I am rubber you are glue...

Hello there, this is just a super quick entry, and if I am honest just an excuse for me to show you a picture that I liked. Basically the driver who picked me up from the airport in Kerala as well as wanting to improve my tamil skills (we spent the whole journey practicing conversational tamil) was also really keen to share with me some of the more interesting sights along the journey. One of which was Rubber trees! So here it is a picture of real India Rubber being harvested from the tree. I hope you like it, I think its pretty cool!

Much love,

A x

Delhi Belly

So my month in the UK flew by in a bit of a flash, lots of frantic socialising and spending time with all you lovely people. However this is a blog about my adventures in India so the story picks up again as I return to that wonderful country of elephants, spices and monsoon rains.

I got my flight back to India on the 28^th, leaving Heathrow again I was excited at the prospect of seeing my Indian friends and I was looking forward to getting back into the routines of my life in the small Tamil Nadu town I think of as home. However I must admit that I was also filled with a slight trepidation.  Perhaps even more than a slight reluctance to leave my family again so soon and with certain things feeling unsettled and up in the air.

On arriving at the airport I was told that I had been upgraded to club class, I don’t know about you but I have never in my life before flown anything other than economy. Well I thought to myself, I might not be worry free but at least I am going back in some style! The flight was lovely but uneventful, my seat was more comfortable than most beds that I have slept in recently and I was out like a light for almost the entire trip. Now some of you may not know this but my primary destination on arriving in India was not the south! I know it is shocking to admit but I actually went to the north of India. Why I hear you chorus? Well actually it was for a obstetrics and gynaecology basic practical skills course held in Delhi.

Delhi in July, I can say with some confidence was the most sticky and humid place I have ever visited. It was very similar to that sensation of walking into a butterfly house or the glass houses in botanical gardens. The air is hot and wet. I arrived after 11pm and still there was not an inkling of cool breeze. The muggy night air enveloped me and I greeted India with a fresh gleam of sweat on my brow.

I was met at the airport by a really sweet driver who I had arranged via my hotel and despite having worried about being a female traveller alone in the big city I am very happy to report that in the two days and three nights that I was in Delhi I never once felt threatened. After a comfortable night in my hotel I headed off to the course. Unsure of how far the course venue was and how to get there I decided to take a taxi, not too expensive at only 250 Rupees and worth it as I was already running late. The driver I am again pleased to report was a lovely man and although he didn’t know any better than I did really where to find the training institute we muddled through and eventually got there. I only had 220 rupees in small notes on me or alternatively a 1000 rupee note. The driver looked at me a little concerned, obviously he had no change. I had agreed the price with his boss before getting in the taxi and I got the impression that if he went back without the full fare there might be trouble, but it is a testament to the trusting culture in India that he agreed to take the 220 rupees on the promise that if he came to my hotel that evening I would give him the balance.

The course itself was really good, nice to be learning again and meeting some lovely obstetrics and gynaecology doctors from all over India. I was as usual a bit of a novelty, being white and British. It is going to seem strange when I move back to the UK full time not to be considered exotic! As one of the course co-ordinators said to me I was their first example of course tourism.

I decided to take the Metro back after the course and I am sure I have said it before but I will certainly say it again, the Delhi metro is really rather wonderful. Cheap, safe and air conditioned it even has women only carriages for all those independent women. The only amusing thing is that to get into it you have to pass through something akin to airport security. Although I suppose in a country where terrorist attacks are a very real danger this is not such a surprise. My favourite sign at the entrance to the metro by a mile is the one explaining what you cannot bring with you. This includes, and I am being totally serious,  manure (of any kind), rags (including oily rags), Human remains and any decayed animal or vegetable matter. For some reason this just tickles me, especially the need to be so specific. As though there was a person in the queue who thought “well I know it says no rags but surely these oily rags are ok?”.

Anyway I made it back to my hotel safe and sound without transporting any manure at all (of any kind). I was just meandering through the streets wondering what to do next when I spied my driver from the morning. He looked happy to see me and was such a gentleman that I really had to be quite forceful in my encouragement before he would allow me to tip him the princely sum of 10 rupees.

All in all it was a very pleasant trip and after the two day course I packed myself up and headed back down south with a much improved opinion of them up north. It really is great to be back in India although as I hinted at earlier things back in England are a bit worrying at the moment (not a subject that I need to go into on this blog) so I might need to cut my stay a little shorter than anticipated. All the more reason in my opinion to write plenty while I am still here and make the most of it!

