The New Year

Hey everyone. I just haven't been in the mood to write since I got back to Jaipur.

After our run in with water in Palolem, Christine and I headed to Mumbai (Bombay) for a few days. Mumbai is great. It is a beautiful city with modern citizens. I can't count the number of times I forgot I was in India while I was there. The entire trip I had been looking forward to seeing "Ocean's Twelve" while we were there, so Christine and I saw that. We also hopped from one coffee shop to another, and got the time to visit a few museums and Ghandi's house in Mumbai. We also had to make a trip to the hospital. Christine had gotten an exhaust burn on her leg from a motorbike, and it looked really bad so we went to the doctor.

We ended up having to go to two different hospitals because the first was absolutely pitiful. There was no emergency room, so we had to see the Chief Medical Officer, who was in his office and made us come to him. He glanced at Christine's leg while he was on the phone, and wrote her a prescription while telling her NOT to bandage it. To leave it open to the air. You know, to leave it open to all the healthy bacteria that exists in the air in India. She and I left, hurried to a taxi, and went to another hospital. This is the one the travel books had said was the best in India, and they seemed to know what they were doing. The doctor put on disposable gloves and cleaned the burn, then bandaged it up for her and wrote her a prescription. All in all, they treated her like I would be expected to be treated in the U.S., but it was still a little odd and it was certainly far more expensive than the other clinic.

We left Mumbai to go to Beawar for New Year. Christine's host family has an ancestral home there, and they were celebrating a 50th wedding anniversary in the family, so they wanted Christine to come and were nice enough to let me tag along. Their family is very unique, very loving. They made us both feel welcome and invited us with open arms into their ceremonies. They had a priest come to their house, and they rededicated their vows in a Puja, then they had a reception, where the couple was garlanded over and over by their family members, so much so that you could barely see their eyes when it was all over.

It was interesting attending this thing with Christine. It made us both very reflective to be around a family where there was so much love. She told me that she rarely saw her grandparents and cousins, and I realized how unique it is that I have grown up being so close to my family. Maybe not unique as much as lucky.

So, after the joyful family celebration, we reluctantly headed back to Jaipur. Neither one of us wanted our vacation and travel to be over, we both would have been content to go on our way more before returning to classes in Jaipur. Classes are not all that bad, though. There are only 3 of us here right now, the new Spring semester students will come next week. It is really quiet and casual, and much more free. We were all supposed to start work at our NGO's on Monday, but Christine and I wanted to stay for a special holiday next week in Jaipur, "Kite Day", so we are doing research this next week instead. It will be nice to be able to stay in Jaipur longer before going back to Chittor where the only social life and freedoms I posses in that small town are my host family's special events and occasional outings to the town's single restaurant. Mrs. Singh has also gotten more free about my being at her home, and no longer worries when I am not back before dark. Maybe its me who has changed though, in insisting that I don't need to be home before dark anymore.

It has been fun getting to know a new person, though. Tim has a guest at his house, a former MSID student from last year who is doing some preliminary research in India and is staying with his former host family (Tim's family). This guy, Adam, has gone down in MSID history because he fell off the Taj Mahal while he was visiting it and broke his leg. He had to be hospitalized for a short time in Jaipur. It is a very notorious story, but what the 3 of us weren't aware of was the severity of the injury. Apparently, there was a very serious back injury this guy had, and, doctor's being as they are in India, either didn't know how serious it was or just didn't tell Adam. Anyway, when he got home the doctor's in the U.S. could not believe that he wasn't paralyzed, let alone walking again with very little pain. Injuries like the one he sustained cause paralysis 95% of the time, so he is very lucky. They are actually trying to figure out what the doctors did here to make him heal so fast, and he is now the subject of a case study in the U.S. (go figure).

It has been really nice getting to know Adam, and it plays up the delusion that all of us have more friends and know more people in India than we actually do. Things continue to plug along as normal here. More from me later...