Little Ditty +me: aka three very confused white kids in India
Note to self: when considering future career options despite being only one letter off IGO is very different from NGO. While the good people of the NGO world are all heart with little reward, when you turn that non-governmental into an inter-governmental you get a little more money thrown your way and thus employees get sweet perks. While I of course am still at my usual NGOness I did manage to tag along with a friend who works for one such IGO this weekend on a trip to Jaipur, the capital city of the state of Rajasthan. First of all, I should point out that this friend wasn’t even a friend at all until a few weeks ago. She is a fellow Blue Devil (woot woot),
Although the hotel was in itself a sight to see - an old palace converted into a hotel by someone with amazing taste in interior decoration - the city was also really cool. It is known as the pink city because the stone that it is built out of is all a pinkish salmon color. It kind of felt like being in its a small world without the creepy singing children jerking awkwardly back and forth.
I visited a fort/palace in the morning, built circa 1600 for the Maharaja who ruled over Rajasthan. Upon approaching the fort (which my friend had already been to several times and thus left me by my lonsesome to navigate) I noticed the path up to the entrance
looked miserably long and steep. Not to worry! This is after all India and thus there was a steady stream of elephants marching people up the hill. Overall assessment of my first use of elephant as a mode of transport: far slower than expected and bumpier than a road full of pot holes and still one sweet ass way to travel. The coolest part about the fort was that I got there before it opened and yet was still let in (questionable) and so I was wandering through all these creepy corridors totally by myself. I’d like to say I was not at all creeped out but to be honest at any moment I expect a group of angry warlords to
come around the corner and attack me. I also went to the city palace, which is where all the recent rulers of the state live, including the current royal family – not to worry I didn’t realize each Indian state had a royal family either. The best part, which I attempted to capture in some photos that failed were these four sets of doors called the four seasons, which are each decorated for a different season. I am going to try to put my pictures on here – both of Jaipur and the 
Wow. So the monsoon arrived with a flourish today. I can’t even describe the downpour. Even though this happens every year in Delhi, the drainage is so bad in the city that all the streets had about a foot of standing water. I of course managed to be out shopping when the rain started so I ended up chilling in a shoe shop for about an hour while the heavens let loose. On the plus side I met an Indian woman who has been living in San Francisco for the last few years and even managed to get a ride home from her once the rain ended. Unfortunately Delhi’s already bad traffic situation only got worse once the streets flooded. This was compounded by the fact that the power was out all over the city so none of the lights were working and people decided to try to speed things up by driving on the wrong side of the road. So you would literally have intersections where people were entering from all directions on both sides of the road, cows were wandering across the street, bikers were stuck in foot-deep water, and general chaos reigned. It was interesting to say the least.
Otherwise I’ve gotten pretty settled in here and am mostly focusing on work. Health care in India is definitely different from the U.S. First, there is no insurance and you just pay the doctor in cash. A visit at a nice hospital can be quite expensive, but other doctors cost anywhere from 1 to 2 dollars. Also, people here have no desire to know why they are sick or what is wrong with them. They just go to the doctor to get medicine. They don’t even ask what the pills are the doctor is giving them, they just take them. When we ask people what makes someone a good doctor, they don’t seem to care if he asks them a lot of questions or does an exam, all that matters is that he gives them medication. The most common meds by far are antibiotics, which are distributed for just about every ailment. Unfortunately, each patient is only given one to two pills, so in fact all it does is build more resistant diseases. Sorry for the boring lesson, in more important and life-altering news I found a bar with an awesome happy hour last night…
In order to celebrate our first month in
I feel that after a month here I really do need to take a moment to describe the joy that is riding in an auto rickshaw in
The downside to the mayhem is the honking. If they ever make a “sounds of
