Another day of roaming around. But first, some more delicious breakfast. And laundry. You might have noticed there is no dryer in these pictures. It’s common practice here to dry clothes on a clothes line – usually on the roof, or a balcony.

First stop. Kailasagiri. This is a park/recreation area type place that’s mildly religiously themed. I am not entirely sure there’s much super-interesting to say, but it was a nice place to roam around.

Visakhapatnam, being a big port city, has several beaches. Sunny day, comfortable temperatures and free time. What better time to check out said beaches?

What followed for lunch is possibly the only time I’ve been disappointed with food in my tour of India. The food came late and wasn’t worth it. If you ever do visit this country, stay away from overly posh restaurants – they show off more and do less of the actual good cooking. This is probably true in most other countries, but here, I feel like it’s even more the case.

Fresh guava from the farmer’s market before bed. Yay. The fancy cutting job’s credit goes to the cousin whose place we were bumming at.

Day 2 of not doing much in Vizag.

After breakfast, it was time to check out the Farmer’s Market. This place is setup with basic stalls that local farmers can sell their crop in. I think they pay some sort of rent, but apparently it’s fairly tiny.

After a lunch back home (with fresh veggies we bought from the market in the morning), and a small (3 hour) nap, we left to check out downtown – an area called “Jagadamba”.

And if you are wondering. Yes. The food was delish.

After spending the night watching Hangover 2 and eating a little too many snacks, we started the day with some South Indian™ breakfast – Idli and Masala Dosa.

We spent most of the rest of the day roaming around Himayat Nagar. We made our way there on 2 bikes. No helmets, not much to hold on to and weaving around traffic. Good fun.

We stopped at a street side store called “Agrawala”. We had to keep to eating at places that had some form of hygiene since we weren’t used to the water yet (The street side carts have better “flavor” but also the bad kind of “flavor” if you are not used to it). We tried a few things in our visit:

• Chole Bhatura
• Pav Bhaji
• Vada Pav
• Dahi Vada
• Sapota Juice

The ride back to our “home base” (Uncle’s house in the suburbs) at the end of the day was in an auto-rickshaw. These things are 3-wheeler … boxes on wheels. Literally. They don’t have any real suspension and sit about 6″ off the ground. So you feel EVERYTHING. Every single goddamned pothole. And there are a lot of those. But they are cheap as hell and you will find them all over India. Most have a meter on them so you pay what you see on the meter. Some cities however go by an older system of basically bargaining around a base price.

We met up with our uncle and stopped midway to shop for some clothes. So I decided to end the day by walking around some more to buy a thing of bottled water and fall off a ledge in the process. Note to self: Falling on your shoulder hurts like a bitch.

So I have always maintained that bagels are delicious and basically all you need to survive. Nutrition be damned. A poppy seed bagel is possibly the work of god. So I have embarked on the difficult journey of finding a way to make bagels.

Luckily, we live in 2010 and Google Search is amazing. I instantly found one.

About an hour later, I had on my baking tray, two delicious bagels.

Except they weren’t delicious. They were ok. The texture on the outside was nice and they looked right, but I think I messed up the yeast part. The packet didn’t say I had to activate the yeast (literally said you can mix into dry ingredients), but apparently I did anyway (bastards). Going to try instant yeast or maybe baking powder for the Beta version.