Hey... I'm in India....

So explanatory titular email out of the way, let's get down to business. I arrived in India Thursday morning (July 31st) by way of San Diego, Los Angeles and Hong Kong, landing in Chennai around 1:30 in the morning. Trips that long (25.5 hours from take off to landing) are bound to be full of stories, but I'll spare you the mundane. Highlights include: my own row on the 13.5 hour transpacific flight (given to me by the tardy flight attendant who I let cut in front of me in the security line,) my own row on the 5 hour intra-asia leg (after an angry lap child refused to remain lap-bound and demanded his own seat), watching the last 20 minutes of Definately Maybe that were so cruely denied me by the LIRR schedule, a free cookie with my $4 grande coffee at the Hong Kong Starbucks simply because I winced at the price, and the 60+ year old business man sharing my table at the Hong Kong airport food court who frustratedly demonstrated the proper way to eat noodles without splashing your well-vested tablemate.

Once securely arrived in India, by that I mean through immigration, baggage retrieval, customs, etc..., I was met at the airport by a taxi driver with a properly ink-jetted sign stating to all who could see that he was picking up "Mathuw Grifft." I really hope there isn't some poor danish fellow still wandering the grounds of the Chennai airport waiting for a taxi to take him to Vellore.

Anyway, I quickly established that my taxi driver's name was "Gajjarraj" which, using my vast knowledge of sanskrit, I deduced meant "Carrot king." CK and I motored off to Vellore chatting about this and that, mostly the cost of things (cars, motorcycles, various roadside edifices, etc...) because all he really knew in English was numbers and all I knew in Tamil was how to point at things. This carried on for an hour until CK stopped for his 3 am tea while I nearly peed on a nearby sleeping goat. Ok, fine... replace "nearly" with whatever word least offends you... that still indicates I peed on a goat. It was very small and black and hard to see in the moonshadow of the Tata truck in which it slept.

Around 4:30 am CK delivered me safely to my apartment, which is really the second floor of an old woman's house, pounding manaically on the locked door until our good pal Kalyan opened up. Kalyan is in his last year of medical school, which translates to our intern year. He is working in the Wellcome lab (my new office) doing rotavirus research. Basically he has also been assigned my wellfare and is generally doing a good job at it. However I'm sure he didn't imagine this would involve being woken up at an ungodly hour by a semi-bearded caucasian and a man with demonstrated dominance over a particular root vegetable.

Once bathed (via bucket... oh yes, there is no working shower so I'm back to the old BBLB, big bucket little bucket, system of bathing) I collapsed face first into my dirty bed (though I did wrap a t shirt around the pillow to make a stylish impromptu pillow case) and slept until 3 pm the next day.

During the rest of the day, I managed to do a bit of cleaning/unpacking, discovered the cricket channel on tv, talked for 2.5 hours with my 92 year old landlady, toured the medical school campus a bit with Kalyan and Deepthi (my fogarty counterpart) and crashed again.

Yesterday. So yesterday was the day that our old Vellore was finally promoted from Town to City status. No one was quite sure what this means, but all agreed that it was worth a giant party that shut down all of the roads and public offices in town after 9 am. This severely limited my ability to do anything yesterday, but I did manage to get an account set up at the hospital cafeteria. This is essentially like becoming a member of a mediocre Indian restaurant... it doesn't really give me any benefits or discounts, but it does mean that a portly man in a blue uniform examines my plate before I can eat and makes notes in a little book. Since the cost of the meal is the same regardless of how much you take, I can only imagine he is recording how much a chubby white guy can eat out of personal interest. Perhaps soon he will move to photos.

Beyond the cafeteria success, I spent the rest of the day in the office occupying space and nodding graciously as people told me their names before promptly forgetting them. Not only are Tamil names difficult, but the people I met yesterday all seemed to have a severely unamerican volume deficiency problem when it comes to speaking to one another at close distance. So after a morning of showing my coworkers how much money doctors in America make and what Step 1 scores they need to get accepted into US residencies (their idea not mine) I decided to walk around town... eventually visiting the famous Vellore Fort. While I was there I shot a video of a cow eating garbage and have loaded it here.



I promise to load more interesting videos in the future.

Anyway, last night I passed out around 6:30, waking briefly to be told that I was too tired to go to a party at one of our PI's house. I proceeded to sleep until around 6:30 this morning. Hopefully I will kick this whole jet lag thing before I miss another chance to party with the "Parasite Queen"... ok, so I didn't make that nickname up, but it's kind of amusing that anyone's life would go down a path that would result in such a nickname.

Today. So today I finally got a SIM card and thus a new phone number. If you want to call me just dial 011-91-989-441-3230. Easy, right?

Alright, that's enough for now.