For feeding the 5,000

Only meant to go out to take the air today but of course got nosy and found new things to watch.  First a dhobi wallah/ironer was topping up the charcoal in his iron and waving a piece of cardboard at it to get it to heat up.  There were all sorts of street vendors making necklaces and using their big toe as a third hand. A roadside silversmith was beating an already thin bit of silver even thinner on a small anvil which he steadied with his feet.  He used a little gas  blowtorch to heat it to red hot, threw it in acid and then into cold water, dried it on his trousers and took it up the street to a friend.  He produced a mould and hammered the silver into it on his anvil and then showed me the resulting holy image pendant – it will be trimmed and have a loop put on it to hang around the neck.  Often these are made to look old and then sold at an inflated price – buyer beware. The sugar vendors were lounging over their different kinds of refined and unrefined/jaggery brown sugar waiting for customers.  There were lots of people around but not much custom.  Little boys were being carried by grannies and mothers – too precious to put down.  Sisters had to walk, even younger ones.  Little boys are breast fed for as long as possible, girls are lucky to get a year – they are going to go to another family to look after the in-laws so why waste time on them. If you ask a man how many children he has he will say perhaps 3.  What he means is he has 3 sons.  You have to ask again how many daughters to get a correct answer!  For the first time I saw a bit of health and safety on a building site.  Well it was actually an old 4 storey house that had been scaffolded with bamboo that was tied together with hessian string.  Two men painting the walls had harnesses on and hard hats perched on top of their turbans– but they still had bare feet for walking on the bamboo! These huge old copper cauldrons would have been used for cooking the mutton & chicken stews at wedding receptions – the fire underneath would have been made in a hole in the ground and the cauldron would have been supported by the earth around it. Mostly people use aluminium or steel now but the purists still think that copper makes the food taste better. An entry for DS68.
 
Thank you for all the super comments and stars again – I have finally managed to get the link for picasa for the 4th and 5th of February and put them on the blips.  Come on the  walk with me today