Last days in Pune.

Guess who's in Udaipur? Yessir! I have finished my coop, and I'm now traveling around northern India.

But first, let me talk about Thanksgiving in India.

Bobby had the idea of celebrating Thanksgiving day with our boss at their place, so we invited ourselves, our coworkers, and the other interns for a giant feast. We needed to find a Turkey.

Incredibly, there was a lady with a couple birds for sale. Turkeys are nearly impossible to find here in India. It’s either chicken or maybe some mutton. That’s it. But we did find a lady who was offering to sell us a cooked, stuffed bird. I don’t know, maybe she was running some lucrative Thanksgiving gig. Either way, we wanted a 6.5 kg bird. She said she had one.

Our feast was to be a bird, some spaghetti salad, some green salad, apple pie, and potato salad.

Come Thanksgiving day, we get a visit from this mysterious Turkey Lady. She gives us a 4.5 kg bird. What happened to our missing two kilograms, we may never know.

We had two problems: how do we cook this precooked bird, and how do we make up for this missing 2kg?

The first question we posed to the Bird Lady.

“I don’t know, I’m pure veg(etarian).”

For the second, we decided we only had one option: lots and lots of chicken biryani.

We ordered ourselves eight helpings of this delicious biryani and decided to ‘wing it’ with the bird. God I’m lame.

Dinner turned out to be fantastic, and our boss’s wife even cooked some delicious gravy for us. Great success.

As for the biryani, we didn’t end up eating any of it at the dinner, as it turns out, not many people were interested in eating until they felt like they would explode. So while Bobby and I did a good job of clearing out everything in our path, our boss barely touched anything.

We were eating biryani for the next four days.

Since then, I’ve also finished out my last day at work. It was fairly anti climatic. I passed over all my work to Theresa who will be taking over my job. I said a couple good byes, and I left. I’m really bad at goodbyes.

We had a farewell party for Jan, Florian, and I two and a half times. Three people need two and a half going away parties. One involved going out to a club and partying. The other involved dinner at the Beer Garden, the place I had dinner on my first night in India, then some parties afterwards, and the half being drinking at our place until I got sick.

It was sad saying goodbye to everyone. I got used to saying farewell to one person all the time, but when it came time to say goodbye to everyone at once, it was actually kind of sad. Thanks, everyone, it's been incredible living in Pune. All my friends really made it feel like home.

On Friday we boarded a bus to Rajasthan. I got a call from Theresa. It wasn’t a goodbye phone call.

“So Matt, do you have a backup of your site that you’ve been working on? I accidentally uploaded some mistakes to the website, and now I need to restore it.”

And this is the girl my boss takes with him to business meetings in Mumbai. But after she told me this, I realized how good it was to be done with work (and to be done only a week after Thanksgiving, at that). Good luck, Theresa.

Oh yeah, Udaipur is amazing. More on that later.