The last few days

We are now in the midst of our last few days as an entire family before we head our separate ways on Sunday. Myself, and six others, will be going to Thailand for two weeks followed by a month in Cambodia and then another two weeks in Thailand again. It will be a very interesting two months, and I will endeavour to keep you updated on all it holds.

Christmas has come early in India this week. Some of the guys did a wonderful job decorating our green room (living room really) with fairy lights, paper snowflakes, chains of paper people and a mini Christmas tree - it looked like a grotto, I'm very sad I didn't manage to get a picture for you all.

We have been singing Christmas songs and carols for a good few days now, and Lia and I managed to bring a taste of England to the festivities. We are pretty chuffed with these mince pies if we're honest - they taste almost as good as the ones at home, even though we used some bizarre dried fruit in the mincemeat and lacked the brandy. But we managed to make mincemeat! And get hold of cinnamon! If you knew how many times many of us dreamed of cinnamon, you would begin to understand the excitement of finding it, and the sadness because we found it with less than a week to use it. 

Our room is currently a sea of bags, clothes and who knows what else! About half of us leave tomorrow night so the packing is almost completed (or so we keep telling ourselves) and tonight is our final night altogether - such a sad thought. I keep thinking about all the stories we will be to share in two months time when we reunite which is making the impending separation slightly less painful. Tomorrow will be full of manic cleaning, final packing and lots of praying for each other hence the final blog of India coming now. Tomorrow night holds the joy of the overnight bus down to Delhi, then a few hours in Delhi before flying onto Thailand Monday night. We've just been adjusting to the culture differences here, apart from a couple of bizarre experiences, so it will be very odd to move onto another new culture which is much more impacted form tourism (at least where we are headed).

I'm sure there's much more I should fill you in on, but its dinner time and I need to finish some packing bits. Please keep us in your thoughts as we travel from tomorrow evening - and the rest of my beautiful family who will be travelling for up to the next couple of weeks due to some visa things - as well as the uncertainty of the next two months (it is all under control, but our schedule isn't full yet and so we haven't got much to do in Cambodia yet). Enjoy all the build up to Christmas, whatever that holds for you. Lots of love :)