Sonya World

I have started to take horse back riding lessons. The first day I was there, I rode Sassy (thats me and Sassy in the picture). She is slowest horse they have - she is so slow that if she raced with a snail, the snail would win.

But considering that it was my first time, it was perfect for me. And the next time around I rode Charlie; and I was trotting like there was no tomorrow! I wanted to ride the horse on the freeways of Los Angeles!

My friend Lorin and I have fun at the stables. Hopefully I can do some more horse back riding over the summer.

My cousins are coming from London and I am looking forward to seeing them.

She is my mother’s maternal aunt’s daughter; my mom’s first cousin. Under the English Kinship rule, she is my “first cousin once removed” and her daughter is my second cousin and her daughters are my “second cousins twice removed”.

But we are Desi, we don’t “remove” people from our family, we embrace them, so to me they are my sisters and aunts, that’s it; no first/second cousins, no once/twice removed - just family!

My dad got a bag of goodies from Beverly Hills; just a block from the famous Rodeo Drive; I peeked in, and it was a box of cup cakes.

Nice box and it had four cucakes in a grid, like a tic-tac-toe grid with all zeros; and the cup cake falvours were, Red Velvet, Strawberry, Milk Chocolate and Dark Chocolate. I tasted the icing on one of them and boy, these must be the best cup cakes I ever tasted.

My mom liked the dark chocolate one and I liked the red valvet. They are not just small version of a cake, they are a bit different, little crumbly and smooth at the same time.

I hear that there is a que, half a block long, to get these cup cakes and I can see why.

I saved some for the next day in the fridge, but when I took a bite of the cold ones, they didn’t taste good atall; waited a couple of hours for it to turn to room temprature and then only thing left of them was the brown wrappers from the cup.

yesterday we went to Cerritos, which is like little India. My dad and I walked in to a desi grocery stores and saw the real Indian mangoes for sale. They were kind of expensive: $30/box (compared to $6/box for Mexican mangoes.)

We looked at the white box for a minute and the box had a little mesh to let the air circulate. We decided to take a whiff and smell the mangoes.

And it was so sweet smelling! My dad and I looked at each other and smiled - yes, we had to have those!

The mangoes are still not perfectly ripe yet, we are going to give it a day or so and then: we have a little ritual that we do before we seriously start eating mangoes!

They don’t call them King of the Fruits for nothing!

Of all the things President Bush has done: allowing import of mangoes from India might go down in history as the most useful thing he did!