Made it to Vellore!

Hello,
I am now posting from the CMC campus computer lab. I've actually only been in India 9 1/2hrs now, and am way way behind on sleep, but I did make it and so did my bags. Qatar Air rocks, it was a thoroughly enjoyable experience with them, and I highly reccomend them. Not able to post pics at present, but am working on it.

I am staying at the Modale International Hostel here on campus. While the city of Vellore is without a doubt much more crowded and crazy than I could possibly have imagined, and the hospital itself is in the middle of it, the med school campus is a ways down the road, and very serene. Dinesh was supposedly staying with me in the hostel, but I have heard that he changed his mind. Oh well. Its cheap, and convenient, so I'm happy. No a/c, but I lived several summers in Texas without it, so no big deal. Fans are my friends. Apparently I'm the only one of my classmates staying on-campus. They are soft. Dependent on a/c. (of course, I know I'll be begging them to let me cool down in their rooms in a week or two).

I ate at the campus canteen this AM, payed r24 for some sort of egg dish and tea. for r38.8=$1, thats a pretty good deal. They apparently have homemade milkshakes. We will see about that, oh yes we will.

I'm signed up for the CHAD rotation to start tomorrow. Thats the community health and development rotation that everony talks about. Looking forward to it.

Will try to get into town this afternoon to get cell phone charged up, maybe find internet cafe and get some pics up. I hope to one day document the insane ride through town that I saw at 8:30AM today. Actually, it began the moment I got into the cab in Chennai, and just escalated from there. Along the way I stopped off for some tea with my cabdriver at a roadside stand. It was a very entertaining ride, with destitute villages sandiwiched between giant mega-factories from Nokia, Hyundai, Motorola, Dell, and more. Naked people relieving themselves on highway medians. Rice paddies being picked by hand, ornate & colorful temples every few miles, beautiful mountains looming in the distance, and the near ever-present smell of something unspecified burning....and then I got to Vellore for real. Seriously. If this is what it's like every day, then they probably need several trauma centers here. It is chaos. A gadgillion bikes, mopeds, rickshaws, cars, trucks, tankers, ox-carts, all going head-on into each other at high speed without the slightest indication that such a thing a a traffic law exists. Add to that cows standing stock still in the middle of the road causing everyone to swerve out of the way at the last second, plus dogs darting in and out of traffic, and pedestrians who seem completely indifferent to the death bearing down on them at high speed, and you have what appears to be the average morning commute around here.

Will give more info, possibly with pic and/or video goodness later tonight (fingers crossed).

This country is already quite entertaining.
Stay tuned for more info than you probably will even bother to read.