Spent a really nice Christmas dinner with a few of the MSPME course people - we had a pot luck on the eve with all of us cooking something from our native lands. There was salad, baked potatoes with cheese, a really delicious eggplant thing from Prasad's wife (called "vankaya"), beriyani rice, 'kheer', lentil soup, a biscuit cake, pickled rice, omelette, 'aloo ghobi' . The 8 of us really stuffed ourselves but it was really nice with the candle light and all. 
On Christmas day itself, there was another feast prepared by American Phd student Robert Lamar and some friends at the chaplaincy. About 20 students left behind in campus for Christmas showed up. We played pictionary and I borrowed some books from the chaplaincy to fill in the long weeks before term reopens in January.
