Day 21 - 21st Feb

I got up early and packed so that I could join Jodie for the yoga class she had found. It was really good and the first decent yoga class I had ever attended. The guy explained everything really well and helped us get into the right positions. He made money from yoga classes and used it to help different social and animal charities. He apparently has a Facebook account with you can find under 'Raiba House', Udaipur if anyone (Claire and Eve?) is interested. I've not looked at it but he says there are loads of pictures and advice on there.

After a quick breakfast we left Matt at the hostel and went to the cooking class. The woman who ran it, Shaishi was quite incredible. She lost her husband when he was 32 and they had 2 young children. She had to complete a year of mourning where she could not leave the house for 12 whole months. For the first 45 days she had to get up at sunrise and sit in the corner and cry. Throughout the day, different women would visit and cry wiith her until, at sunset, she could get up and take a little food.

After those first days, she had no way to support her children and, due to being from the Brahmin caste, she was only allowed to do more professional jobs such as secretary or teacher. She secretly starting taking in laundry and doing it behind locked doors. After the mourning period was over she had to stop and again had to find a new way of making money. Her sons had befriended some English guys who had complimented her cooking and told her she ought to start teaching other people. She did not speak English so they started to help her.

Her first class was with 2 Australians and, because she still had very little English but were impressed by the course, they helped her by writing up the recipes in English and word processing them. The next couple were French (I think!) and they helped her to create a website. After several years, she now speaks good English and is the number 1 cookery course on trip advisor.

She started by talking us through the recipes and helping us to make notes. She then taught us how to make chai and pakoras. The pakoras were fantastic and we stuffed ourselves silly. After that, we moved on to making corander chutney, mango chutney, a base masala which we used for making aloo gobi, malai kofta, vegetable pilau, local cheese, paneer, naan with cheese and tomato, chapatti, plain parantha, stuffed parantha and sweet parantha.

4 hours later we were sat down with all of this wonderful food in front of us and absolutely no room in our stomachs to put it. We received our jangly graduation bracelets and a keyring elephant and some goody bags to pack up the food and take it to 'my husband'. Something that turned out to be not much of a success when curry sauce leaks out of a bag that been fastened with staples!

We said our goodbyes at the hostel and headed to the train station, hoping to buy our tickets for the Delhi - Udaipur leg of the journey. After waiting in in the queue at 3 different windows we still couldn't book a ticket so had to just jump on the 5.15pm train to Delhi and resolve to do what we could when we got to the other end.

Journey was restless but uneventful.