Overhaulin'

Sorry to leave you all hanging, I hope you haven't spent the last two and a half weeks worrying that my mom has been lost somewhere between Chicago and Bangalore, she actually arrived safely, if not 45 minutes late. And I was stressing every minute. Anyway, she arrived with no problems despite the scenarios that my overactive imagination cooked up, no abduction by agitated soccer hooligans at Heathrow, no kidnapping and subsequent forced arranged marriage at the Bangalore International Airport by some deranged pervert. Nope, none of that, just a boring old trip halfway around the world. Bummer.

Not to worry though, as soon as Mom got here the fun began. Her purpose for this trip was really two-fold; first, to have some dental work, vision consultations and surgeries done and a distant second, to visit Eric and I. On her very first day in India, just four hours after her arrival, we had her first appointment at the dental clinic. She got to experience Bangalore traffic in the back of an autorickshaw which I think is an experience that she will not soon forget, in fact she might have recurring nightmares for the rest of her life. We spent the next week back and forth between home and the dental clinic (and to work for me when I could) having three root canals, one filling, one extraction, gum surgery for crown lengthening and two crowns placed. Whew, it was crazy. She completed her dental work on a Friday at around 6 PM and then next morning we were back at the hospital for her surgeries (during her dental work we had also fit in all of her pre-surgical tests, an ECG, chest X-ray and blood work as well as two meetings with the anesthesiologist). She was in surgery for 8 full hours having a mini face lift and brachioplasty (fancy doctor word for an arm-lift, why say arm-lift when you can sound way smarter by using a word with the suffix -plasty?). The surgeries went well and by Sunday afternoon we were back in an auto bumping our way back home (though bumping gently thanks to a very thoughtful auto driver). Two days later we were back out having a consultation with an eye surgeon to discuss LASIK and lens replacement. Since then we have been ordering new eyeglasses, getting cheap prescriptions and generally rebuilding my Mom. Mom is recovering well and has handled all of this like a pro but I am sure she is ready to get back home and have a vacation from her "vacation". We have had a little time to enjoy ourselves, we went out this week and spent a day shopping and went out to lunch but unfortunately the time has passed so quickly that there hasn't been time for much else. However, like I said her main reason for visiting was medical and dental, and I am very pleased that we managed to get that all taken care of in just the space of under three weeks.

Okay, the million dollar question. Why? For the readers of this blog from the US this question probably doesn't need to be addressed but for any international readers or any Americans who happen to live under a rock or have so much money that medical care isn't a financial worry, let me lay it out as briefly as I can. And please forgive me, this isn't the first time that I have talked about the prohibitive cost of medical care in the US before. Okay, let's begin with the dental treatment, I already mentioned the procedures that were done, and let me also mention that they were performed in probably one of the nicest and most expensive clinics in Bangalore. The total cost in dollars for all of the procedures that I mentioned was around $750, I think that a conservative estimate for the same treatment in the US would be $3000. Even though Mom's insurance would pay 50% of these treatments, she still saved $750. Okay, now for the surgeries, in the US the fact-lift would run anywhere from $3500-$6500 and the brachioplasty would be anywhere from $4000-6500. Mom paid $3000 here in Bangalore for both together and since insurance companies in the US won't cover these "cosmetic" procedures at all meaning that she would be responsible for footing the entire bill she saved at least another $4500. Her complete eye exam and consultation with the eye surgeon, $20. That would probably run you $200 in the States. For her eyeglasses she paid around $150 here in India for the best lenses that money can buy and saved around another $300. We stopped at the pharmacy yesterday and picked up some prescriptions that she and Dad take for high cholesterol, restless leg, acid reflux, etc. and saved another $350 on a 3 month supply of these meds (that is taking into account the 80% that insurance pays for the prescriptions, if they didn't have insurance covering this portion of their drugs they could save around $1650). Grand total saved by coming to India, over $6000 (this is a conservative estimate). Considering the cost of her ticket was around $1700 I think that it was a good decision for her to come here. Plus, she got the opportunity to visit with us and have an opportunity to travel abroad and see how the world is outside of the Quad Cities. It has been a crazy two and a half weeks but it has been great to have Mom around and I think that she is generally pleased at how it all turned out. In fact, she is making plans to continue the overhaul in January so I guess it wasn't so bad. Her visit is nearly up which means that it is only a few more days before we are homeward bound for a three week holiday in the US, and after the craziness of the last couple of weeks, we could sure use a holiday!

Where in the world is Zelma Ziegenhorn?

I remember when I was in college and even for years after I had graduated from college, after wrapping up a trip to visit my parents they would always ask me to give them a call when I arrived back home, just to let them know that I arrived safely.  I thought that they were being silly, didn't they realize that I am an adult and that they don't need to worry about me, it's just a three hour drive, no big deal. And because I thought that they were overreacting and being so silly, I usually forgot to make that call.  I am a horrible daughter.

