Soaps, Lovely Soaps!

  With autumn comes flu season. Schools coop up children to the comfort and ease of the various germs and viruses they harbour, universities force students to get up early in the morning and breathe on each other in seminars, and the country's work-force succumbs to a violent desire to stay in bed and spend entire days watching The Simpsons.
  Hand hygiene is so important. The most effective way to protect yourself from disease is to wash your hands. Frequently and thoroughly. (You can read about all the reasons why you should wash your hands often here, and how to do it properly here. Or, if the audiovisual is more your thing, here.) We find it helpful and motivational to have lovely soap, and thought we'd share some of our favourites!

The scent from these soaps is truly divine!

  We've been to Oxfam again recently, and picked up this lovely lovely stuff from Bubble & Balm. These soaps tick all the boxes: they are made with fairtrade ingredients, using sustainable palm oil (palm oil plantations do terrible damage to the environment and make orangutans homeless), and come in a box made of recycled card, with no unnecessary plastic wrapping. And they smell delicious! Monkey couldn't wait to get a good lathering with this monkey-friendly soap!

Monkey loves lovely soaps!

  We've got some more favourites: one from Chandrika, a company from Bangalore. This is an Ayurvedic soap, containing among other things coconut oil, sandalwood oil, and orange oil. It is lanolin-free but contains palm oil, and we doubt very much that it is sustainably sourced. However, it smells gorgeous!

Contains all sorts of lovely things, according to the website:

Coconut Oil : it nourishes, moisturises and lightens your skin tan.

Wild Ginger : soothes the skin and helps prevent infections and rashes.

Lime Peel Oil : for a refreshing cooling effect and rich, penetrating lather with an astringent action.

Hydnocarpus Oil : helps prevent skin problems, rashes and outbreaks.

Orange Oil : tightens pores, helps prevent pimples and blackheads.

Sandalwood Oil : to cool, refresh and gently prefume your skin.

We think this writing might be in Kannada, the main language in the state of Karnataka, but then again it might not.

Just lovely

We wish we could send some of the fragrance your way!

  Last, but not least, here is another soap from Bangalore - the Mysore Sandal Soap. This one seems to be quite readily available in the UK, at least in Asian supermarkets - hurrah! It does contain lanolin, so is not free of animal products, but on the other hand it is, apparently, the only soap in the world made from 100% pure sandalwood oil. Then again, that sandalwood is reportedly not sustainably sourced. The commercial website claims that the Mysore Sandalwood Soap was the favourite soap of Queen Victoria, which is interesting as the company was founded in 1916.

A very cheerful-looking box

We LOVE sandalwood...

...and surely everyone loves elephants!

  We hope this abundance of lovely, and sometimes environmentally friendly and ethically sourced, soaps inspires you to keep washing your hands, for health and well-being! Hygeia will bless you!

Wæs hæl!

P.S. If you're Scandiwegian and enjoy reading about beauty products, check out http://skimmerskuggan.blogspot.com/!

A Passage to India: More Indian Toilets

It's been a while since our last Indian update.  We are feeling a bit adventurous today, so thought we'd share some more exciting toilet pictures from the Orient.
The following photos are from the public toilets in Cubbon Park, in Bangalore. We apologise for the appalling quality of the pictures; we were under strain and in a hurry.
 (Being a severely sweaty foreigner makes one feel enough of a freak without being caught photographing toilets and consequently being taunted, stoned and kicked out of the country for being a toilet perv.)

Ornamental sinks. (At least one assumes they are ornamental, since they are as far from being functional as is possible.)

An interesting water tank, containing all kinds of things; children's toys, items of clothing, etc

Et voilà - the oriental toilet!

Apart from the non-functioning taps and the resulting inability of the visitor to wash their hands, these toilets were perfectly hygienic, and we seem to remember that the lady collecting our two rupees smiled in a friendly manner. The park itself is isn't bad either. For an insight into the toilets in another Bangalore park, look no further.

Indian Splendour

We had an interesting toilet experience at the Lalbagh Botanical Gardens in Bangalore today. Spending a penny costs 1 rupee for using a urinal, or 2 rupees for using a toilet, as pictured above. These toilets were perfectly clean, but as there was no flush (or at least there was, darling, as Bridget Jones's mother would say: there was a tap and a bucket), toilet paper or soap, we are unable to award any points. However, we don't want to disappoint you by writing a boring blog update, so, as in all moments of crisis and difficulty, we turn to literature: here's a quote from Andy McNab's book Bravo Two Zero (Corgi Books, 1993). Andy is a prisoner of war in an Iraqi prison:

There was no ambient light whatsoever. It was so dark in the room I couldn't even see my hand in front of my face. There was a gagging stench of shit. I got down on my hands and knees and felt my way around. There wasn't much to feel. The room was tiny, and it didn't take me long to discover the two porcelain footpads either side of a hole about eight inches in diameter. No wonder my new bedroom stank. I was in a minging Arab shithouse. (pp 272-274.)