So to cut a long story extremely short expect more blogs from me in the short term, I will be attempting to capture it all in writing in shorter period of time. That is a lot of shorts in one sentence but there you have it!

With as always all my love and best wishes.

A x

Curry in a cold climate

So it is almost time for me to make the big trip back to India and I haven’t even finished telling you all about what happened before I left. Its official I am a bad blogger! Totally out of date! Anyway to try and rectify the situation here is a brief run-down of how I spent my last week in India before returning to our English summer. Where I left off Lucy and I were having an excellent and very relaxed time doing very little apart from enjoying the pace of life in rural India and each other’s company.

To be honest that is what we did spend a lot of the time doing looking back on it. On a couple of occasions we had to break from the self-imposed chill out to do something entertaining or practical but we tried to keep this at a minimum.

 In order for me to actually leave the country however there was at least one very practical thing which we could not get away without doing and that was travelling up to Ooty to apply for and collect my visa exit permit! Ooty as I have told you all before is our nearest hill station up in the blue mountains. Full of slightly decaying imperial Englishness, coach parties of Indian tourists and more than a few dead rats. When I first went to Ooty I thought it was awful, massively over hyped by the guide books and generally more than a bit unpleasant. As a town it is a bit of a crumbling mass of concrete buildings with very little in the way of architectural merit. Doubtless the surrounding scenery and countryside is stunning but so is a lot of the region and I never felt that Ooty itself was much of a draw. My opinion I must say has changed. In between the nondescript concrete buildings I now notice more of the eccentric old and higgledy piggledy  brick building with their warped and wobbly tiled roofs. I like the slightly hyped up over excitement of the Indian holiday makers, as long as it’s not high season obviously that is just too extreme. I like the obvious pride that Ooty takes in its little gems of tourist attractions, the bee museum, the massive botanical gardens, the charming little mountain railway on which you can tootle along to Cooinoor, the next hillstation on the line.

I am sure that some of my affection for Ooty is related to the fact that compared to my little back-of –beyond adopted Indian home town you can get a lot more creature comforts and exotic food, for example good quality chocolate and western style cheese. Not something one bothers about when you have only been in India a few weeks but I must admit after five months I was rather excited to sit in Café Coffee Day, a large Indian chain of coffee shops and drink Choccacino while polishing off some very sweet snacks (as me and Lucy did on a number of occasions).

The main thing to mention about Ooty apart from the chocolate is that it is cold. Really blimmin cold. As the bus climbs up the mountains towards its destination you find yourself slowly layering on more and more woollens. This creates a very amusing branch of Indian fashion which I like to refer to as the Ooty look. Many layers of chunky knit wool, waterproofs in rainy season, the obligatory umbrella topped off with some variety of slightly mismatched head wear, preferably slightly comedy earmuffs or a sort of woollen bonnet specific to the region! I love it.

On our trips to Ooty we did I feel make the most of it, we went to the bee museum (highly recommended), the botanical gardens (where we were photographed by a large number of over excited Indian holidaymakers) and even took a trip on the mountain railway. We only went as far as Cooinoor but it was lovely. We stayed in the YWCA which although run by slightly intimidating people (long story) is certainly clean and comfy and joy of joy had hot water! After months of cold water washing I ran myself a bucket of water to wash in that was so hot I ended up clean but looking very similar to cooked lobster.

All in all our adventures to Ooty were rather lovely in a cold and damp way, a little bit of proper old fashioned tourist fun. Slightly reminiscent of the faded glamour of the average little forgotten English sea side town but with crazy Indian over the top ness for added effect.

This little reminiscence is all I have time for now which is a shame because I wanted to tell you about the elephant ride. Ah well perhaps another time but until then much love and ever yours sincerely,

A x

So to make up for the lack of telling you all about my wonderful elephant ride, here are some pictures!

Getting "on board"

Prime position

Enjoying the view from the Ooty toy train.

 

Disneyland India

Hello all you lovely people. Well it feels like its been a long holiday for me since mid June when my lovely friend of many years came to visit me in the small town in south India which has become my home. This post is a little reminiscence for me about the couple of weeks that we spent out and about in the Nilgiri hills.

