Oh so that's the monsoon thing they were talking about

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…