India - Day 5

Today I walked around the city for about 10 km without accomplishing much anything.

To be precise, I was trying to get myself some peppermint tea in order to kick the nasty caffeine habit. The problem is, they only have green and black tea here - no camomille, peppermint or any other type of herbal tea anywhere. Best I could finally find was hibiscus, which will probably have to do.

Shopping here is complicated. Everyone is helpful, but they generally speak just a few words of English so asking for help doesn't really work. As mentioned before, most of the shops are small and also sell quite similar stuff, so if you want anything that is not generic, you will have to know where you can get it -- which may well be on the other side of the city. Large malls only sell clothes and there seem to be no supermarkets for food. I did see my first McDonalds today, tho :)

One more thing I have forgotten to mention before is that electricity goes off at noon from 12 to 1. Tom said this is not a bug but a feature, for they are shutting entire neighbourhoods off in order to balance the load of the electrical grid. I always manage to forget it, however. For instance, today I wanted to charge the battery of my cellphone only to come back and see it had gotten nowhere.

One more thing that crossed my mind is that for some reason, most men wear western-style clothing (from pressed shirts to football jerseys) while the vast majority of women wear traditional dresses - either saris or the traditional muslim dresses. I am not at all sure how this has come about, but to me it seems somewhat odd.

One more thing that seems strange is that there are many advertisments for doctors (Medical, not traditional) on the streets, even for specialties that definitely require a sterile surgery (neurosurgeon, for instance). I assume they still do their work in a hospital, but that you contact and pay them separately and they just rent the surgery room from the hospital when they need it or something.

My mind is still overflowing with too many thoughts and memories... and I haven't been dealing with them, to be honest. In theory, I could probably keep on learning and seeing new things here every day, but I came here not to learn new things but rather to learn how to be without doing. In some sense, I feel like a complete failiure... well actually, in many more senses than just one, to be honest. I think I need a hug, but that will probably have to wait until I get back.