My Last Weeks

An Excuse…

This will be my last blog post from India.  And I know, I kind of balked for a couple weeks there with the (optimistic) weekly updates, and you fine readers deserved more than you received. Your unwavering (presumably) and enthusiastic (hopefully) readership factors greatly into my desire and ambition to actually write, even though it really do enjoy it.  It has been a great symbiotic relationship, between you and me. I have a lot of time to think and I see a lot.  And sometimes, I feel like I have a lot to say (which is true, but does not guarantee quality), which is channeled into my blog. All of it. Without much editing... The point I'm trying to make here is that I really appreciate you, whoever you are - family, friends, stalkers, lost internet folk - taking the time to actually read this, or any one of my posts.  I wouldn't say that I feel that I've shared this experience with you, but on my first post, I succinctly stated that India is fucking cool, and I hope that I have shared that with you. I hope that you are at least a percentage, a fraction, a teeny tiny bit as enthralled with India as I am.  If I have made you think at all that India may be the coolest (not literally) place in the world, then I am satisfied.  If you have enjoyed my illustration of a country of one-sixth of the world's population, the world's oldest religions, and the highest concentration of cows all over everything, then I am happy.  And, if I have, at some point, elicited a genuine "lol", well then I am just psyched.

Not that it's a good excuse, but one of the reasons that I haven't posted anything in such a long time is because, until a couple weeks ago, I haven't really been doing anything new.  For the first few weeks in Mumbai, most of the excitement was simply from living in a huge foreign city. My placements at various clinics and hospitals were interesting and just the right amount of concerning.  Commuting was a daily gamble with life and death.  Downtime was spent exploring local parts of the city or catching up on homework and other "real world" affairs.  And all the students here became friends, sharing the experiences of dealing with all of this as foreigners, as "goras," in Mumbai.

After twelve weeks here, I still feel foreign, no doubt, but only to the extent where I stick out wherever I go and I have unconsciously perfected a blank, vacant stare of non-understanding when someone appeals to me in Hindi or Marathi.  Other than that, I am surprisingly comfortable in India. I have my favorite bars, I know the train schedules, I can essentially communicate with people, and I have bought toilet paper.  You can officially claim you’ve lived somewhere when you have to buy a six pack of toilet paper.  Because that’s what this is, for the last three months, I have been living in India, and it’s become another home.

My train station

And that’s why I haven’t written in so long, because I don’t feel like writing about my daily life.  It’s not too interesting.  But, I’ve been becoming increasingly aware that this is not my permanent home and I seriously need to get Indian shit done.  So the past couple weeks have been pretty interesting and I’d love to share my last weeks in India with you.

My India

An Escape…

Matheran is hill station – essentially a retreat created by wealthy colonials to escape the heat – set on top of a plateau at 2,600 feet, surrounded by all the shit that I have obviously taken for granted in Utah:  trees, valleys, waterfalls, dirt, air that isn’t perfumed with car exhaust and garbage water.  It lies about 90 kilometers to the north of Mumbai, which is (thankfully) close enough for a train ride and far enough away to not smell.

The Monsoon Package is important to this story for two reasons.  The first is that the Monsoon Package allowed us, Jessie and I, to stay overnight in a relatively non-infested hotel for relatively cheap, and pretty much set the conditions for our trip.  I accredited everything good, bad, or otherwise to the grand idea of the Monsoon Package. The improvised dance club in our hotel?  Beer delivered straight to our room in such a secretive manner that it could only be illegal?  The jaw-dropping, magnificent, and completely refreshing vistas, almost devoid of ridiculous crowds?  The leech that managed to attach itself to my leg?  All thanks to the Monsoon Package!

The picture really can't do justice to exactly how happy I am to be
on a mountain, with grass, and clouds, and no people...

I watched this cloud engulf the mountain for a good half an hour.

The second is that the Monsoon Package is a result of the monsoon (you following?), which is in full swing here, meaning it’s pretty impossible to escape the torrential rain.  It rained the entire time we were there, which was wonderful because we were pretty committed to being muddy and wet and dirty the entire trip, and we were not disappointed.  We hiked all over that damn mountain and the evidence was everywhere on us.  Also, upon searching high and low for a way to keep our electronics, passports, and other such important stuff safe and dry, we realized that India does not have Ziplock bags.  Like, anywhere.  I know.

