It’s Christmas Time...

Most of the festive season has been spent shopping for the new flat. It felt a bit like doing the Boxing Day sales in the UK but instead of a shopping centre filled with rampant bargain hunters this was rushing round Indian markets for duvets and a potato peeler. Xmas day was a break from the shopping. 12 volunteers piled round to one of our flats. The emails started a couple of weeks before: what would we eat, who was bringing what and could we bag the projector from the VSO office to watch a bit of James Bond?

With no oven, we settled on Turkish chicken takeaway and some stuffing balls fried up on the stove. Sitting on the balcony chatting in the winter sun slurping a red wine before dinner was lovely. For afters we had what was left of the mountain of cheese that a visitor had brought over for a party the week before. The Delhi volunteers swooped in at the end of that party so we could get some Stilton for Xmas day. One of the vols though managed to scoff most of the cheese before we got to the party though. Sacrilege!

It was certainly strange not to be around family but MSN was a saver. We had some games, more red wine and the guitar was out in the evening. A street band saw the party and come round beating their drums. One volunteer got on the guitar, sat on the balcony and tried to get them to beat along to Jingle Bells. It was hard to hear anything above their drums so they missed his point but it didn’t matter. Xmas Day was finished by seeing another couple of visitors and eating their Xmas pudding before heading home in a freezing cold auto to the lovely new flat.

On NYE there was a few of us on a terrace ploughing through a case of Kingfisher. It was a right laugh listening to Spotify and coming up with the most random playlists. It was the coldest and foggiest NYE I’ve ever had. To warm up we ate spicy chicken rolls and slung back a vodka shot. We nearly missed midnight until we heard another party cheering. After midnight there was a partial lunar eclipse of the ‘blue moon’. We also got to see a refraction that made it look like another real blue moon. We danced on the terrace to keep warm until we couldn’t drink anymore and it was time to head home.

Having spent much of the last week settling in it’s been a good time to reflect on the year gone by and what my next year will be like, the majority of which will be in Delhi completing this project I’ve come here to do.

YouTube clip of Xmas day here.