DWDB : 3 (the inevitable finally happened...ugh...think I'll stop putting this on the posts now, you get the point)
Here goes, this will probably be the last post from our elective home base of 'Oddan'. The fabulous five are going our seperate ways tomorrow night, when Kev and I head North to Bangalore on our way to Nepal, and the girls head south to...somewhere (not sure if they know yet) to eventually end up in Kerala, Goa and Delhi before we all fly out of India in late December.
Last thursday Kev, Georgie and I went along to the second of our village clinic visits. We had been expecting to head up into the mountains but on arriving at the clinic it turned out to be only about 10km from the hospital in a small lowlying village off the main road. The clinic here was much more established than the Gandhi Nagar clinic we visited last Tuesday, as it's been in use for about 15 years. There were three doctors at the clinic and it was bigger and more organised than the shed of the previous clinic. After spending the morning sitting in on patient examinations and getting a few explanations from the doctors, we had lunch in a little building about 100m away which was used as the nurses quarters for the clinic. We had a packed lunch from the mess, but the nurses ('sisters') served us some of their curry lunch which they'd warmed up in the kitchen. After lunch it is traditional around here to have a bit of a kip, so after cleaning up the nurses got out some straw mats and started to lie down on the floor. We had been playing cards over lunch so we thought the noise may not be welcome if they were trying to sleep, so why not have a sleep too? As Kev and I were the only guys in the room, we weren't sure if it was kosher for us to lie down on the same mats as the nurses. Although they can all speak english, they only do so when necessary and otherwise they seem a little too shy to communicate with us other than the odd 'excuse me' if we're in the way on the ward. So when we lay down to have said nap, there was a lot of hushed whispering and giggling amongst the nurses. We didn't really know what was going on and we ended up laughing too, about what we're not sure, but the whole room ended up in hysterics for a few minutes...all about apparently nothing! It was a little strange... We headed back to Oddan at about 4.30.
Thursday night at about 4.30 the inevitable happened. Delhi Belhi finally took it's fourth victim of five (me). Somehow, apart from a bit of a sore throat, Kev has managed to avoid getting sick this whole time. Guts of steel. I was pretty pleased that I'd made it nearly three weeks without getting sick. Needless to say I took Friday off and Kev headed in to surgery outpatients for our last day in surgery.
We decided to skip town early on saturday and take a long weekend away in the mountains at a place called Kodaikanal. It's at almost the same altitude as Mt Kosciuzko, so it was pretty cool up there. The bus ride was very picturesque, but took 3.5 hours to make the 65km trip from Palani to Kodai. Just when we thought we couldn't go any higher, the bus would turn around another ridge and keep on climbing...when we finally arrived in Kodai at about 3pm, the bus was crammed full of people, a lot of whom had brought with them huge sacks of fruit and veg to sell at the markets, and these were stacked three deep almost the entire length of the bus. The legroom in these buses leaves a little to be desired, so it was quite an uncomfortable trip. The views made it alright though, just.
We spent the afternoon exploring Kodai while at the same time looking for somewhere to stay. In the middle of Kodai is a beautiful man-made lake (lake Kodaikanal), surrounded by market stalls, horseriding, bike riding and some really nice lookout spots. Kodai is quite a touristy spot, even for Indians, and there were a lot of Indians around taking photos looking almost as touristy as us which was a relief because it meant we were able to enjoy a bit more anonymity than back home in Oddan ('the five whiteys from the hospital'). When the sun went down it got quite cold (well, probably only about 12 degrees, but it was cold compared to Oddan). None of us had really come prepared, so we bought the ugliest cheapest jumpers we could find at a streetside stand (see the photos, you'll agree). The all-knowing Lonely Planet had informed us of a great restaurant that did western-style meals including Pizza, and we eagerly searched it out only to find it closed for the winter. Somebody said "I know a nice little Indian place..." and we ate there, a little disappointed at the lack of pizza on the menu.
