But you’d think I was a bit weird, and no one would ever read it, so let’s move on… It is the ultimate pick-me-up, and I could write it a love poem. A big pinch of tea, milk, cardamom or ginger and a tablespoon of sugar it’s boiled in a pot, filtered into a tiny cup and sold for a pittance ten billion times a day. The imaginary number four on this list is the Indian national drink: chai. Here I list three foods that I had never heard of before I went, but that now I am back, I miss keenly. I had never eaten one before, and it was delicious.Īs time passed I learnt to eat rice with my hands, I conquered spice, I realised that vegetarian food can be just as good as meat dishes, and I fell in love with Indian cuisine - which, incidentally, is at least as diverse as the cuisine of the whole of Western Europe. I was in Connaught Place, the central hub of New Delhi, and I was presented with a masala dosa, which is a huge south Indian pancake with spices and potato inside. I remember my first meal in India vividly. ![]() ![]() My father, who adores it, took us to Indian restaurants frequently when I was young, and to me, Indian food was stodgy sauce, dry chicken breast, soggy naan and a solid wall of spice. I have a confession to make: before I went to India, I didn’t like Indian food. I’ve had a number of what I thought to be Grand Revelations while staring at a saucepan, only to later realise, of course, that they made no sense). (For me, they often tend to come when I’m cooking. The upshot of this is that at the end of each day I am often emotionally exhausted and my mind is racing with those dangerous and uncontrollable thoughts that will be extremely familiar to anyone with any kind of anxiety. It is very strange to have people tell me that I’m emotionally cold, or that I am quite rational, because I have spent most of my life feeling the opposite! ![]() So now when things are bad, I often still hide it, even when it would be better to express it. When things were a lot worse, and I felt terrible every day, I became very good at hiding it, because I realised that nothing good would come from being unhappy on the surface all the time. I am very lucky to be able to say that these days, it’s almost always real life events that cause this. But sometimes - like now, incidentally - life events mean that my brain decides to have a little holiday from the city of Thinking Clearly, and takes a slow tour around the lands of Panic, Anxiety, Overthinking, and Self Pity. Usually, the medication works and I feel that I am pretty level-headed and sensible. Six months late, the alignment has shifted to its northern point of sunrise at winter solstice.As I have said before on this blog, for most of my life I have had problems with my mental health, and I take medication for this. Standing near the southwestern corner in Angkor Thom the rising sun at summer equinox will be visible through, or over, the eastern gate. For example, standing at Pre Rup 6 kilometers away at winter solstice, one would see the setting sun over Angkor Wat. Published in the journal Science, the study demonstrated how Angkor Wat's architect had established solar alignments between the temple and a nearby mountaintop shrine that took place during the summer solstice. In 1976, University of Michigan researchers suggested that the architect of ancient Cambodia's Angkor Wat had encoded calendrical, historical and cosmological themes into his architectural plan for the temple. ![]() They created in its very structure and orientation, a reminder of the greater cosmic order, reflected in both the passage of time, and in the changing rays of the sun at propitious times of the year. The builders of Angkor Wat were not interested in creating a temple merely to honor their deities.
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