The world is big and fascinating and I decided to see it

Eating from a banana leaf, sitting cross-legged on the floor, eating without cutlery while smacking ones lips? „Are they all that poor?“ This question slipped out of my granny's mouth when I was telling her about some Indian habits. It is not like this but Indians love to eat with hands. The aim is to maximize the senses. Food is prepared fresh with a lot of effort and love and garnished beautifully. Exotic spices are added for the unique tastes and some spices are added just to make the aroma of food better or to make it more colourful. And eating with the hands give you the sensation of texture, temperature and composition of your meal. And I experience right this trying the food was an explosion for the taste bulbs every day as well as for the other senses. It took me a while to learn to eat not that clumsy with my 3 fingers of the right hand. Indian food is affected by the various religions, it is a paradise for vegetarians. Cows are holy in Hinduism so beef is not on the diet, due to big Muslim populations you wont find a lot of pork as well. Major meat is chicken (world famous from the tandoori clay oven) or mutton. The Jain's wash off the leftovers of there fingers with water over their plate and drink it to not waste a single crumb. Most people aren't that serious but the public is aware of the fact that they have a population over 1 billion and avoid wasting. Fresh vegetables and delicious spices are the base of every dish. Food is usually served with typical flat-breads. Rice is cultivated in India and served in different versions as reasonable healthy side dish. Traditionally most of the girls go through a yearlong cooking course by their mothers or aunts before they get married. Because the parents think that if these girls can not make their husbands happy by cooking delicious food for them, they are not serving the purpose of an ideal Indian wife. The first Hindi phrases I learned was "This is delicious". On the streets you see people carrying a tiffin box to work or for the long train journeys. In Mumbai you can see the Dabbawalas which literally means "box person". These workers develop a unique system to deliver home cooked food in lunch boxes to people working in offices all over Mumbai. They collect it in the suburbs at private houses where the wives prepare it freshly and deliver it in time. After lunch break they come again and collect the empty boxes and returning them to the homes.