Rodger and Claire (who arrived on New Years' day) out for dinner tonight and I can say without hesitation that they were all pretty shocked when they realised that for around £3.50 you can get a fillet steak in a restaurant that is at least double the size of one back home that you'd easily pay £20 for. For Kim especially, who lives in Spain where proper fillet steak apparently doesn't really exist, this results in us eating a hell of a lot of steak on a regular basis, but (vegetarians aside) who wouldn't?!
As I mentioned earlier, my brother and his girlfriend Claire arrived on New Years Day and for the first time in over six months we're all together again (brother and sisters I mean), if only for a week. I have to admit that after a few months away it really was so lovely to see Kim, Rodge and Claire and did make me feel less removed from home - to be out of people's lives for six months is actually quite a big thing so it's so great to have them here and being able to properly catch up on what they've all been up to. Plus they brought me two massive bars of Galaxy chocolate and a proper 'in a wooden box with gingham fabric' camembert so I'm literally the happiest person in the world right now. On the list of things I miss most about home decent chocolate and cheese are right up there at the top so it couldn't have been any better. Their arrival also caused something to happen which has never happened to me before, it has actually been suggested that I have got something of a tan. I am the girl who sits under an umbrella wearing factor 30 and burns to a crisp at the slightest ray of sunshine, but after two and a half months my skin is finally turning from milk bottle white and heading in a 'browntown' (to use my little sister Tor's description of tanned) direction. When Rodge and Claire arrived even I had to acknowledge that next to them (sorry about this guys!) I looked positively brown! Kim of course has already surpassed my caramel coloured aspirations despite being here for just over a week, but then she's always been a bather whereas I may as well just stay inside the amount of enthusiasm I have for laying baking in the sun. It's never really been my thing so despite the potential for being very tanned indeed, I'm just accepting that hopefully, with another three months plus to go that I'll return home in April and at least look like I've been away to a hot country and caught a bit of sun! Of course, my newly redded hair doesn't really go with a tan but as I packed enough red hair dye to last me six months I'm just going to have to find a way to make it work as vampire pale skin is no longer something I have!
So Christmas is over for another year and we're officially in the year 2012. My facebook status after midnight read '2012 is the year....' and I mean that in so many different ways. My situation when I go home is not an easy one; I gave up my job and my flat and am returning post travelling to start again, go down a new career path and really start being a proper grown up. None of these things sound hugely appealing right now but I suppose I do have another three months of travelling ahead of me before I have to go back to reality with a bang. I had a tarot reading at Anjuna market the other day and despite having been a sceptic about that kind of thing for years, the reading I had really did strike a chord with me. I won't go into the details of it but I walked away from it feeling more positive, certainly more hopeful strangely and very much intrigued as to how a person you've met so briefly can tell you so much about yourself, your friends, your ideas for the future. It put me in the right frame of mind to start thinking about where I'm heading next, what I want to do with my life and lots of other ridiculously large ideas like that. 2012 is a new year and I'm (starting it at least) with a new mindset, let's just see what happens!
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