not your average turkey dinner....

I found a lovely Indian woman named Kumari to cook Thali for our Christmas dinner.  She was very reluctant because she does not like to package all of the small dishes required for a Thali feast and cousin Arshid insisted on having the meal in the family's hotel.

This is Kumari's house where she prepared the meal.  She does not like to have her picture taken, so this is a shot of her husband helping in the kitchen.  If Simon wants to express his colourful opinion on naked men cooking, he can do a blog post of his own. 

This is the food packed ready for us to take back to the hotel.

This is a photo of the baker at the restaurant down the street.  He baked the chocolate cake we had for desert (at least he was wearing a tank top).  All of the staff crowded in to the first several photos before I got this one with the head waiter.

This is the second cake I bought in town at the bakery that has been approved by both of the German women I know here.  It is a White Forest cake with Christmas teddy bears(?).

I bought some Christmas lights, some Christmas balls and three white paper stars to decorate the courtyard of the hotel, but it was the boys that developed and executed the plan for the tree.  They ripped two papaya trees out of the ground (Simon swears that one of them had a $40.00 price tag on it) and a frond from a palm tree in the yard and stuck it in a pot of gravel.  They decorated the wilting branches with some of the balls and paper mache decorations borrowed from the shop. They were very excited by their ingenuity and made me come over to admire the masterpiece before the event.

This is people serving themselves at the front desk/buffet table.  

mmmmmmmm-good

We invited a a Swedish tourist, and several neighbours.  David looked after the shop for us and ate after we returned.