This isn't actually that much worse of a state
than what my feet are usually in here...

Yeah, India is beautiful as shit.  Gettin' our early morning hike on.

The following week was pretty unremarkable, except for the day that I got sick.  I made it 10.5 weeks here, in close contact with a ton of sick people, avoiding most major illnesses, and then I get the flu.  Because the monsoon season is also the flu season.  I learnt that, although being sick is a generally uncomfortable experience, being sick in a hot, humid, unfamiliar environment is even worse.  But, I guess it had to happen, and I got over it in time for my last weekend here.

An Excursion…

My last weekend was spent essentially running around, trying to do and see everything that I haven’t and wouldn’t be able to make time to do and see the following five days.  I went from the north side of Mumbai, Borivali, to the south, Colaba, and stopped in between.  I went from hiking to ancient Buddhist caves to volunteering with stray dogs to observing rectal surgeries to scouring a beach for cool seashells and rocks (because they were really cool!).  Luckily, I have pictures of most of these events (sorry guys, but I didn’t get any rectal surgery pics), so I won’t have to verbally describe everything I did.

Kanheri Buddhist caves in Sanjay Gandhi National Park

I almost look short!

Beach front at Bandra

Sanjeevani Hospital, where I hung out for six weeks

For the past few days, the last days of work, I am with the Society for the Education of the Crippled, a school for children with physical and mental disabilities, which I actually really enjoy. For instance, today we spent a few hours painting and learning Hindi, both of which I thoroughly enjoy.  I learnt that “gai” is Hindi for cow and that a cow is not a sheep.  I can’t turn down these pearls of life wisdom.

Coloring.  It is awesome.

An Ending…

So yeah, as I’m writing this, it’s Wednesday evening.  I will go back to SEC tomorrow to do more crafty stuff and say goodbye to the kids.  Friday will be spent in the city, doing last minute things and saying goodbye to Mumbai.  I leave India early Saturday morning, fly for 30 hours, and arrive in Utah late Saturday night (because I like to taunt jetlag).

I am sure that I will have another post in a few days or a week or whenever, just to update everyone on the re-immersion into real life and maybe some more pictures, but for now, I’m going to go enjoy my last hours in India.

Week 6 and 7ish

Mumbai is a city of juxtaposition.  All of India is, in fact, but nowhere is it more evident than Mumbai – a metropolitan of (conservatively) 20 million people crammed onto a peninsula on the west coast of India, resulting in an insane population density of 30 thousand per square kilometer. Let me just let that sink in. I am currently situated at the Starbucks (fuck off, I know) in a pretty huge mall (again, fuck off, I know) in Malad, a suburb of Mumbai proper. If I were to walk a kilometer in every direction, one after another, to form a square, I would enclose 30 thousand people.  Thirty, goddamn, thousand people.  When I really think about that, it terrifies my Utah heart.

Anyway, juxtapositions.  This is a city in which the super-rich live and work within spitting distance (true fact, I’ve seen it) of the super-poor.  You can see grand façades of multi-million dollar shopping malls just behind a shantytown of cardboard and plastic homes. You can be rudely shoved aside and cut off in a half-hour line for a train ticket by someone who will then kindly tell you on which platform the train from Borivali to Churchgate will arrive. You can see squalor with tidiness, modernity with reserve, and business with absolutely no sense of punctuality.  To me, this is how Mumbai has been defined. Self-definition, in comparison, is found in another example, which is how one can be quite literally surrounded by people (see above paragraph) and be alone.

I like being alone.  Being alone is being self-reliant.  It is liberating and wonderful and, to be honest, completely necessary.  Which sounds like something people tell themselves to justify being alone, I know, but bear with me.  I like being alone as in being able to walk up the canyon or into off the highway, behind a bush to pee and not see anyone.  First of all, you can’t do that here; everyone will see you piss. But, the aloneness in Mumbai is internal. It’s being in a state of forced adaptability and willingness to forfeit aspects of yourself – ego, expectations, comfort, toes – to the greater cause.  I think that’s why people come back from these trips, claiming they’ve changed, that their three-month experiences abroad have reorganized the previous twenty years of information into new, blog-writing people.  I’m determined to be alone here because this is an alone that I haven’t found anywhere else and because I’m sure not going to find a bush to go behind.

