Happy New Year

Happy new year everyone!! May this year be happier, healthier and more successful than the previous year for all of us :)

2015 was a year of many firsts for us - our first stint at living abroad, living and not just holidaying, Angel’s first day care, our first jobs abroad, and so forth.

Since it were holidays for me and Angel for the whole of last week and J* had to go to office for a couple of days, we explored in and around Toronto. That explains a small post as I am back to office after around 10 days and a lot of work is waiting to get looked at. We went to the Niagara Falls for Christmas and Boxing days. It is one of the places that I always wanted to go, so that is one item crossed off my “To Do/To Go/To See” bucket list. As it’s a known fact that The Niagara Falls is the collective name for three waterfalls that straddle the international border between Canada and the United States. The Falls were mesmerizing and I fell in love with them. The boat ride was closed, so that’s one reason for us to go back in the summers. The Falls at night were colorful and beautiful. Fireworks were the cherry on the top of the cake. Fortunately, the weather for that time of the year was warm. It started snowing from the next day we returned to Toronto (It’s -16 degrees Celsius at this moment).

That was one fitting end to the year!

'Tis the Season!

This is the week of Christmas and I am loving the spirit of festivity. It’s that time of the year when there are Christmas trees and decorations everywhere, and an air of cheer all around. The office wears a deserted look as most people are either working from home or are on vacation. I have an off for the whole of next week :)

Angel had a concert (*gulp*) at her day care where the children from her class performed on Jingle Bells. It was lovely to see the little tots sing the carol song. Yeah, I just got to know that it’s not a carol, it was not even meant for Christmas.

Here is Angel’s version. The link has the audio of her singing the song.

I love the way how the children sing the songs without getting bothered about the lyrics.

Angel got this in the mail. 

This is the first letter we got which is addressed to her! 

I also baked these beautiful (whatever happened to modesty!) candy cane cookies inspired by my friend Bhawna. Mine were the eggless version. Thanks B for the inspiration :)  The four cookies on the left most end were made by Angel, she rolled and twisted it all by herself. I think she did a pretty good job and she got better with every attempt!

Below are the gingerbread cookies decorated by Angel. She loved doing it as "The Gingerbread Man" still remains one of her favorite stories.

And finally, some of the most gorgeous Christmas trees amongst the many many more:

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! :) :)

Different

Last week, while aisle hopping in the supermarket I came across this 

It immediately caught my fancy and this goes in the “Weird Different Exotic Foods I have Tasted” list. We tried it together – J*, me and Angel and we found the chili content in it quite okay – even by Angel's standard who I think was happy to just eat the chocolate without going into the nitty-gritties of it :P We could taste some spice towards the end of the bite.

Will I try it again? Maybe, I am not too eager for that because I like only milk chocolate and to some extent dark chocolate. However, I will let some time (and some chocolates) pass before I decide on that. Who knows, I might get addicted to differently flavored chocolates.

Talking about different food, I loved the paan ice cream and gulkand ice cream which I first tasted in Pune. I am not a very big fan of paan, so just tried it on a whim. I am not, for the life of me, able to recall the name of the ice cream parlor. It was located near my training center. I asked some friends too, but sadly, none of us remember the name. I have had these two versions of ice creams at some other places too, but none could match the Pune ones.

I come from Ahmedabad, a place where alcohol is prohibited and most of the people follow vegetarianism, so it’s not uncommon to find “Pure Vegetarian” restaurants, however when we found something like below, that was different in Toronto :)

It was owned and managed by a Gujarati. They just serve some pre-prepared snacks like samosa, kachori, aaloo tikki, pizza, khaman, jalebi, fafda and some other sweets. We tried everything other than the sweets which did not appeal much to our eyes. The food was strictly okay, but to get something like that here gave us a high :) Apart from that, the place had a lot of Guajarati farsan, Indian spices and condiments, needless to say we bought a lot of stuff. The other items had been devoured before I remembered to click the pics.

They even had multiple copies of Gujariati newspapers like Divya Bhaskar and Swadesh kept at their entrance for people to read and take along. I then got to know that they are the weekly editions that are printed for Gujarati readers abroad

So what's up different with you all ?