Expat life in Hyderabad

This weekend I decided to stick around Hyderabad to get some work done and also catch up on a little R&R. Even though I've been here for a little over a month, this was pretty much the first weekend I got to experience the expatriate lifestyle.

On Friday night, Tanja and I went out for dinner at a vegetarian Italian restaurant called Little Italy in the Banjara Hills. The food was good, and the architecture and setting were surprisingly impressive.



Saturday morning we went to Cafe Mocha, which specializes in coffee, dessert, and hookahs. This place is extremely popular with the youth of Hyderabad, and other than the incredibly loud club music at 11AM, I thought the atmosphere was really cool. Lots of random furniture arranged in a cavernous house-like setting.

Afterwards, I went to a gym/spa called Latitudes where I had a Thai massage. It was the best massage of my life -- much more relaxing than my Ayurvedic experience in Cochin. They started out by soaking my feet in rose water, and at the end I got to sit in an incredibly relaxing steam room for a while.

Today, a bunch of us went to brunch at the Grill Room, which serves amazing skewered meat. I have to say it was a treat to eat mounds of chicken after all the vegetarian I've been eating lately (not to knock the veg -- it's just better to accept that I have a carnivorous streak).



Every good Indian brunch buffet comes with an impressive dessert selection. I liked the little swan shaped cream puffs seen below: