Coffee again

Two things. The barista, Desiree, apologized profusely for yelling at me. She then gave me a tour of the reverse osmosis system they use to ensure that their water and ice is safe. This is what our misunderstanding was about earlier. I am now here to say that coffee.com is the official cafe/restaurant of CaseIndiaTrips. If you want to know more, go here. The second thing is that they are so fantastic, we are now at their other (newer) location for dinner. They are that good. And I am not just saying that because I am afraid of Desiree. Or because I saw her verbally take down the rude Frenchman Brian mentioned. I just like the place. We are going to have risotto now.

Yummy Saffron Ice Cream

As you can tell by my predecessors, we made it to downtown Pondi by bus, and are hanging out in a chic internet cafe/restaurant.

Without repeating everything, today’s been a day of firsts for me:

1)  My first Indian bus ride

2) My first auto-rickshaw ride

3) My first saffron-honey ice cream–homemade of course!  Very yummy.

4) My first lime-salt soda.  The jury’s still out on this one.

There’s a very angry French guy behind me right now.  Something about 20 rupees.

Great day in Pondicherry

Hello all,

My travel companions that have just recently blogged have summed our recent events up fairly well. I’ll try not to be too repetitious. Today has been our first full free day and it has been fantastic so far. I already find myself saying “fantastic” more often after only a couple of days with Gopal. We had breakfast at the canteen at the hospital which has pretty good food and most meals average around 50 cents. We then were enlightened with Paras’s talk on organophosphate poisoning, which invoked some interesting discussion as Gopal mentioned. We then headed into town on the bus which did have great music along with some interesting light effects. Now we are hanging out at a great coffee shop, which my lonely planet guide book described accurately as a “hip cafe.” They have espresso which makes me very happy and good food. We’ve heard they will play us a movie for Rs 100 (a little over $2) so we definitely will be spending an evening or two here.

Overall, it’s been a great experience thus far. At times I’m overwhelmed with the poverty and state of things, but at others impressed with the fine clothing, jewelry, cars, etc. It’s a very interesting place. It’s been more difficult to communicate then I expected, but we are getting by.

I forgot to mention- We traveled from the bus stop to our current location by rickshaw, which is an interesting motorized 3-wheel auto. I really liked it, I wish I had one of my own. I could probably pick one up for a few thousand Rs but getting it home might be an issue. Hope all is well at home.

Pondi….

Hey blog world, I guess that it is my time to make an entry into the blog universe. Many of the things that I would want to talk about (i.e. the journey to Pondi, the HIV conference, Tim and Gopal trying to become card-carrying members of Southern India) have already been discussed above….

It is different for me to be here than my counterparts. I have been to India 5 times before but I have never been fortunate enough to leave Bombay. It is really different in South India. I didn’t think that I would have as much of a communication problem as I did in Bombay. What little Gujarati and Hindi that I know would get me by and also my extended family was an invaluable help in getting things done. I just don’t have that now. I kind of have to start from scratch and try to be able to communicate with the people as best as I can. Now that Gopal (aka sir) is here, it does make the job easier….

Tomorrow starts the first day that we go to the hospital and observe what goes on there. I’m really looking forward to that as I’m sure there will be stark differences in the things that we take for granted in the US and how things actually are here… good times to be had by all!!

Coffee.com

We are all blogging from a fantastic coffee shop/internet cafe/restaurant called coffee.com. We left MGMCRI via the commuter bus. Fortunately, we ran into Niharika, one of the med students we met at the conference, at the bus stop. She and her friend were going into town as well and guided us on the bus. All went well until the bus came to a screeching halt at the bust stop and Niharika’s friend slammed her trachea against the seat in front of her. She is ok, though, I think.

The bus ride was fantastic. It was a slower pace than the 80km/h preferred by our taxi drivers, and afforded us the luxury of looking at the roadside as we made the 20km trip into town. We passed rural sections, marked by paddy fields, neat rows of coconut trees and banana plants; interspersed with partially constructed houses and small, roadside shops. There was no closed sewage system between the college and the city, so we were treated to open sewage canals ranging from one foot to 10-12 feet in diameter. Tamil filmi music blared from the radio next to the bus driver’s seat, and the atmosphere was fantastic. The bus was not as packed full as one would see in the big city, so we were able to look around and enjoy ourselves.

Paras gave a lecture today on organophosphate poisoning. This led to a spirited discussion on research priorities. He observed that the vast majority of funding (>99%, I would estimate) goes to prevention research for things like sarin poisoning. Bioterrorism. This is despite the fact that people in developing countries get OP poisoning from either accidental exposure or as suicide attempts. Treatment research, which is what these patients would benefit from, is almost non-existent. As Tim pointed out, this merely reflects the priorities of the countries best positioned to do the research (resource-rich countries). It was an interesting discussion, and it was nice to see talk about global health issues beyond infectious diseases.

Finally, the baguettes here at coffee.com are as good as the ones in Paris. I know that may sound sacrilegious, but it is true. And the barista is conducting her business in 4 languages: English, French, Tamil and Hindi. I am impressed. Even though she yelled at me. We are now headed to the French area and then the beach. Tomorrow with the dawn of the work week, we hit the hospital.