On Sunday morning we did a five hour trek with a local guide starting at 7.30am. The mountains around Kodai are very very steep and beautiful and I guess the best way to tell you about them is to just let you see for yourself. We arrived back in town around 2.30 and headed to a local Tibetan restaurant for lunch. We had a great (non C&R!) meal of chowmein and dumplings. After a bit of a nap back at the hotel (watching crap daytime TV on cable....ahhh TV) we wandered around the lake checking out the markets and just enjoying the fresh mountain air. After dinner Jenna and Suzie got massages at a local parlour. Apparently the masseuses really weren't shy and when they said full body massage they meant it! George, Kev and I walked back up the hill towards the hotel only to come across a big group of Indian college students from out of town having a dance party in front of their hotel around a big fire. Some guys came and tried to talk to us about Australia (cricket) and tried to get us to dance. They were very keen to show us their dance moves, and I think Georgie might have preferred if we hadn't told them all that she was not married. They suddenly became even more interested in what is apparently quite a strange sight for an Indian man : a white woman in Indian clothing (they all stare unashamedly at the girls, no matter how rude it seems to us...it must be pretty unnerving!). We went back to the hotel, and Jenna and Suzie soon arrived back covered in oil and looking relaxed, if not a little disturbed.
On monday morning we went for a 'swan about' on the lake in pedal powered Swan-boats. We had lunch at the Tibetan place again (I got a very watery vegetable soup - my stomach wasn't really agreeing with much at this point) and then wandered around a bit more before getting on the bus back to Oddan. The bus trip home only took 3.5 hours (as opposed to 5 on the way) and because it wasn't the weekend it wasn't full of tourists or people with stuff to sell at market.
Tuesday afternoon we tried to book train tickets online for our trip to Bangalore but failed miserably so we made another impromptu trip to Dindigul (we love Dindigul) and organised our tickets with no fuss at the train station (and we had to pick up our flight tickets from the travel agent too). The girls came with Kev and I and we showed them the bar we'd been to last week and introduced them to our barman friend, who insisted on more photos with us (what is their obsession with cameras!?) We had dinner and a few drinks in yet another bar, this one a rundown dirty room behind a 'Wine Shop' next to the busstop. Not a classy establishment at all and the men in there (there were only men) seemed flabergasted at the sight of three women in their bar. Once again, everyone stared, but this time it was the leering, unsteady stare of men who'd had a few too many cheap Indian whiskys. There were signs on the wall in Tamil with exclamation marks at the end everywhere you looked...they may have said "No women allowed!" but we weren't to know. Guess if anything we provided the locals with a bit of entertainment...haha!
This week Suzie and I have been in the ICU which has been quite interesting. I've been reading a lot of ECG's, learning about various poisonings and discussing with the consultant the significance of various clinical findings. Dr Suni was a little aloof at first (because we're only first year) but once he realised what our level of knowledge was he's become a bit more accommodating. We've been going on rounds with him every morning and seem some interesting cases, however most of them are heart or lung problems (MI or COPD).
This week we've had meetings with Meena (our preceptor) and the medical superintendent and his wife had us over after dinner on wednesday to meet us which was nice. He is the son of the hospital's founder (it was founded in 1955) and is a psychiatrist, and his wife is an ENT specialist. We've almost organised all the paperwork that needs to be filled out before we leave and tomorrow we're going in for rounds in the morning then packing up and heading to Dindigul for the afternoon and catching our trains at about 9pm tomorrow.
Walking down the main street yesterday with Suzie, we were actually a little sad to be leaving this place. It's been such a great experience, unlike anything we (certainly I) have experienced before, and it will surely never be forgotten. The people here are so nice, despite all the hardships in their lives, and have made us feel nothing but welcome. I can't say I'll miss the hard beds and the 5am call to prayer from the local mosque waking me up, but other than that Oddan will be missed.
So begins the next chapter : climbing the Nepal Himalaya!
Haven't got time to add photos to the blog now, but there are new one's here!
