Temples, Turkeys, and Toilets

The internet is SO slow here!  I've been trying to upload 2 pictures for an hour now.  I'm just going to post as is and will try to edit with the photos from the chicken trip later!

Saturday 6/16/12

On Saturday, we woke up early to check out of the hotel at 7.  We had breakfast, where I really just had a pancake-type thing (does not taste like a pancake at all) and jam, like a jelly roll-up…at least I tried.  It was not much food, and our professor called me out.  “Carrie is a very anti-Indian food person, I can tell” he says.  I told him that it’s not that I don’t like Indian food, I’ll try some and eat it for a while, but I can’t eat it repetitively day after day.  I basically feel like I ordered Chinese take-out (more like Indian take-out I guess), ate it for dinner, then heated it up for breakfast and lunch the next day.  I might try one or two new things, but most taste very similar.  Then, I ordered Indian again for dinner that night, and did the same re-heating process the next day, and so on and so forth.  Every day, the meals might change a little, but overall we are on repetition.  And I can do this, for like 3 days because it’s so new and it’s an adventure.  But when I’m eating the same type of bread and masala (liquidy) and sambar (liquidy) and rice, it gets old to my taste buds quick.   They (my taste buds) like variety – it’s just what they’re used to.  I’m not saying it’s bad, I just need to take breaks, and then I can eat the things again, after it’s been 4 or 5 days.  So I’m basically rotating – some meals, I can eat most of the things available, but then some meals I can only eat one thing because the other things we just had yesterday or the day before.  At home, I usually don’t eat leftovers for a day or two because I just had it the day before, so it hard to change once I’m here.  And I think he understands, he just gives me a hard time about it.

We travelled to the Chola temples, which is relatively famous and has been there for more than 1,000 years.  It is made entirely of granite – including the stone pathways – and is extremely intricate.  Nobody knows how they built it without any machinery – a mystery like the pyramids.  We had an awesome tour guide from the college who told us interesting things about the temple.  One story he had was about the carvings of guards.  These guards are like soldiers – they are guarding the inside of the temple.  And each one is depicted stepping on something.  The one he showed us was stepping on an elephant, which was being eaten by a giant, giant cobra, and then his foot is huge compared to these.  This is supposed to remind us humans that we are so so small compared to the soldier’s body, and the soldier is so small compared to the god in the temple he is guarding.  Basically, don’t let anything get to your head, which is the message of the white ash Hindu Indians put on their forehead daily as a reminder.  “You came from ashes, and to ashes you will return.  Don’t let things get to your head.”  We went inside the temple and had them say a prayer for all of the veterinarians and the animals.  I don’t know what he was saying, but it sounded nice.  We all were given ash for our foreheads.  The best part was that pretty much all temples have temple elephants, and we got to sit on one!  It was incredibly scary - so high up!  (I'm a little scared of heights)  Their skin is so scaly and rough-haired.  It would sway, and I would freak out!  But it was soooooo cool!

I may have a smile on my face, but I am FREAKED out!  So exciting!

A huge sculputre of a cow!

One of the temple "guards."

The group in front of the temple

After the temple, we visited a very old library, where there were books and paintings from thousands of years ago.  It was interesting, but I’m not the biggest history buff.  Plus, most everything was in Tamil (the language that is spoken here in the state of Tamil Nadu), so we couldn’t read any of the writings, but we could tell they were very old.  Some of the manuscripts were written on “scrolls” of palm leaves, which was definitely different.

We had some time to kill, so we went to get some more ice cream and cool down.  We had lunch where Dr. Mohan ordered us all the same dish.  It was huge - with bread and rice and tons of small dishes with different sauces and such.  I definitely couldn’t eat it all!  After lunch, we went to the bus “station” and loaded a semi-sleeper bus where the chairs lounged back quite a bit, kind of like a lazy boy.  Because the trip was during the day (1:00pm until about 9:30pm) I couldn’t sleep, so I watched India outside the windows and saw various interesting things.  I loved just people watching because India is so different than the US.  I saw some wild pigs, tons of cows, tons of goats, and even a crocodile (or what I’m pretty sure was a croc!)  I saw more trash than I’d like to see in my lifetime, and I’m fairly certain that an area of water we passed over was so polluted, the white things floating were small fish, dead with their white bellies up.  This made me somewhat skeptical about the fish industry here, but I hope that, being right on the ocean, there are reliable places where good fresh fish is available.  There were 2 movies that played on a big screen on the bus, but they were in Tamil so we couldn’t understand them.  It was possible to follow the basic storyline, however, just based on body language and inflections.  When we got back to Chennai, we ate dinner quickly and ran off to bed.  That may have been my best night of sleep yet!

Sunday 6/17/12

Sunday was a day of rest and recuperation.  Pamela and I slept in and skipped breakfast (on purpose – we told them the night before).  It was so nice not to have to set any alarm, but I still woke up around 8:30.  Still, it was nice just to lay in bed.  We did some much-needed blogging and relaxed all morning.  I did a load of laundry also.  Laundry here is done by bucket.  There is a washing machine in our hostel, but it is broken, and it is so small it wouldn’t do much laundry anyways.  So we do it by hand.  It is then hung on a clothesline – I don’t think they own dryers – and because it is so hot, it dries relatively quickly.  It is just difficult to really get out any stains or soils you may have on your clothes because they are not agitating against each other very much, and then it is near impossible to get all of the laundry detergent out.  We haven’t been using any fabric softener, so the clothes dry pretty stiff.  It’s not really all that bad, though.