What I’m really getting at here is that my first week in Mumbai, which also happens to be the first week of the second half of my Indian adventure, went well.  It’s about a million times more humid here, which my hair is super psyched about, but my armpits and between-boob and neck and really everywhere capable of releasing sweat is not.  It threatens to rain most days, but the real-deal monsoons haven’t hit yet, which is unusual and makes the days pretty hot.  I mentioned earlier that I’m staying in an area of Mumbai called Malad, about an hour and 40 kilometers north of where you would probably stay in a hotel if you chose to visit Mumbai.

I’ve been placed at two different hospitals here so far, to both of which I take a public bus.  And I fucking love it.  I wish I could live my life the way a Mumbai public bus driver lives his, with a perfect mixture of optimism, skill, and recklessness.  Allow me to elaborate:

A Mumbai public bus driver does not question whether or not the bus will make it through the intersection before the light switches red.  The bus will always make it, according to the Mumbai public bus driver, even if the light is already red.

A Mumbai public bus driver sees things in the world that others just don’t.  He doesn’t see a sidewalk.  He sees a continuation of the road, free to utilize.  He doesn’t see a dense group of people in the road.  He sees the future, what the world would be like if said dense group of people were not in the road, and he acts upon that vision. Most importantly, a Mumbai public bus driver doesn’t see two white girls, awkwardly waiting for the bus at nine in the morning.  He sees two ordinary bus-riding customers waiting for the bus at nine in the morning and treats them exactly as such, not sparing them the raucous yelling and hand gesturing and definitely not taking the time to actually come to a complete stop when they stumble on the bus.

Lastly A Mumbai public bus driver is always content.  He is happy to be driving a piece of cold-war era machinery through the hottest part of the day.  He is happy to offer raucous yelling advice to customers.  He is happy to sort of slow down at bus stops.  And he is happy to be working at a job that most Americans would shit themselves over.

It’s brilliant.

But the hospitals.  My main doctor dude is Dr. Nikhil Datar and is kind of a big deal here. Datar Nursing Home is home base and where I spent my first week in which I saw seven plus vaginas.  I guess it’s important to note that Dr. Datar is a gynecologist.  I’ve seen a bunch of cesarean sections and tubal ligations.  More blood, essentially.  I know that I don’t want to be a gynecologist or a pediatrician, which I think is an important thing to know.

I will spend the rest of my week at Sanjeevani Hospital, which is huge in comparison to the small privately owned clinics in Lonavla and hosts a ton of specialists from phyciatrists to oncology radiologists.  It may be because it’s mid-Tuesday-evening, but I don’t really want to talk about work, so that’s all the hospital stuff for now.

And just to wrap it up quickly, the rest of my time here can be summed up by this series of seemingly unrelated words and photographs:  World Cup, Gateway of India, beer, trains, beer, writing, hand washing laundry, rain, beer and paneer hotdog.

Me, exuberantly standing in front of the Gateway of India

It just says Mumbai, but it says it in Hindi...

 

My view every morning

Crawford Market

Marine Drive
Off in the distance is Chowpatty Beach

If you can't get the sunset on the Summer solstice, at least you can
get a cool effect from the massive amount of air pollution.
Aahh, silver lining!

Chowpatty Beach
iiiis pretty gross

Make of that what you will.

Week 5 (In lieu of a Week 4)

So, it’s been a couple weeks, but I’ve been busy and I’m sure you’ve been busy as well.  I hope you’ve been busy!  I hope you’ve been productive and having adventures and working and being happy.  That’s the rub about this whole blog thing –it’s very self-centered.  Well, yeah, you may think, but that’s the whole point, to have a platform from which to communicate with hundreds of people at once.  But, I would genuinely love to know (those of you who are reading this) what you’ve been up to. I would love to sit down with a cup of coffee and talk this whole thing out because, though I do love to write, I just can’t adequately explain how ridiculously, unbelievably, shockingly beautiful everything here is.  Okay, “beautiful” might be a facetious word, but I’m a cheesy enough person to use it.  I have moments, sometimes when I wake up, sometimes while I’m riding the train or sweating through my last good bra, where I re-realize that, I am in India; the furthest from home I’ve ever been and by myself in one of the most historical, colorful, spicy, spiritual, and diverse countries in the world.  On a whim I decided to come here, and I’ve never been so proud of my rash-decision-making skills.

