The food gods must have taken pity on us finally. We had a great food day in Allahabad. We were the only foreign tourists in the town which made wandering the streets easy and hassle free (except for the ubiquitous street urchins that kept tapping us for rupees). We headed over to a popular restaurant, El Chico. This place had absolutely nothing to do with Mexican food, but it had wonderful Indian and Chinese food in a subtly decorated atmosphere and it was full of business power lunchees punctuated by families out for good food. Derrell was ecstatic to note that a full three tables were playing with their mobile phones, just like the “real” world! From there we braved the street stalls in the afternoon and found two sticky sweet treats, a masala coke (Coca-Cola with spices, salt and lime added to it), and a mitha paan (betelnut wrapped around coconut, dates, saffron, doused in lime paste). With finding the best restaurant on our journey since we left Delhi, we headed back for dinner and it did not disappoint us even on the second visit.
Our afternoon was spent lazily at the Nehru museum, the Anand Bhavan. This was a glassed in house showing the furniture and bookshelves of the famous family in a building in which Jawaharlal and his daughter Indira both lived and worked. The walls were covered in books discussing country development, political reform, and government design. You could almost hear the reverberations of discussions surrounding Indian independence from Britain. Pictures of Nehru and Gandhi were everywhere.