After lunch, we headed to the college “track” and we learned how to play cricket.  It wasn’t too complicated, but I’m sure there’s a lot about it I still don’t understand.  Each time I hit, I got out, so I don’t think I’m very good at it either.  I played catcher quite a bit, but I was getting pretty beat up back there.  Every time I’d try to catch the ball, it would bounce up and pelt my arm or my face.  I’m not a fan of many sports with balls.  Never have been, never will.  Afterwards, we were surprised to still have internet, so it was a great day to have off since we could have some solid internet time. 

Monday 6/18/12

Monday we spent the whole day in the brucellosis/tuberculosis lab running our 40+ samples we collected in the village.  There was some miscommunication in the lab in the afternoon which made things a little frustrating, but overall it was a productive day.  We went to the basketball court and played basketball a little before dinner.  After dinner, we watched some of My Best Friend’s Wedding.

Tuesday 6/19/12

Tuesday we woke up early to travel to the Kancheepuram district to collect samples for our chicken research project.  We are testing the efficacy of a Newcastle Disease vaccination given in the form of a pellet.  The trip was about 2 hours either way by van, just because of traffic.  We had to draw blood on the chickens, which I’ve never done before.  There were a couple turkeys as well.  It was easier than I thought, but the small chickens with small veins got hematomas very easily, which is scary in a bird if the blood won’t clot.  All of the birds were a lot calmer than I was expecting, and the all of the people in the villages were very nice and very accepting of the free vaccine and letting us draw blood samples.  In one of the areas we visited the people are trying to become more advanced in agriculture, so we are trying to see what we can do as Michigan State University to adopt the village and help them get more resources to become more successful.  The day lasted pretty much all day.  Back in the hostel, we watched another movie and headed to bed.

Wednesday 6/20/12

Wednesday, we went into the lab in the morning.  We learned about the tests we will be doing for the Newcastle project (the one Lindsay and I are in charge of) and completed some of the preliminary work.  After lunch, while a few of us rested for a bit, some students went up on the roof to get some sun.  I said “No thank you – it is too hot!”  At 2:00pm, Dr. Kumar took us shopping. (Note: Dr. MohanKumar, Dr. Mohan, and Dr. Kumar are all the same person – I may refer to him by any of these names, but he is the professor from MSU who is from India).  At the first store, one of the students started feeling sick.  She was basically down for the count after that – we travelled to a drum store, Dr. Kumar’s music teacher’s house, and got ice cream, and the whole time she stayed in the hot van because she didn’t want to move.  She seemed absolutely miserable.  When we got back to the hostel, three more got sick within an hour.  Audrey and I were still feeling fine, so we went to dinner by ourselves.  It was very sad because it was an American-ish meal: “Chicken” patties (I’m not sure what was in those patties…couldn’t look at them) on bread to make a sandwich and we actually got some cheese on it!  It also had cucumbers and tomatoes on it.  It tasted really good!  Once we got back and went to bed, Audrey got sick right away.  I got no sleep because if all 5 were sick around me, time could only tell when I was going to get sick. I was dreading it all night, hoping it wasn’t true. 

Thursday 6/21/12

Had diarrhea a few times during the night, and at 6, I couldn’t take it anymore.  Things went downward from there on out.  We called our professor to tell him that we were all still not feeling well, so we had to cancel going to the wedding planned for this morning.  I was bummed about that because I was looking forward to seeing this other wedding - he said it was a going to be a much more traditional one and we could even talk to the priest about some of the different rituals.  Plus, I wanted to wear my sari again!  There's no way I could have lasted the ride, let alone the wedding or the food.  For me vomitting lasted all morning and diarrhea persisted.  We were taking medicine, but I couldn't keep it down, so I'm not sure how much it did for me.  All of the others felt decent during my worst time since I was the last one to get sick.  Our professor decided that our health was more important than the lab work scheduled for the afternoon, so we stayed in the hostel and relaxed all afternoon and night.  This was good, as I was nauseous all day long.   For dinner we had the same sandwiches as the day before, but all I could eat was a few cucumbers and a couple bites of bread.  An IT guy from MSU came into India today because he's here to work on a few things with our professor and the vet school here.  He was amazing with (hopefully) fixing our internet problems, so I'm hoping to have internet a lot more often now!

Friday 6/22/12

Today, I was feeling much better with my stomach (except what was coming out the other end, but I'd rather that than coming back out the way it came in).  I came down with a head cold, however.  I can't get a break!  One sickness after another.  I can't breathe all day long and was blowing my nose and sneezing all day.  We think we traced the bug we all got back to some fresh-squeezed lime juice we had at a restaurant in the chicken town.  Even our professor got a fever, which is sick for him in India! 

We spent the whole day in the lab.  We split half in half, some of us in the chicken lab and some in the brucellosis/tuberculosis lab.  In the chicken lab we ran two titer tests that should be interesting to compare to our samples we will get in a couple weeks.  Breakfast I couldn't eat anything but a granola bar.  For lunch we had spaghetti, so I was able to eat a little bit of that.  Dinner was veggie sandwiches which were decent and I ate about half.  Hopefully I'll get my appetite back soon!