Hot hot hot ...

What a terrible blogger I have become.... nothing from me for months. The reason for that is not too much has been happening beside heat. Delhi has been in the grip of a serious summer, it has been over 43 degrees for as long as I can remember. I am eternally thankful to the people that invented air conditioning, and can't even imagine what living through heat like this would be like without it. Even though so many people in this place do.

There has been a lot of 'goings' from Delhi. The minute the school closes up, the aeroplanes take off and the tumbleweed rolls in (not quite in a city of 20 million people). Some very special people have taken off this summer and won't be coming back to Delhi shores, thankfully a lot will be.

I'v been working part-time which has allowed for some long weekends. On one of these recently we managed to scrap in a little trip to Oman and Dubai to see some very good friends. In Muscat we stayed at the Shangri-La Hotel and just swam, ate Aussie beef (in many states) and relaxed in the heat looking at the Arabian Sea. It was a few days of just relaxing.

View from Shangri-La

 

Soph and Tom meet the locals

We then drove to Dubai (via Shobha - a must see!) with our mates and had one day checking out the malls of Dubai. I need to pencil in a trip back as didn't get around to seeing nearly enough stuff but importantly I saw Dubai's new Waitrose, Jones the Grocer, Nespresso store and a butcher. Another highlight was Milk and Honey - a gorgeous little grocer that stocked amazing olives, Carmen's museli bars, Natural Confectionary company lollies and quite delicious cupcakes. Dubai's malls blew my mind after Delhi and have a feeling that place hasn't stopped growing yet! Cate - pencil me back into the spare bedroom soon!

Otherwise, today is Sophie's 2nd birthday so there has been plenty of cake, balloons and Charlie and Lola episodes (her absolute favourite). Can't believe she is 2! Where has the time gone......

Here's to another day of 44 degrees......

Pondicherry holiday

At the end of April we packed the family up and headed south to Tamil Nadu and the city of Chennai. Chennai was just a pit stop before heading down the highway to Pondicherry. The road to Pondi was fairly good but our driver was a complete lunatic! As a result Sophie threw up all over the backseat, herself and her parents.Her father, for some odd reason, had brought along a plastic bag - genius - so an easy clean up and we continued on our way.

2 hours later we arrived at the Dune Hotel, a lovely villa based eco hotel about 15km north of Pondi. Dunes was cool. We were shown to our villa that had its own pool and immediately relaxed. The only way to get around the Dune is on bicycles which was lovely and gave a very relaxed Rottnest vibe to the place.

On the Sunday morning we ventured into Pondi city and had a little wander around.... on the way in to town I did let my mind wander to french baguettes and wide boulevardes however we were obviously still in India so the French influence was limited to some older style french buildings damaged by years of heat and monsoon rains, but it still had some charm.  It was also crazy crazy hot so after about 90 minutes of walking we called it a day and headed back to the private pool and a nimbu pane.

The weather in Pondicherry suited alot of lazing, reading, sleeping and swimming so we stuck to these core activities and we were fine. One of the nicest things was sitting outside on our little deck, getting room service sharing a bottle of wine and staring at the many many stars that we hadn't seen for awhile.........