Now I think that I am beginning to know how they felt, and I am sure how they probably still feel to this day.  My mom (Zelma, the one from the title) is currently somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean on her way to visit us here in Bangalore and I am terrified.  I sat bolt upright in bed this morning at 5 AM and since then I have been  continuously trying to calculate the time differences between India and the US, then India and London (where she has a connection) and stressing all the while hoping that everything is going well for her.  I know logically that she is a grown woman who managed to raise 8 kids and that she is no dummy, she'll be just fine, I should relax.  But my heart is shouting that I should be with her to help, she hasn't travelled often and she has never left the US, let alone gone half-way around the world and I just can't convince myself to stop worrying.  I have spent most of the day near my computer so that I can check e-mails and monitor her flight progress, I know that the plane took off from Chicago eleven minutes late and that it is supposed to land in twenty six minutes, just six minutes late.  I have calculated that she will have 3 hours and 44 minutes to make her way to the new terminal in London, Terminal 5, the terminal that had its disastrous opening in March.  I then stress for a few minutes wondering if they have all of the kinks worked out and will she make it to the terminal okay.

Seven minutes until she lands now (sorry, I had to run off and do some work).  Have I prepared her for immigration and customs in Bangalore sufficiently?  I forgot to go through that with her and had to write an e-mail the day before she left trying to detail the process, did I forget something?  But why am I so worried, she is a smart lady who can figure these things out on her own.  Now I understand, you worry because you are powerless, you have tried to inform and give all of the help that you can and then you have to just trust that everything will work out, that it will all be fine in the end and that all of the worrying was for nothing.  But you worry really because you love.  Can you love someone and not worry about their safety, their happiness, their well-being, even when it is out of your control?  I don't see how, and I have no idea how my parents have managed to keep sane when they have 8 kids and now 7 grandkids to worry about.

Yay, she's landed safely in London (at least according to British Airway's web-site and assuming that she made it on the plane in Chicago to begin with, oh God, now I have something else to stress about)!!!  Onto Terminal 5 Mom, Bangalore dead ahead!

What's in a name?

Hi all. I noticed a few weeks ago that Blogger has this cool new function that allow users to transliterate in several Indian languages. Transliteration is not the same as translation, but what it means is rather that you can type something phonetically in English script and the Roman characters are substituted with characters from some other language (say Hindi for instance) that have the same sound (or at least as close an approximation as possible). But again, it isn't a translation. For example the name of one of our cats is Chaya which is the Hindi word for shade (actually the proper spelling is probably something more like Chhaaya but that seems like WAY too many double letters for my taste). So transliteration of shade is शेड while transliteration of Chhaaya, the translation of shade, is छाया. Pretty cool, huh?

I am not sure if I have mentioned much before about the Indian languages on this blog so here is a quick primer. The Constitution of India recognises 22 languages, spoken in different parts the country, namely Assamese, Bengali, Bodo, Dogri, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Maithili, Malayalam, Santali, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Santhali, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu. Just to give you a bit of context, India only has 28 states (and 7 territories) so that breaks down to just about one language per state (give or take). Hindi is recognized as the official language of the central government but in some states in the south of India (most notably Tamil Nadu) Hindi is not taught in schools and thus a large number of South Indians do not speak Hindi but instead speak the local language. In Karnataka, the state in which Bangalore is situated, most regular folks speak the local language, Kannada and often maybe just a few words of Hindi and probably even more words in English. I feel in the South you are better off knowing English than Hindi if you want to communicate with the locals.

