Down by the seasideSee the boats go sailing

And... another guest blog from Quagmire:

So clinic today was cancelled...again. Shocking. We might be going to the HIV hospital this afternoon, but I'm not holding my breath.

Yesterday and Monday, I was at the Leprosy Hospital here in Mumbai.

Sounds kind of scary, being around all those leprosy patients doesn't it? The reality is that there are almost no leprosy patients at the Leprosy Hospital. The people who live there at one time had leprosy and are no longer contagious, but they can no longer return to Indian society. Thus, they live at the hospital.

The hospital is really more of a compound or little community for the people. Our two days consisted of lectures about leprosy, a tour of the place where they make footwear for leprosy patients, and a visit to the leprosy museum. I can't be certain, but I may actually know less about leprosy now than before I went to the lectures.

My night clinic is much more interesting. I am stationed with a pediatrician who is about my age. He invited me to go hiking with his large group of friends this weekend. It seems that we drive about 50 miles outside of Mumbai and hike 5 miles up to a 600 year-old temple in the mountains. We spend the night in the temple and then in the morning we hike up to an abandoned fort that is about half the size of NY's Central Park. It's against the program's rules to pal around with the doctors here, but as I've learned, rules in India are open to interpretation of very wide latitude.

I am going to go with them.
How can I pass this up?

I mentioned that we were in Aurangabad last weekend. I've also spoken about IST (Indian Standard Time). Briefly, IST means that anything that is scheduled in India will happen at least 30 min after the appointed time. So, 30 min late is considered on time, and anything that happens on time is considered early. Therefore, if something starts 30 min behind schedule it actually starts early. It's all very
confusing.

For our flight from Aurangabad back to Mumbai we were running a little late American late, not IST late). But, we felt OK about it because of, exactly, IST. Imagine our shock when we get to the airport and are told "You need to hurry if you want to catch your flight, it's leaving early!" I assumed they meant IST early, but in fact, they meant American early, as in it was going to take off 15 min before the scheduled time. The best part is the looks the ugly Americans got as we boarded the plane that was waiting for us before it took off. I guess because the flight was leaving 20 min early and we didn't get on the bird until 15 min early we were making everyone late for a flight that was not obeying IST. I still need a slide-rule to figure it out.

OK, HIV clinic supposedly starts in one hour which means I either have 90 minutes or 15 minutes to get back to the University.

Hope everyone is well.

Quagmire