Showing posts with label Monsoon. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Monsoon. Show all posts

Sunday, July 16, 2017

Would you like to help our students?

If you are a foreigner coming to Delhi, or a local with overseas visitors coming to Delhi, we would like your help.

We have a new batch of guides being trained for our offbeat and fun Delhi by Metro tour. This is a tour we are doing in partnership with the non-profit Manzil. The guides are from low-income families and this is an upskilling program for them to earn money while they are in college.

They are currently being formally trained to do the tour, and we want to give them some trial tours for practice. Our guides need to practice understanding foreign accents and helping foreigners getting comfortable with Delhi. They need to practice how to explain apparently simple and obvious things about our culture to a foreigner. They can only do this by actually taking foreign tourists on the tour.

If you have overseas visitors coming to Delhi in the next few months (Jul-Aug-Sep) we would love to offer them a free tour. There will be one or two trainee guides doing the tour. If you have a large group, we will also assign a fully trained guide.

As I said, there is no charge for the tour. We just want our kids to have some practice.

We will pay for the local travel expenses on the tour (Metro, autorickshaw, cyclerickshaw). The only thing guests need to pay for is their own meal (we will stop at a restaurant for snacks).

Tour description is here: http://delhimagic.com/metro.html It's a great tour, lots of fun.

Please email deepa@delhimagic.com if you want to help. I will only be keeping this free offer open for a short while, in the off season, for a limited number of free tours. So please write soon.

Friday, July 25, 2014

Rai-Jamun in the monsoons!

The jamun-sellers are back! Yesterday I ate these sweet, slightly sour, happily purple jamuns.
Woman sitting near National Museum who sold us the jamuns
The fruits were sprinkled with kala namak (a type of rock salt)... yum! Apart from
being delicious the salt also counters the jamun's astringency.
These are rai jamuns (Syzigium nervosum), not to be confused with regular jamuns (Syzigium cumini). Rai jamun is a different species that has slightly bigger, more elongated fruits. The jamun wallahs call rai jamun "ashadiya jamun" because it ripens in Ashad (June-July). The regular jamun is called "jamoa" or "bhadoniya jamun", and ripens in Bhadon (August-September). Most of the trees in Lutyens' Delhi are jamuns, though rai jamuns line the lawns on both sides of Rajpath.