An Evening On The Town

With the last day of surgery behind us, a few of us ventured out to do some shopping in town. Amie, our pediatrician was looking for a sari so Dua, an anesthesiologist, recommended a shop that finally stumbled into. Dua had honed her shopping skills a couple of days earlier while picking up some gifts for some of the guys (they weren’t brave enough to go sari shopping) and get fitted for a custom sari. Once safely inside, we discovered it was a department store.

After fondling dozens of outfits and saris, Amie settled on two that she would try on. It turns out that you can’t just by a sari; with it, you need an undershirt and an underskirt to make it work. It’s like buying an iPad for $600 and discovering that you need $200 more in accessories to truly enjoy it. Installed in the dressing room, Amy went to work first with the underskirt, which was straightforward enough. It was when she went to put on the undershirt, it became problematic. For us Americans, these little garments appear look like a half shirt with short sleeves a scoop neck and a body that is fitted to just a couple of inches below the chest; it also has a hook and eye closure system, which most of ladies tend to wear in the back (bras).

Anyway, I hear this “uh, I need help hooking this up” and out comes Amie from the dressing room fully clothed by our standards but in what to everyone else must have been underwear. I tried to help hook it up but couldn’t get it to work; no one else offered assistance so she went back in the dressing room convinced she needed a larger size. Then a young clerk came over to me and started making a spinning motion with her hand. Oh – she was putting it on backwards! I looked around at the other clerks to find them all giggling and broke the news to Amie who quickly declared that the “boob darts should have given it away.” You had to be there but it was funny. I wish I had presence of mind to take pictures.

Then came yards and yards of fabric. The younger girls moved away and let the older women come in to dress Amie in the first sari. The older woman shoved her back into the dressing room as if this was a private moment and went to work wrapping her up. A second woman went into the tiny dressing room and I noticed to walls of the tiny room started to shake, but I wasn’t hearing any signs of trouble. And then she emerged very pretty in a foam green sari. Then there was more pinning to be done and some of the clerks standing around were unfastening their own clothing to donate pins to Amie’s cause. I have to say this is a group activity; I can’t imagine the production of dressing these women go through every day. But they do look beautiful. I may try to get a sari in Delhi.

A few more from the Rotaplast team came into the shop and on our way back three of us stopped at a pizza restaurant. Earlier in the week I smelled pizza coming from the shop and had obsessed over it all week. In fact, two days earlier I had talked Ian, one of our anesthesiologist into a 45-minute walk for pizza which resulted in nothing. To-go pizzas in hand, we decided to take a tuk-tuk back to the hotel. What an adventure. Amie documented it on video – see below. It was exciting and terrifying all at the same time. The best way I can describe it is as blindfolded rollercoaster ride: you know you’re moving fast, you have know idea where the next twist, turn or loop will be and all you can do is sit there and hang on.

After eating the pizzas back at the hotel with our teammates watching to see who would get sick first, we went upstairs to practice a dance that we’ll be doing with some of the medical students at the closing ceremony tomorrow night. It was a lot of fun to get out tonight and do something different. My sides hurt from laughing.

Fruit vendor

Inside a fine bakery shop -- almost forgot where I was for a minute!

Indian grocery store...lots of dry goods.

Many of the same dry goods sold by a street vendor.

Parking in front of the grocery store...it must have been a shopping day!