All of this, I’d love to share with you, face to face, intimately, and loudly (it would definitely be loud), and in return, be loud with you about your respective summers, but I’m away from my life at the moment, and this will have to do.

I may be excruciatingly white, but I love my saree.
I'm going to wear it too.  Suck it, Utah.

A Vacation Vacation

The main reason I haven’t written anything earlier is because I took a vacation from a vacation and flew to Goa for the weekend with some friends.  Goa to India is comparable to Hawai’i for America.  It’s a tourist-driven resort town on the Arabian Sea that offers boat excursions, parasailing, spas, city tours, bargain shopping, and drinking.   I don’t have a lot of beach experience, but the beaches were the warmest and sandiest and beachiest that I’ve yet seen.  The humidity was about 3000% because it was just at the beginning of the rainy season, which was great because there weren’t many tourists.  It was... just so perfect.  I may have taken a ton of pictures, so enjoy!

"Heeeyyyy" from the balcony of our resort in Goa

I was pretty fascinated with this sunset. So there are many pictures of it.

Because, holy shit, look at it...

Mm, yeah, I was here.

Treanna has been my Indian roommate and American friend.
USA! USA!

Also, the final game of the Indian Premiere League of cricket was showing the night we went out clubbing, so there were good feelings and free drinks all around.  Surprisingly, I am a cricket fan when I’m piss drunk.  I am also a fantastic Bollywood dancer.

A little Canada.  A little America.
A little Jenga.  A little cricket.
A lot of whisky.

The first drink of the night - watermelon martini

Oh! Lesson of the week:  Indian clubs are exponentially more fun than American clubs for the simple fact that everyone dances, actually dances.  Men and women both get into it.  None of this grinding twerking bullshit, no.  Passionate, give-it-everything-you’ve-got dancing. It’s beautiful; I very highly recommend clubbing in India.

After saying goodbye to my Canadian friends, Treanna (I don’t know if I’ve mentioned her, but she has been my buddy for the past three weeks, and she is pretty awesome) and I returned home.

A Weekly(ish) Update

My second to last week in Malavli was pretty standard – I haven’t been anywhere new, but I’ve been loving getting comfortable with the hospitals that I am at.  Getting to know the doctors and sisters and patients has been an eye-opening experience, to say the least.  I now have a partner that will be with me at my placements for the next month, Cecilia, who is in the same program as I am.  They say that you really don’t know how well you know something until you try to explain it to someone else.  Showing Cecilia around the villages and to the hospitals, trying to explain subtle and not so subtle cultural differences and imparting my mediocre wisdom upon her has been that test for me.  I’ll be sad to leave this area next week.

In other news, I saw a cesarean section and an abortion this week.  In the words of an Indian gynecologist, “Gynecology is very bloody.  Ladies have a lot of blood.”

Yes, we do, sir.  Yes, we do.

This baby is fresh out of the womb.
It was actually pretty special. The family was so happy!

I’m running low on blog-writing energy, so I’ll wrap it up, but a couple more interesting things before I begin my nightly ritual of eating dinner, taking my malaria pill, and promptly falling asleep.

When the Canadian students were here, half of them were working with an orphanage in the area that sounded phenomenal but I never got out to until this week. Shikshangram houses boys and girls of all ages and, as one who is not fond of children, these kids are pretty cool.  I was only there for a few hours so I don’t know much about it, but I would like to go back.  I’ve never been so entertained with balloons and 30 children.

The kid to the left of me is bakshi, which I thought was a name
but really is basically Marathi for little shit.

Anyway, India is great. I hope, if nothing else, you enjoy the pictures, and if you want more, let me know.  I will try to send some out.  I only have like 750 of them…