You stay classy San Diego
Here goes, this will probably be the last post from our elective home base of 'Oddan'. The fabulous five are going our seperate ways tomorrow night, when Kev and I head North to Bangalore on our way to Nepal, and the girls head south to...somewhere (not sure if they know yet) to eventually end up in Kerala, Goa and Delhi before we all fly out of India in late December.
Last thursday Kev, Georgie and I went along to the second of our village clinic visits. We had been expecting to head up into the mountains but on arriving at the clinic it turned out to be only about 10km from the hospital in a small lowlying village off the main road. The clinic here was much more established than the Gandhi Nagar clinic we visited last Tuesday, as it's been in use for about 15 years. There were three doctors at the clinic and it was bigger and more organised than the shed of the previous clinic. After spending the morning sitting in on patient examinations and getting a few explanations from the doctors, we had lunch in a little building about 100m away which was used as the nurses quarters for the clinic. We had a packed lunch from the mess, but the nurses ('sisters') served us some of their curry lunch which they'd warmed up in the kitchen. After lunch it is traditional around here to have a bit of a kip, so after cleaning up the nurses got out some straw mats and started to lie down on the floor. We had been playing cards over lunch so we thought the noise may not be welcome if they were trying to sleep, so why not have a sleep too? As Kev and I were the only guys in the room, we weren't sure if it was kosher for us to lie down on the same mats as the nurses. Although they can all speak english, they only do so when necessary and otherwise they seem a little too shy to communicate with us other than the odd 'excuse me' if we're in the way on the ward. So when we lay down to have said nap, there was a lot of hushed whispering and giggling amongst the nurses. We didn't really know what was going on and we ended up laughing too, about what we're not sure, but the whole room ended up in hysterics for a few minutes...all about apparently nothing! It was a little strange... We headed back to Oddan at about 4.30.
Thursday night at about 4.30 the inevitable happened. Delhi Belhi finally took it's fourth victim of five (me). Somehow, apart from a bit of a sore throat, Kev has managed to avoid getting sick this whole time. Guts of steel. I was pretty pleased that I'd made it nearly three weeks without getting sick. Needless to say I took Friday off and Kev headed in to surgery outpatients for our last day in surgery.
We decided to skip town early on saturday and take a long weekend away in the mountains at a place called Kodaikanal. It's at almost the same altitude as Mt Kosciuzko, so it was pretty cool up there. The bus ride was very picturesque, but took 3.5 hours to make the 65km trip from Palani to Kodai. Just when we thought we couldn't go any higher, the bus would turn around another ridge and keep on climbing...when we finally arrived in Kodai at about 3pm, the bus was crammed full of people, a lot of whom had brought with them huge sacks of fruit and veg to sell at the markets, and these were stacked three deep almost the entire length of the bus. The legroom in these buses leaves a little to be desired, so it was quite an uncomfortable trip. The views made it alright though, just.
We spent the afternoon exploring Kodai while at the same time looking for somewhere to stay. In the middle of Kodai is a beautiful man-made lake (lake Kodaikanal), surrounded by market stalls, horseriding, bike riding and some really nice lookout spots. Kodai is quite a touristy spot, even for Indians, and there were a lot of Indians around taking photos looking almost as touristy as us which was a relief because it meant we were able to enjoy a bit more anonymity than back home in Oddan ('the five whiteys from the hospital'). When the sun went down it got quite cold (well, probably only about 12 degrees, but it was cold compared to Oddan). None of us had really come prepared, so we bought the ugliest cheapest jumpers we could find at a streetside stand (see the photos, you'll agree). The all-knowing Lonely Planet had informed us of a great restaurant that did western-style meals including Pizza, and we eagerly searched it out only to find it closed for the winter. Somebody said "I know a nice little Indian place..." and we ate there, a little disappointed at the lack of pizza on the menu.
