November 25th, 2009

Although I am thoroughly enjoying being immersed in the Indian culture and trying new things, sometimes its nice to have a taste of home. And today, that taste came in the form of Baskin Robbins ice cream J

Our work day itself was not very interesting. We were able to assess 3 more kids in the morning for our tardieu scale project, but all in all the PT department was really quiet because it was new assessment day (the new assessments don’t’ take place in the PT department). We spent much of the afternoon observing both group and individual therapy sessions, and by four pm we were definitely ready to be finished work and to go back to our room.

After our half-hearted attempts at doing our own laundry by hand last week, Priya the PT found a woman (one of the kitchen employees at the compound I think) that is willing to do our laundry for us for a total of 400 INR (about $ 10 CAD) for the next four weeks. At first I wasn’t too sure how I felt about this. I feel like of weird paying somebody else to do my laundry by hand…to do my “dirty work” for lack of a better word. Its hard to explain, but it almost feels like I’m taking advantage of this woman by paying her what is seemingly so little, for such hard work. It makes me a bit uncomfortable. But we decided to go for it, since we are obviously not adept at doing it ourselves. Today was the first time that she came to do our laundry (she will come once a week). She did an awesome job, and we both have plenty of fresh smelling, clean laundry hanging up to dry now. I still feel kind of bad about it, but we’re going to give her a really fat tip at the end of the four weeks.

Anyways, so after our laundry was all done, we got set to go out for dinner with a friend of Priyanka’s family, Vijay. Vijay is the one that tried to arrange alternate accommodations for us on our second day here, when we were a little bit overwhelmed by our room. Vijay and his family picked us up at SPASTN and took us to the Ascendas (a big IT company right next door) food court for dinner. The food court at Ascendas is amazing, and even bigger than the one at Tidal Park (not to mention easier to get into!). It has all kinds of western delights (like McDonalds, KFC, and Pizza Hut) interspersed with Indian restaurants. Vijay and his family treated us to all kind of interesting Indian foods for dinner, and then we finished off the night with a cup each of Baskin Robbins ice cream. I had Lychee ribbon ice cream, and I have to say it was a little piece of heaven. I also tried Priyanka’s mango crème ice cream, which was equally as delicious.

Vijay and his family are extremely extremely nice and helpful. They are going to help us sort out the situation with our phone, and Vijay even whipped out his mobile at dinner to phone his travel agent to secure our train tickets to Banglore for the weekend. He is having his secretary deliver them to us tomorrow, and then help us out with the rest of our errands.

After dinner we went to the retail section of Ascendas. I can’t believe we didn’t know about this before! We found a Café Coffe Days (which is kind of like the Indian version of a Starbucks), and a 24 hour convenience type store. There is also a pharmacy, a grocery store, a gym, a bank and of all things, AN AIRTEL STORE! Which means we don’t have to go back to the sketchy place in Thiravanmyuir to fix our phone!

I am enjoying doing things the “Indian way” (ie shopping in the little out of the way places, haggling for good prices etc), so I don’t want to look for too many Westernized place, but Ascendas is a great place to go for a taste of home.

All in all we had a really great day, despite a slow start. Tomorrow we’re hoping to get the phone sorted out and run a few other errands, and then I guess on Friday we’ll have to get ready for our big trip to Bangalore!