ADAM AND RYANNE GO TO INDIA: A houseboat, more class, and a birthday!

These past two days have been quite busy for Ryanne and I! Yesterday we took a four hour bus ride along with our group to Lake Alleppey, which is about 140 kilometers north of Trivandrum. It was a very bumpy ride that included our first stretch of Indian highway driving. This made the driving within the city look quite calm (with highway speeds for a bus heading up to 80 km/hour). After arriving at the lake we boarded a large houseboat and were served a mango fruit juice while we pulled away from the dock. We traveled around the lake for the next six hours where we saw a bird sanctuary, ate a delicious lunch, and played a few games of cards. Most of us were quite tired, with bad sunburns, once we hopped on the bus to head back up to Trivandrum. We stopped for dinner on the ride south at a nice lakeside resort where I had one of their specialty dishes, a chicken curry on top of a fritter...to me it seemed like chicken on a pancake, DELISH! We got back to our hotel around 11 PM last night and slept in until about 9:15 this morning to make it to class at 10. We must have been absolutely exhausted from such a long day in the sun and 8 hours total on an uncomfortable Indian bus.

Our class this morning was one of the best so far. We had one of the doctors from Pallium India speaking to us about good communication skills for much of the day. The man was very bright and was able to not only teach great communication skills, but do it while crossing into the context of another culture. This seems to be an ongoing theme for us here in India within our home visits and lectures. We may be able to do a great job caring for patients within the comfort of our cultural setting, but how would we do things differently in another culture?

It was one of our friend's, Taylor, 21st birthday today. We went out for the most American meal possible, pizza, for dinner as a group (and brought our professor along too)! We got a her a couple of Hindi dance music cd's, a very nice cake, customized birthday drinking glass, and a bottle of Bacardi! She posted on Facebook slightly after that it was one of the best birthdays she has had!

We have lecture again tomorrow (Tuesday) followed by 3 days of home visits. It should be a great learning experience getting home back into the home visit experience after just one day of it last week. We will be sure to post all the latest and greatest exciting things from the other side of the world!