India: Drinking

Some of you may be thinking to yourself "Golly, what do they drink in India??"

What, you weren't thinking that? 

Oh. 

Well, you're about to find out what we drank while we were there anyway. 

As most of you know travelers are always advised not to drink the local water.  With my first two visits, we would run out and buy bottles of Aquafina to drink as we needed them.  The 3rd time I went we ended up buying bottled water by the case.  It was much less expensive than buying the water bottle by bottle.

This most recent trip, however, was the easiest in terms of having drinkable water on hand. 

While it was harder to get the big bottles home (Echachan would drive to town on the scooter and bring two of the big green jugs home at one time) they lasted a lot longer and have been, by far, the best bang for our buck. 

I'm thinking we should've used this water to brush our teeth, too.  We didn't think anything of it, but Biju and I both ended up with sores in our mouths much of the time we were there.  Ajay had a few sores, too, and I'm sure Alex did but didn't say anything.  Next time we'll have to be sure we use the bottled water to brush!


Tea.  We drank tea twice a day.  Not the big mugs of tea like we would drink here in America, but a smaller "teacup" amount.  This is the reason you saw the recipe for tea on one of the "Recipe Wednesday" posts.  This was a great way to get in some servings of dairy. 

Mom boiling the tea.

Alex drank the tea decently but Ajay was more drawn to the coffee. 

This was one of our cups of coffee on our train ride to/from Kerala.

You can guess that we tried not to give them too much coffee.  We even limited the tea towards the end of our trip.  They were wild and crazy enough, they didn't need the help of the caffeine!  (Mom was lovely to use mostly milk when making the coffee to try to cut back on the coffee flavor/caffeine.)


Horlicks was the drink we turned to when we thought the boys needed less tea/coffee.  We just wish they drank it!  Biju didn't really care for it, either.  We did come home with a bottle of the powdered mix.  It's chocolate flavored.  I think it is pretty tasty.  (It's a malt flavored drink made w/ milk.) 

Juice was hugely popular.  This was the main drink for the boys.  While it was not exactly inexpensive, we always kept a box or two in the fridge.  They had this for most meals and quite a bit throughout the day.  Hey, since they weren't eating much, we wanted to get anything into them! 

Kingfisher.  It's beer.  It is something Biju was looking forward to drinking for quite awhile.  Funny thing, when I first went to India and was pregnant with Ajay, I LOVED the smell of this.  I had even tasted it and it tasted lovely.  So on my second trip, when I wasn't pregnant, I tasted it and it was NOT as yummy as I had remembered.  Funny what pregnancy can do to you!  This trip, though, pregnancy didn't influence me any.  I did take a little sip and it still wasn't that great.  I guess I'm just not a beer drinker overall. 

Oh, Biju and I did get to go out without the kids once.  It was the day after Valentine's and we went to town with Bino.  We stopped at a restaurant that Biju always has to go to when we're in India.  We had some soda to go with our "burgers" - no beef, but I had a chicken burger and I think both the guys had lamb.  We had fries on the side and dipped them into a honey-mustard dip.  The burger was m.e.s.s.y!  The drinks were similar to ours but not quite the same. 

Fanta - still orange, but just tasted different.  Thumbs Up - like Coke or Pepsi, but didn't taste exactly like either one.

See what I mean about being messy??

Other pics from our outing:

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Yay for drinks!!