Composting, Timbaktu and Europe

I picked up our composting pots on Sunday. I am now seeing all the possible problems with composting at home and not that sure about whether this was such a great idea:
1.) Since we live in an apartment, the pots are sitting on our balcony. If it starts smelling or having flies its going to be a mess. Even others someone finicky is going to have an issue sitting beside decaying garbage.
2.) I'm sure there is going to be some trial and error to get this right, and in the meantime we're going to have all kinds of wierd stuff happening in the pot. And I'm not going to be at home a lot of the time too.
3.) There are smaller things like the extra work involved with maintaining this thing rather than chucking the garbage out without a second thought.

I'm still excited though.

I'm going off to Timbaktu tomorrow and expect to be there for about a week. Obviously this is a pretty big deal. I haven't stayed in a rural environment for such a long stretch since being a child (The night sky in Timbaktu, as any rural place, is gorgeous). And after talking for a long time, I will actually be doing some hands-on work.
They have limited internet connectivity, so I likely won't be able to update the blog much, if at all, until I'm back in B'lore.

I'm definitely excited.

We're going to Europe !!
The Europe trip that I made a passing reference to, in one of my previous posts, is on ! We got our UK visas, we should get the Schengen and Swiss visas soon (fingers crossed!), and I made the final payment today. Its obviously a huge thing for me (and Priya). I haven't taken a long vacation since marriage (and that doesn't count as vacation!). We went for 5 days to Kerala and that was the most. So its going to be great to be out travelling for 2 weeks, and too through Europe. Its a group tour and will hit a bunch of high spots (London, Amsterdam, Paris, Switzerland, Italy).

We're *very* excited.


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PS: For those (like Anchal!) more interested in my culinary doings, I cooked again today. This is the first time, after then previous episode which I blogged about, and this time was 'unsupervised'. The uninteresting looking goo in the photo was the result. This was a mixed vegetable dish that I used to cook as a graduate student and came out much better then. It didn't help that this time around I forgot (!) to add the key vegetable -- 'simla mirch' (capsicum)