I had decided to head down to the bustling metropolis of Mysore to meet her. Partly for the sake of a pleasant feeling of symmetry, the first time I came to India in 2007 the very same friend had come out to visit me and we had met on the lawns of a the beautiful hotel we were staying in. Almost four years on we had booked a room in the same hotel, a restored colonial era palace for the princesses of Mysore currently run as a eco friendly luxury hang out spot. In a perfect re-enactment of our prior visit we met once again in the garden restaurant, both terribly happy to see each other in such exotic surroundings.

The 24 hours we spent in Mysore itself was a lovely haze of meandering around what seemed like our personal palace and gardens catching up on each others news. One particular high point was our Sunday evening trip to the city palace illuminations. Built in 1912 Mysore palace is a serious caricature of fairytale wonderment, when lit up in the evenings with its 96,000 glowing bulbs it looks unbelievably disneyfied.

I have added a photo taken while we were there to illustrate my point because I am sure you would otherwise think it an exaggeration.

The next day we tootled around the rather charming city itself, enjoying the  feeling of being tourists. I managed to spend more than a week or two of my average indian living costs on some truly lovely Mysore silk but hey, its an investment right? Then we finally clambered aboard the bus to make our way back to our little rural out posting. Eyes pealed along they way as we bumped our way through the wild life park, eager for the inevitable glimpses of deer, monkeys and elephants.

By happy coincidence there was a dinner party that night at the lovely home of our senior doctors,  a great opportunity for my school friend to meet all of the many and varied friends I have been lucky enough to accumulate in my time in India. From the long standing permanent members of society here to the newest batch of charming British medical elective students! Also a wonderful opportunity for us to enjoy the fabulous Indian home cooking to which I have grown so accustomed.

As we strolled home across the fields later on, navigating by thin beams of torch light through the treacly darkness that you only really get in the countryside, it occurred to me that it was really rather wonderful to be able to spend time with my oldest and my newest friends at once. I had been a little worried that it may not seem like enough of a holiday for my English visitor, as I was not planning to take much time out from my hospital duties. But on airing my concerns I was glad to realise that actually for her the quiet and beautiful green mountains outside her windows and the knowledge that work was very far away in england was likely to be holiday enough!

So it began, our rambling and relaxing and not terribly busy holiday. A lot of the time it just involved the very simple enjoyment of each others company and a cup of very sweet indian tea. However in my next post I will tell you a few of the more exciting things we got up to, including our visits to the very chilly hill station Ooty and our rather wonderful elephant ride.

Until then all my love,

A x

June Monsoon

Hi all you lovely people, so here is a catch up on what happened to during last month in India, that is to be precise the month of June.

June was when we suddenly all became very soggy in my particular green valley in the Nilgiri hills. It is something that I have never experienced before, the coming of a Monsoon. Everyone spoke about it for the weeks leading up, speculation on which day it would hit. Now for those of you like me who have lived the majority of their lives in Britain may in fact like me feel sceptical about the sudden coming of rains. In my corner of south west England we get at least our fair share of rain but seasons tend to gradually melt into one another. The spring slowly starts to warm your cockles, the summer arrives with its fair and sunny days but still the smattering of rain showers, you notice the nights drawing in and the air getting crisp and its autumn, the first frost of winter can snap and crackle but you will still get the occasional warmer ray of sun. Well in India it is a little different.

One day the skies are startlingly blue and you are sweating in the heat then before you even have a chance to think to yourself "gosh that cloud over there looks a bit ominous" woosh, it is quite literally like a tap being turned on above. I have never in all my time in the UK, even when I lived in Plymouth which is a pretty damp sort of city, found occasion to purchase an umbrella. But within the first day or two of the monsoon I hotfooted it up to town and purchased a rather fetching purple one.

Suddenly the forests are even greener than before, more green than I could have imagined. When the sun shines out from behind the cloud and catches the damp leaves rippling in the stormy winds it takes your breath away. The small stream in the valley which runs along past the hospital has swelled to a river and at night if the rain stops long enough I can lean out of my window and hear it roaring past.

During June as well as enjoying the sudden contrast in weather I also noticed a small change in myself. My Tamil skills are developing, still at a rather slow pace but I feel also that perhaps my clinical confidence has grown. Early in June I was caring for a woman in labour, it was her first child and she was coping well despite a very slow labour and what on palpation seemed to be a rather good size baby. The labour progressed all be it slowly and with an episiotomy and little bit of cheerleading when the time came she delivered a beautiful baby boy at the healthy birth weight of 3kg.

