Apparently, as a general rule...

It's best to avoid seafood in coutries w horrible water systems.
Lesson learned. And that's all I have to say about that.

The bus system is a different story though. Crowded, chaotic and fast
but not necessarily to be avoided. My friend accompanied me downtown
to have a lawyer notarize my medical license application, and it
turned into quite the journey.

Im standing there about to have a heat stroke, there are a
million buses flying by until one stops. You basically have one
opportunity to sprint and lunge for the door. I was confused to watch
Rahul run off as I got on. The conductor is screaming at me, 'hurry
up! Hurry up!' so I do. Then I realize that women and men are
segregated and Rahul was running to the back entrance. Even though I
was towering over all the other women I still couldn't see him because
it was so packed.

Watching the conductor work was like watching a comedy sketch in a
foreign language. I swear his sole purpose was to yell at people
getting on and off to keep show rolling. I was filling in my own
words with English in my head. Because people are so bluntly honest
here, I kept picturing him heckling everyone...kinda like a drill
sergent 'move it or lose it, saddle bags!'... 'what, have trouble
seeing the stairs, four eyes? Let's go!'. (laura can attest to this
scenerio actually being possible.). He kept running off and dropping
money off at these little stations and telling the driver to go ahead.
Then sprinting full speed to catch up and leaping back on. I was
thinking, man... This guy takes his job seriously! But hey, it
worked... We made it there about as fast as if we were driving.

It was interesting to see how everything functioned based on the
assumption that everyone was able bodied and could run, jump, leap if
you had too. If you couldn't... Good luck to ya.

So it ended up taking us forever to find this guy but we did. We were
hot, sweaty, thirsty, hungry... It really was like a long ass wizard
of oz journey. We walked into the office and it's a long, narrow
single room w shiny white floors and walls w nothing on them. In fact,
the only objects in the room were a single water cooler and one desk
at the other end of the room. He didn't acknowledge us for 5
minutes... Even though we were literally the only other things in the
room to look at. Mission completed!

Got back just in time for a weekend in the mountains, tea plantations,
and jungle tiger preserve! So much to tell about!

-Cathy

Sent from my iPod