Farewell

The four weeks experience in India has been completed. I have just arrived back from India. There is so much that I have experienced and wanted to document, but every time I try to blog I somehow always manage to leave out something. I am still amazed at how advance CMC is and the equipments provided at the hospital despite the condition of the surrounding environment. The doctors and medical students are so well read and very hardworking. During grand rounds, the attendings ask very intricate questions and seem to always be interested in what year did a certain medication regimen begin, etc. I do miss the rickshaw rides. They were quite an adrenaline rush but I will not miss the littering. Throwing water bottles, candy wrappers, plastic cups, and everything and anything else is almost second nature for the elders and children. It is so hard to find a trash can around the city that I can almost understand why littering is so prominent. I will most definitely miss tea time. Everyday at exactly 10:30am, all work stops and all the doctors have their tea/coffee break. Then around 4pm there is another tea break; this one is not as consistent. Even during the nurse/doctors’ runs to the villages at 10:30am we stop by a coffee shop to grab some tea/coffee. I will not be able to have a meal for $1 anymore. Breakfast would be at most 50 cents and lunch maybe 75 cents if I wanted to splurge. Yet somehow I ended up spending much more than I intended to. Maybe it was the “foreigners pay 750 rupees and only 20 rupees for Indian residents.” However, the traveling to Mamallapuram, Kanchipuram, Bangalore, Delhi, and Agra were well worth the trip. The Taj Mahal is breathtaking and the Lotus Temple is amazing! I’ll miss the Indian spices they were delicious, but goodbye to my heartburns now that I’m back in the U.S.