Kites!

True Hyderabadi fun!

Monday was the start of a festival and Google Hyderabad had the day off. We first went to a park where Dichan thought there might be some local kite flying...there was, but we were the ONLY non-indians in the place, and man does that draw attention. As we walked through the parking lot/park we certainly drew a crowd. Young boys come up and just stare. They don't really say anything, they just look at you, and pose
for your camera. Every once in a while they will ask where you are from or your name. I did get asked to move aside when I was in the way of the cricket game, aparently in India they take their cricket very seriously. Still it was fun, and one of the boys in the park even handed me his kite string after i'd taken a ton of pics of him.



Later in the day, Mike, Alon and I, hungry to be shown around by locals met up with some members of the Checkout team. They took us to Hotel Paradise, where they have the best Hyderabad Biryani in the city. Apparently Hyderabad is famous for it's Biryani, and this place does it best.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyderabad_biryani

I ate mutton!...fun to have someone who knows what they are doing order for you. And Nishant was kind and made sure they didn't give me anything too spicey--I'm a bit of a wimp when it comes to this, but I am working on getting better.

Next it was off to Shushil's house to fly kites!! We went straight to the roof terrace where we saw a few people out flying kites, but not many and the wind was a bit low--so we went downstairs to his apartment. As soon as we sat down his mom brought us cake and snacks, even though we were stuffed full of biryani and some crazy overly sweet dessert that was basically like apricot jam with ice cream (diabetics beware--whoops). She was so nice we couldn't say no! And she invited us to come back and she'd cook us homemade food--I could be down for that.

Back up to the roof we went, more people had come out and the skies were dotted with little kites. It was like a mix of dancing on rooftops in Jerusalem on Shabbat and the kite runner. I'm not kidding. I got to fly one and even cut someone (shall I leave out the part about how we cut each other and the kite ran away?)...fun times. Here are pictures :)