Nandi

The town of Nandi is about a 30 minute bus ride from the marina.  My mom, Cleo and I got up and dressed early to catch it.  We were the first ones on the bus so we watched as all the local people who lived outside the town get on.  

The bus stop in town was huge with tons of buses in it, around the border there were stalls selling all kind of Indian treats. We walked through the town and came upon a store called Lani’s, we stopped to take a picture and the owners invited us in.  We told them that my moms name was also Lani and they invited us to sit down and have Kava with them. We made friends with them and they showed us around town to all the shops we needed to visit.  After going to the Supermarket, they let us drop off our bags in their shop so we wouldn’t have to lug them all around while we went to our other stops.  

We checked out all the little dollar stores for things to use for our Halloween costumes. It was soon to be Diwali so all the stores sold fireworks and sparklers and little Hindu statues.  We bought some face paint and Henna paint to do doodles on our skin and Cleo bought some silver nail polish for her Artemis costume.

For our last stop we went to the Fresh vegetable market. It was huge, there were rows and rows of all different kinds of vegetables and fruits and Kava. A whole half of the market place was devoted to selling Kava, the root that was ground and watered down to make a drink that didn’t taste very good, at least not to me. We spent an hour browsing the different vegetable stalls, we each got a chicken curry roti for lunch and an apple.  After we were done with the market we went back to Lani’s to collect our bags and thank the nice owners.  We caught a taxi and drove out of town, along the road out there were lots of stores and restaurants, we stopped in an alcohol store to get beer and a butchery to get bacon.  

We were on our way back when my mom saw an Italian deli, she got really excited and insisted we stop there.  Inside the shop smelled like milk and pasta, the owner was glad to have customers and warmed up to us when we told him we were from Rome and spoke a bit of Italian.  He let us taste the meats and cheeses he was selling and chattered away in Italian while we picked out cheeses, meats and pastas to buy.  It had been so long since we’d had any good Italian food that we ended up spending a lot, but was worth it.

Finally done with our shopping we headed back to the marina.