India update: Tummies and Rain

I am currently lying in bed, with a dodgy tummy. I could try and pinpoint exactly what I did that caused it, but frankly that seems like wasted effort. I went to India, anything more specific is probably eternally unknowable.

It’s not awful, thankfully. There was just three minutes of *TMI* after lunch today, and then I took some immodium, got plenty done during the afternoon, came home, chatted to Julie, ate some dinner, and played some appallingly bad games of pool. Well, they started off only mildly bad, but the third game descended into farce, and then I took myself off to bed, where talking to tisme cheered me up a bit.

And then I saw this:
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See the spot marked "Pune"? See the big blue wall of water headed towards it? That’s 6cm of water going to fall on Sunday. After that, it probably gets properly wet. And, actually, I’m ok with this. We’ll probably be trapped in the hotel, but I’ll get to see a bit of the Monsoon, which I’ve been impressed by since I first heard of it as a child.

Further update from the land of the sick

I pulled myself together enough to make it out to MG* Road and buy a few presents to take home.

I then came back an hour earlier than my coworkers. We travelled in a auto-rickshaw, which is possibly the least safe-feeling mode of transportation that isn't a rope bridge over a crocodile-filled abyss. The feeling of unsafety isn't helped by the fact that Indian driving is a clear illustration that reality is in the eye of the beholder - in this case, "The right side of the road", which is a concept flouted whenever things get a bit too busy on your side of the road, and the driver reckons he can take up a bit of the next lane over because nobody is actively travelling the other way down it right now. Last night this culminated in what would be, in the UK, a four lane road (two each way) becoming five lanes going one way, and a thin trickle of traffic failing to make much headway at travelling in the other direction***.

Anyway, I staggered back to the hotel, used the bathroom, collapsed into bed, and slept for two hours, woken only by the hotel wanting to change my bedsheets. And then, an hour later, wanting to give me some chocolate biscuits. I really need to find the "I am sick, leave me alone" switch.

I've spent the time since then lying in bed, hitting the "Refresh" button on news/LJ and generally feeling pained. I don't even want to eat dinner - I don't feel hungry at all.

Thankfully, I've now found that there are about twenty Zero Punctuation videos I haven't seen, so I get to watch short bursts of extreme sarcasm about video games, which is exactly what I need when I don't have the attention span to read.



*Mahatma Gandhi**. I didn't know that until Julie told me, because nobody ever calls it that.
**The one thing that Gandhi and Cthulhu have in common is I can never remember the exact whereabouts of the silent H.
***The other part of traffic which attracts the most attention from foreigners is the Indian efficiency at using scooters. It's quite common to see four people on a motorbike/scooter - small child at the front, father sitting behind him driving the bike, larger child behind father, mother sitting at the back of the scooter, frequently riding side-saddle. It's not surprising that India's road death tally is proprtionally dramatically higher than the UK's.