There are a couple of points that resonate with me when considering the effects of having so many languages in a single country. The first is that I am utterly amazed at and in awe of the capacity for language among the Indians. I have yet to meet an Indian who is not at least bilingual. And I mean truly bilingual, perfectly fluent in at least two languages. This consistently makes me feel like a total idiot, I luckily can manage English pretty well and I can put together a bit of Spanish from my four years that I had in high school (but that was between 18-14 years ago, my god, is that right? Yikes!). The truly humbling thing though is that for many, many people here two languages is nothing. A girl in my lab speaks English, Hindi, Tamil, Oriya and Malayalam all fluently and if memory serves she can manage pretty well in several of others (hey Gayatri!). The thing that is truly impressive about this is that these languages are all unrelated with different alphabets and no actual similarity to one another so it is not like learning one helps you to learn any of the others. The second point that I think is worth mentioning in regards to the many languages of India is not so positive and has to do with the inability of people from the same country to communicate with one another. This is something that we, as Americans, take for granted. Certainly there is a population of non-English speakers in the US but it is very small (I can't find any numbers that I trust to support this, everything that I find on the web is from crazies who want to "defend and protect English" as if there is some war on English. Hello dummies, English isn't in danger, it is actually endangering thousands of indigenous languages because like an invasive species it moves into communities and takes over, strangling the native languages, just ask the Native Americans and the Inuits (Eskimos) to name a few). Sorry tangent, couldn't help myself. Give me a break, it's 5 in the morning and I can't sleep so I should be given a bit of latitude I think. Anyway, the point that I was trying to make before I got distracted was that it is almost impossible for me to image not being able to communicate with someone from say, Colorado because we speak different languages. Even worse, since I grew up on the Illinois/Iowa border, would I not be able to understand the Iowegians or have to learn their language in order to communicate with them? Okay, in fairness I do have a hard time communicating with and understanding the Iowegians as it is, after all, they are from IOWA (sorry Mom and the Kreinbrings, couldn't help myself). A friend of mine from work visited the US just about two years ago (hi Neha). She is from the North of India and speaks Hindi and English and has been transplanted here in Bangalore for the past several years while in grad school. She told me the story of her visit to the US and how it struck her that while she was there, maybe for the first time in her life, she could understand ALL of the conversations that were going on around her because they were all in English. She had to leave her country to understand and be understood by everyone. Very strange. Anyway, I thought that I would leave you with a little bit of transliteration in some of the Indian languages so you can at least get a look at the differences. Enjoy!

Hindi
Suzi सूजी
Eric एरिक
Kannada
Suzi ಸೂಜಿ
Eric ಎರಿಕ್
Tamil
Suzi சுசி
Eric ஏறிக்
Malayalam
Suzi സുജി
Eric എറിക്

Monsoon!

The monsoon rains are a welcome event after the summer that we have had. I have already complained enough about April and was able to keep my mouth shut through all of May for fear that you all would get sick of my whining (though the temps were above 90 F 21 days of the month) but for the last two weeks, the rains have come and brought with them mild days and cool nights. When I say the the rains have come for the last two weeks I should clarify and explain that they have come every single day for the past two weeks. You can almost set your watch to them, the mornings are cool and clear, around lunchtime the sky is a bright blue with a few puffy white clouds, but in the late afternoon dark clouds chase away the puffy ones and the skies open up. According to the weathermen here the monsoon officially began on June 1, though how they arrive at this date is beyond me. I don't have a lot of faith in meteorologists so I don't even bother to try to understand how they do their predictions, etc. I figure that it is probably equivalent to reading tea leaves or something of the sort...

Anyway, back to the monsoon. I am usually pretty lucky that I don't often get stuck walking in the rain, it often wraps up before I leave work in the early evening or holds off until I get home from the gym a couple of hours later. I am not always so lucky though and walking in the rain isn't exactly for the faint of heart. In fact, walking here at all is a fairly dangerous and nerve-wracking activity and the addition of flooded streets, overflowing sewers, drivers aiming to drench you with the nearest mud-puddle and pelting rain just adds to the excitement. I have to say though, I never experienced such a sense of accomplishment at just getting home as I have here in India. It is like being on American Gladiators each and every night except that instead of facing 'roided up opponents you instead have to take on vehicles, animals, the elements, the crumbling infrastructure, and the Travelator equivalent, the locals. All of this makes Helga look like a sissy, and if you can make your way down and across the streets every night, you are truly a champion. Some days I make it, and other days I have to admit that I suffer the agony of defeat. I have been hit by at least 2 motorcycles (okay, really just bumped, but still), I am accosted by strangers wanting either money, to talk, or god knows what, I have stubbed my toe so badly that it poured blood, I have tripped more times than imaginable, dodged more autorickshaws than I can stand and a few weeks ago I fell into a ditch while trying to side-step a mud-puddle. Luckily I landed on my feet but it was pretty embarrassing crawling out nonetheless.

On Saturday evening we experienced probably the most impressive rain shower that I have ever seen. I guess a shower isn't really an appropriate term, more like rain torrent. It was crazy and the rain came down in a way that I have never experienced. I was sure that the water was going to flood into our apartment because it just couldn't drain off of our balcony fast enough (we even have 2 drains). Lucky for us though, no flooding, just a power outage from around 5:30 PM until 9:30 PM. Despite the new set of problems brought on by the arrival of the monsoon, I will take it over the long hot days of summer anytime!

Paranoia

I just thought that I would include an addendum to my last post as it has kicked up a fair number of paranoid delusions among former students in the GH lab who are now afraid that the senior members felt similar disgust and disappointment toward them (ahem, Shantala and Rashmi). Take it easy you guys, if we thought you were idiots or didn't like you believe me, you would know it.