Monday, February 16, 2009

tasty travels!





There is so much to share! We have ten work days left here! We have become pretty close to Mitalee the counselor/social worker. We have set her up an email account and facebook to attempt to stay in touch with her. She seems to do everything/anything that is needed. She leads devos, facilitates church and any other meeting that occurs. She teaches the children's Sunday school. Her work ethic is amazing. While, her duties keep her busy seven days a week, she is happy to serve in all these areas. At the hospital, she stays until the last patient is seen because her job is integral in every patients visit. Most would not know how to open an eye drops bottle or how to put in eye drops if she did not show them. I hope that we are an encouragement to her like she is to us!
Hannah and I ventured out into the unknown last week. We have spent just about every hour of every of every day within the confines of the hospital compound. Pastor Silas the father of the bride of the wedding that we attended took us to our "luxury" bus Thursday night at 8. He got on with us to make sure we got situated and confirmed with the drivers where we were headed. I thank my dad for teaching me resourcefulness. I rigged the curtain closed to that we could have privacy in what I call our "cubby" of a matress with enough ceiling room to sit up but not quite enough leg room for me to stretch all the way out. Mostly bumpy and surprisingly chilly, we slept most of the way to the city. I woke up and started packing up my things to find that there was a gap in the top of the curtain and a little Indian lady just watching every move that I was making from the bunk above and opposite ours. Even with my pseudo brown eyes, I am quite the spectacle.
We rode auto rickshaws to all our stops in the city and managed to book a hotel for the night and find the bust to Ellora. The latter was not as simple as we had hoped. We naively thought the bus stop would have soemthing written in English since that is were manyu tourists make the trek to the caves. Thankfully we discovered bus lane 8 was the one we wanted...waiting...being stared at....finally, a man comes up and questions Ellora? The bus was about to leave but we would never have known cause it was behind several in lane 8.
We found people to be really helpful like that man. If anyone was too helpful, I was of course skeptical with my pepper spray at easy access and was prompt to loudly say "nay" and keep walking. Hannah got a kick out of how bold/rude that I can be if imposed on. I guess my brothers would be proud.
While we left the caves with tons of amazing photos and a new appreciation for the hard work of thousands of men who carved the temples out of the side of a mountain - quite insane actually, my favorite part of the trip was eating. Still trying to learn Indian cousine, we made excellent choices and enjoyed it all - even with a mouse making himself known at one of the "hot spots" for north indian food. I managed to have a veggie cheese burger, fries(finger sticks), and a coke for lunch on Saturday- wooohooo!
A stop at a coffee shop - cafe coffe day- made us equally excited and after searching for the location for two days ( most streets are not named and we only knew the district it was in), we really got the most out of our time to chill in the a/c. Our dinner on the way out of town - ob valentines day- was by far my fave. Buffet style and at a fancy hotel, we felt like queens savoring every bite and appreciating variety like never before. The icing on the cake for that dinner was the guitar/harmonica player who meandered thru the tables playing relaxing music that hannah quickly pointed out to me was songs that we know and love - hymns! We instantly knew we had a lot in common with him. Minorities in the religious hodge podge that India is.
We are happy to be back to work especially since out job description has changed a bit. We help with physio, lab draws/iv's, and only pop into clinic with unusual cases. I am a hands on person so I was glad to poke and prod a man (to body map his deficits) who came into physio post stoke and neglect of his left side.
He will be coming twice a week and the PT tells me there are signs of at least partial recovery - yay!
More later and Hannah is working on a super long post that will be done one of these days:)

No comments:

Post a Comment