  Last Sunday, on our third day in Ludhiana, Aditi, Crissaris, Sailaja, Elena and I went to visit the village of Gujjarwal, where Elena's family still owns land.
The village was a 40 minute drive out of Ludhiana that provided a sense of the agricultural roots of Punjab (which is the most fertile and prosperous in all of India). On the sides of the two lane road we saw lots of rice paddies at various stages of growth and Elena's uncle used this opportunity to teach us about the process of growing rice and the back-breaking task of transferring each individual plant to the paddy after a short initial growth period. Unfortunately, we will miss the seeing the final product of these fields during our time in Ludhiana. The village is over 350 years old and contains narrow streets lined with brick buildings and some of the roads are paved in bricks.
Our first stop was to visit the family that grows on Hellenize family's land and pick up their daughter and young son to show us the schools in the village. We were taken first to the boys' school which sits just beyond the edge of the village and was founded over 150 years ago. The school had an open, courtyard design and many classrooms in its older portion as well as a two story addition made more recently. The school teaches boys from 1-12 standard and girls for 11 and 12 standard. Having girls at the same school as boys, particularly when it is on the outskirts of town, has been very controversial in the village and some parents have removed their children from the school.
Next we visited the girls' school, which was unfortunately locked, but was in a much more populated area of Gujjarwal. After the school we decided that this would be a great opportunity to milk a water buffalo. We went to a farm owned by the family we met earlier where we found many animals and got to see the swimming pool for the water buffalo (read smelly greenish pond). This farm was actually rare in that the animals lived across the way from the people, usually the animals live on the first floor of the structure and the people on the second floor which leads to a lot of cases of TB.
Unfortunately, we came too late and the water buffalo had already been milked. We then returned to the home that we first visited where we were graciously invited in to see the whole home. The house had electricity, city water, three indoor rooms and a very large backyard where all the cooking was done. The daughter prepared for us a yummy snack of burfi (a Punjabi sweet made of milk solids) and warm, fresh water buffalo milk. It was a wonderful treat. We said good bye with a promise to return and learn to get milk ourselves. On the drive home in the darkness we visited one of the teen hangout places in Ludhiana (which are few and focus on food), Cremica.
This is an ice cream place that was packed with young men. The ice cream was superb with a consistency that is lighter than American ice cream and many, many flavors (which we tried quite a few of) including mango, leche and butterscotch. It was so good that we brought home 2 liters of chocolate and vanilla each. Overall, it was a very beautiful, tasty adventure to the Gujjarwal. 
