andrea arrives

Yay!! Andrea is finally here! It is so nice to see a familiar face after all of these months (aside from mom and dad’s trip of course!). Andrea arrived in Delhi on the 11th, and then braved the train to Bhopal overnight, arriving early in the morning on the 12th. She brought me really awesome Korean clothes and a bag, as well as a fairly large supply of delicious chocolate from Amsterdam… mmmmm. Its so weird that I haven’t seen Andrea in over a year, and here I am seeing her in Bhopal. Anyway, we spent the entire first morning that she was here planning our travels around India, which I was dying to do (surprise, surprise)! So, our route will be Bhopal – Varanasi – Agra – Delhi – McLeodganj – Delhi – Goa – Mumbai. And all within about two weeks!

From Mumbai Andrea has to go back to Delhi to catch her flight back to Korea. I think that I will stay another day or two in Mumbai before I go to Thailand. I haven’t quite decided where I’m going in Southeast Asia yet, but I think that I’m pretty definite about starting in Chiang Mai, then to Bangkok, and then somewhere in the south or a bit of beach time. Then Cambodia, the Vietnam. That’s all I know so far. But I am SO excited to start traveling.

I have almost exactly a month left in Bhopal, and I feel like the sands are quickly falling through the hourglass. I still have to finish about a million things here, and unfortunately most of what I have left to do relies on other people quite a bit. I need Shweta to finish typing the menopause booklets so that I can paste the text into the photoshoped version; I need Dr. Kaur to go over he information about cervical cancer with me in order to make the posters; I need Aziza and Masurat to go over my puzzles with me to make sure that I have all of the symptoms and everything right. Anyway, you get the picture. It’s hard to track people down and get them to do these things too. Everyone here at the clinic has such busy schedules that it makes it hard to keep things moving. Anyway, I only hope that when my time finishes here I will have something to show for it other than a bunch of half-finished projects! Ak!

Eurig and Susan left last week, and it seemed like the end of an era in a way. Eurig was always really good at getting everyone together to enjoy a few illicit beers and have a chat or watch a movie. He was here for three months, too, so it was a little strange not to have him here with us after so long. We did manage to make a wonderfully bland dinner of mashed potatoes, peas and carrots, and scrambled eggs the Sunday before they left though. Unfortunately that was also the night when two new volunteers showed up at the clinic. There was, as usual, some confusion as to where everyone was supposed to be sleeping etc. so in the middle of my mashed potatoes I had t go and move all of my many possessions from the girls dorm room into one of the small rooms again. Not that I’m complaining, but I’ll be glad when I don’t fell like I have to help every new volunteer settle themselves into the clinic. Because I have been here the longest people look to me to sort out things like sheets, blankets pillows, instructions on how to use the laundry and how the canteen functions. I know that it is only for another month, so that is good, but sometimes it feels like I’ve repeated the same information about four hundred times.

Ankeeta has officially been replaced in the canteen. A new group of women started cooking breakfast and lunch yesterday. I have to admit that I like their food a bit better. It’s a little strange though, because I’m so used to Ankeeta’s cooking that it seems like “home cooking,” while the new food is like going to a restaurant or something. Anyway, the new group seems nice, so I hope that it all works out okay. Prabjit went over to see how Ankeeta was doing yesterday, but she had gone away overnight – probably to visit her brother or something. So I guess we’ll see. I worry a bit about her being able to find another source of income, since she is essentially the sole breadwinner for her family.

On this past Sunday Andre and two new volunteers, Judith and Nicole, and I went to the Museum of Man by the lake. It was absolutely gigantic and pretty cool. It took us an hour just to get to the main museum building, since they had all of these traditional types of homes built outside the main grounds. We also passed this giant fenced in area where we heard these pretty intimidating growls coming from. Te guard said that there was a tiger in there, but we never did find the part of the fence that you could see through, so we never did see the tiger. The Museum itself took us another hour or two just to get pat of the way through. When they say that they are making a museum about the history of man, they really mean it. The museum literally started with DNA strands and Cro-Magnon man or whatever. There was kind of a big jump between Cro-Magnon man and traditional Indian culture and civilization, but I got the general picture. They had huge displays of different traditional societies and all of the stuff that they had in them which was pretty cool.

The museum went on forever though, and after a while we wanted to move on. They had these museum employees that would NOT let you move in the opposite direction of the pre-determined path though, and every time we made for an exit someone would yell at us to get back on the path. Judith eventually explained that we were going to the gift shop, thank-you-very-much, and we managed to escape. The gift shop was cool though, and extremely reasonably-priced compared to most of the other places that sell touristy things. I got a really cool silk-screened piece of tribal art that I absolutely love!

Anyway, I don’t have much else to report at the moment. We watched Point Break (of Keanu Reeves fame) last night. I realized that I am much more desensitized to violence that everyone else. Most likely it’s the three-to-five day intensive periods of video-watching that happened at Grandma’s house a couple of times every year of my childhood. Annie had a knack for selecting the most brutally violent videos with minimal gore (because I couldn’t stomach the gore) which we would watch pretty much continuously for days at a time.

Oh yeah, and Photobucket seems to be allowing me to upload photos again (albeit at a snail’s pace), so you can check out photos from mom and dad’s vacation now…