On Sunday morning we did a five hour trek with a local guide starting at 7.30am. The mountains around Kodai are very very steep and beautiful and I guess the best way to tell you about them is to just let you see for yourself. We arrived back in town around 2.30 and headed to a local Tibetan restaurant for lunch. We had a great (non C&R!) meal of chowmein and dumplings. After a bit of a nap back at the hotel (watching crap daytime TV on cable....ahhh TV) we wandered around the lake checking out the markets and just enjoying the fresh mountain air. After dinner Jenna and Suzie got massages at a local parlour. Apparently the masseuses really weren't shy and when they said full body massage they meant it! George, Kev and I walked back up the hill towards the hotel only to come across a big group of Indian college students from out of town having a dance party in front of their hotel around a big fire. Some guys came and tried to talk to us about Australia (cricket) and tried to get us to dance. They were very keen to show us their dance moves, and I think Georgie might have preferred if we hadn't told them all that she was not married. They suddenly became even more interested in what is apparently quite a strange sight for an Indian man : a white woman in Indian clothing (they all stare unashamedly at the girls, no matter how rude it seems to us...it must be pretty unnerving!). We went back to the hotel, and Jenna and Suzie soon arrived back covered in oil and looking relaxed, if not a little disturbed.
On monday morning we went for a 'swan about' on the lake in pedal powered Swan-boats. We had lunch at the Tibetan place again (I got a very watery vegetable soup - my stomach wasn't really agreeing with much at this point) and then wandered around a bit more before getting on the bus back to Oddan. The bus trip home only took 3.5 hours (as opposed to 5 on the way) and because it wasn't the weekend it wasn't full of tourists or people with stuff to sell at market.
Tuesday afternoon we tried to book train tickets online for our trip to Bangalore but failed miserably so we made another impromptu trip to Dindigul (we love Dindigul) and organised our tickets with no fuss at the train station (and we had to pick up our flight tickets from the travel agent too). The girls came with Kev and I and we showed them the bar we'd been to last week and introduced them to our barman friend, who insisted on more photos with us (what is their obsession with cameras!?) We had dinner and a few drinks in yet another bar, this one a rundown dirty room behind a 'Wine Shop' next to the busstop. Not a classy establishment at all and the men in there (there were only men) seemed flabergasted at the sight of three women in their bar. Once again, everyone stared, but this time it was the leering, unsteady stare of men who'd had a few too many cheap Indian whiskys. There were signs on the wall in Tamil with exclamation marks at the end everywhere you looked...they may have said "No women allowed!" but we weren't to know. Guess if anything we provided the locals with a bit of entertainment...haha!
This week Suzie and I have been in the ICU which has been quite interesting. I've been reading a lot of ECG's, learning about various poisonings and discussing with the consultant the significance of various clinical findings. Dr Suni was a little aloof at first (because we're only first year) but once he realised what our level of knowledge was he's become a bit more accommodating. We've been going on rounds with him every morning and seem some interesting cases, however most of them are heart or lung problems (MI or COPD).
This week we've had meetings with Meena (our preceptor) and the medical superintendent and his wife had us over after dinner on wednesday to meet us which was nice. He is the son of the hospital's founder (it was founded in 1955) and is a psychiatrist, and his wife is an ENT specialist. We've almost organised all the paperwork that needs to be filled out before we leave and tomorrow we're going in for rounds in the morning then packing up and heading to Dindigul for the afternoon and catching our trains at about 9pm tomorrow.
Walking down the main street yesterday with Suzie, we were actually a little sad to be leaving this place. It's been such a great experience, unlike anything we (certainly I) have experienced before, and it will surely never be forgotten. The people here are so nice, despite all the hardships in their lives, and have made us feel nothing but welcome. I can't say I'll miss the hard beds and the 5am call to prayer from the local mosque waking me up, but other than that Oddan will be missed.
So begins the next chapter : climbing the Nepal Himalaya!
Haven't got time to add photos to the blog now, but there are new one's here!
You stay classy San Diego
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