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Last week I shifted into a place closer to where I’m working in Gurgaon, which I share with a few other guys from the office. It’s a barsati apartment, which is essentially a top-floor apartment with separate enclosed rooms and a lot of open patio space.

Living in Gurgaon isn’t thrilling, but it at least cuts down on terrible commute time from Delhi. Plus it’s pretty interesting to see the city in its various levels of development - right now it looks like a sea of scaffolding. The neighborhood I’m staying in is no exception; pretty much all of the buildings immediately around the house are under construction.

Besides the construction lot views, there are also views of ubiquitous Gurgaon high-rises: 

The flat itself is neat. My favorite bit is the spiral staircase leading up:

And I’m slowly making my room into a nest. I bought some curtains, a rug and some sheets (note the space pillowcase, brought from home); next steps include getting a table and a sewing machine. 

Members of my family and others who have lived with me for prolonged periods know of my immense love for all things culinary and Japanese. I taught myself how to make sushi a few years back, and since then have kept a steady stock of sticky rice, rice vinegar, shoyu, nori, furikake, and wasabi paste in my kitchen. I’m a Japanese food addict, to put it plainly. While I love sushi, it’s time-consuming to make, so most nights of the week I typically make myself some concoction of sticky rice and toppings for dinner - fried egg, avocado, tofu, etc. I call it “deconstructed sushi.”

This has obviously presented a slight problem while living in India. The first year I lived here I craved sushi like mad, and was elated when I finally discovered a few decent sushi restaurants in Bangalore. While Indian food holds a close second to Japanese food in my list of favorite international cuisines, I don’t cook Indian food very well (save for a few simple dishes, like uppuma), and after a while I start to miss having my standard sticky rice meals for dinner. I was ready to pack a five pound bag of sticky rice and some furikake into my luggage for this current stay, but gave up when my bags became overwhelmed with other necessities. I figured I’d just have to hold out and make do with the occasional meal at a sushi place in Delhi.

That being said, I was beyond happy to discover this week that there is an exclusively Japanese grocery store, Yamato-ya, in Safdarjung Enclave in South Delhi! With a large Japanese expat community in Delhi, there’s definitely a demand for it. I went today and it was better than Christmas:

There was everything I wanted and then some. I also discovered that there’s a Japanese-run organization that produces fresh organic tofu and miso at their headquarters in Allahabad!

Here’s what I came home with: sticky rice, kelp-flavored sushi vinegar, instant miso, soy sauce, wasabi paste, chopsticks, and a few different types of furikake (aka seaweed-based rice seasoning). Yay!

And here is what was my dinner tonight, the old favorite, sticky rice with fried eggs and bonito furikake, topped with soy sauce and a dab of wasabi. Hey Delhi, you can be 100+ degrees and humid everyday, but I won’t care a bit as long as I’ve got my Japanese food.

Just a quick note to say that I’ve enabled comments on posts via DISQUS. You should be able to comment via Facebook and Twitter, too! Let me know if there are any bugs! kassia [dot] karr [at] gmail [dot] com.

Unluckily, I have been a little sick and have spent most of the last two days indoors. I spent some of that time channel surfing, flipping through Indian daytime television, which is mostly a barrage of dramatic Hindi-language soaps. Watching them reminds me of watching Spanish telenovas while channel surfing back home, enjoying the so-bad-it’s-great acting without actually understanding any of the language. My Hindi is better than my Spanish, though, so I suppose I could make the excuse that watching them might help me grow accustomed to the language… but really, it’s worth it just to see the over-the-top soap opera medium done Indian-style.

Blossom Book Store, Church Street, Bangalore

After a full day of flying and layovers in New York and Delhi, I reached Bangalore. I’ve mostly just been taking it easy, to avoid exacerbating my jet lag - staying inside under fans, reading, working on some design stuff, watching a lot of World Cup matches, etc. Yesterday I made it into the city, to the shopping area around Church Street and MG Road. I was trying to find a particular book: “Up the Country” by Emily Eden, so I stopped into a few bookstores. A few hours of searching later, that particular book hadn’t surfaced, but I did get a good reminder of how amusing book stores here can be:

The “Women’s Interest” section at Higgenbottom’s on MG Road was comprised mainly of cross-stitching books.

Want to know when your husband will die? There’s a book for that.

This German IKEA catalog was available for purchase in the “Design” section.

Another shot at Blossom. This book store is amazing; I have never seen so many books crammed into such a tight space.

And this one’s pretty much self-explanatory.

I was hoping to start shooting some video, but sadly, I went to turn on my little Kodak Zi6 camera and found that it has inexplicably died. Some searching online has revealed that this is a not-uncommon problem, but sadly in my case I have no way to send it to Kodak to have it repaired. I don’t know what I’ll do in the meantime, as I had really been looking forward to video blogging - I suppose my iPhone camera will have to do for now!