The problem arose after the placenta was delivered. In some ways it was similar to the monsoon, I knew that a few aspects of her case made her high risk for bleeding after delivery, the long labour, a well grown baby and a big placenta but I was still surprised when she started to lose blood. Her uterus didn't contract well and after a small pause, like the calm before the storm, she started to bleed. And I surprised myself to be honest, that with the assistance of the incredibly competent nurses I dealt with it. My first post partum haemorrhage that I have managed without another doctor in the hospital. After a flurry of activity, some medications, some common sense measures the tap was turned off and we controlled the bleeding. Once she was stable I phoned the senior obstetric doctor, this was late in the evening by this point. She was really supportive and it was great to hear that we had done the right stuff, she had a few other pieces of advice but overall we had done a good job.

The final note on the story is that when the time came for the lady and her very adorable baby to be discharged she came to see me at the hospital mess where I was having my 11 o'clock incredibly sweet cup of tea (a daily routine). She gave me this amazing smile and a little palms together greeting as is the tradition and in one way or another through our scrambled languages she told me that she was leaving, but that she was grateful for me being there for her and I hope I managed to convey how glad I was that she was well and that I had been able to help.

Anyway needless to say I was grinning from ear to ear all day. This is the end of my blog for now, leaving on a high. I will write again soon to let you know all the news about my wonderful visit from one of my oldest friends. Oh and I promise it will come with pictures!

Lots of love,

A x

What is yet to come

So it has been a while since I last wrote. Mostly because the charger for my computer has gone caput and this has made internet access in India more of a challenge! In the intervening time plenty has occurred in my little corner of India and I am now writing to you from the living room in Zenobia Mansions, safely back in the UK for my summer break.

My plan is to write a few catch up blogs to fill you in on the gap, namely the majority of June! So this is really a blog to explain that other blogs are on the way. Something I have noticed about myself since starting to write the blog is that I spend a lot of time thinking of titles, so here are a few to whet your appetite before the real deal!

June Monsoon- a little about the weather and a few cases from the hospital.

Disneyland India- in which my lovely friend Lucy arrives and we explore Mysore with its beautiful and ridiculously lit up palace.

Curry in a cold climate- The second instalment of our holiday in India.

Half term report- a short report on life so far in the Indian sub continent and what is happening next..

COMING SOON TO A COMPUTER NEAR YOU...

Alice x

p.s. As this is a rather short posting I thought I would take the opportunity of adding a few photos, just to keep you all sweet.

A frog, no reason just because I liked him.

Another classic monsoon pic, brightly coloured truck in a flooded Keralan field.

Stomp stomp, Chomp chomp

Hello just a quick report on a rather exciting early morning visitor I had last Sunday. I was sleeping soundly in my little bed at around four in the morning and I heard a noise from outside the window. Normally a very deep sleeper I was surprised to find myself awake while it was still dark outside and at first in my sleepy state couldn't work out what had happened. The noise that had woken me continued. Stomping and chomping. My first guess was that this was some wandering herd of wild boar, not an infrequent occurrence however this seemed a lot louder. I gave in to my curiosity and dragged myself out of bed.

Standing there, directly outside my window, was a large elephant. I was more than a little surprised. When I had come to terms with this I naturally decided to try and photograph the big guy. By this point however he had strolled off towards the hospital. I thought that my chance was over but he took a left turn and went into the tea plantation next to the hostel where I live. I ran to the bathroom window for a better view and just managed to capture a picture. I think he disliked the flash because he left soon after.

Waking up in the morning I assumed this must have been a rather odd dream, the product of too much curry before bed time. But on looking at my camera and the large elephant footsteps outside the house I managed to convince myself that my vision had in fact been correct. I have enclosed the photo below, an elephant outside my bathroom window attempting to hide behind some shrubbery. Notice the large tusks and glint in the eye, this rogue elephant has apparently been up to no good! According to varying reports he has stomped on between 2 and 4 people. Not an ending I would like to come to on a dark night.

Since then the general consensus is that the elephant has returned to the forest. The more dramatic of the story tellers say that he was rounded up by the tame elephants who are cared for by the elephant sanctuary and driven back. I particularly like this version of events.

Anyhow it’s all rather exciting and I have been thrilling all those who will listen with the story of the elephant sighting all week.

Aside from elephants the only really big news here is the arrival of the Monsoon, but I will tell you all about that another time. Until then lots of love to all.

A x