Cockroach Buffet

Our second day of surgery was spent in outpatient clinic. I was assigned to the chair of the department, the same one that was mentioned in Elena’s blog tapping his toe to elevator music. I spent the morning getting pimped about venous stasis, and pretty nasty non-healing food wounds. There was also some cool stuff, carotid body tumors, a hydrocele on a twenty year old the size of an ostrich egg, thyroid nodules.
Wednesday we rounded with the same chair and several interns and 2 upper levels. I have learned a very universal lesson…attending rounds are BRUTAL. We marched all over the hospital rounding on nearly 50 patients and by the end I think that the resident had shrunk several inches in size due to the disappearance of his confidence. Then we went to dinner at our favorite Punjabi restaurant and ate some awesome North Indian vegetarian food. Unfortunately, the single cockroach that we saw at the restaurant last week seemed to have found a friend and performed some major reproduction as there were several bugs crawling on the wall. The chickpea masala and garlic naan is so yummy though that we merely acknowledged the creepy crawlers and went right on munching. I think that my expectations of hygiene and bug infestation have drastically changed in the past 2 weeks and I suspect that I am going to be very good camping from this point on.
Oh and on another note, for some reason they changed the bus schedule Tuesday. We got cocky because we had a string of successful commuting, but due to this unannounced change the number 2 bus did not take us home on 3 separate occasions from 3 separate starting locations. We spent quite a bit of time walking along mysterious roads and even more time asking people who did not speak our language for help that they were not very interesting in giving. So we get it India, we did not figure you out in a week. Back to square one.
Tonight we are leaving on a 13 hour overnight sleeper train to go to the town of Varkala in the southern state of Kerala. It boasts some of the best beaches in the country and we have some bamboo huts with our names on them! There are also rumors of pancakes there too which will be awesome since breakfast is the least impression meal of the deal. Sure they have decent coffee or tea and there is amazing juice where I am pretty sure that place whole pineapples in a blender, but they have subpar toast and idly. Idly is some kind of round yeasty rice cake that we loved at first by now after eating them everyday I am pretty sure that they are just sitting in our intestines clogging our cecums.