welcome to india

Crossing the border from Nepal to India went like this. The Nepali visa officers greeted us with smiles and said it was a shame that we had to leave so soon. Then we crossed over to India and the Indian visa officer wasn't there to stamp our passports. We waited for him for twenty minutes and when he finally arrived to do his job he was drunk. Welcome back!!

Our first move was up to the beautiful state of Sikkim, which was actually an independent kingdom until 1975 when it merged with India. Although they enjoy Indian statehood, ask any of the Sikkemese people and they will tell you that they don't consider themselves Indian at all. Judging by the special tourist permit that you need to get to enter the state, their government has taken special measures to let tourists know that.

Unfortunately, my first few hours in Gangtok, the provincial capital of Sikkim, were panicked. Jack, my travel buddy, got some serious food poisoning that had him in and out of consciousness. So we went to the emergency room - what a trip! It was not so dirty that you had to worry whether or not the needles were clean. BUT they didn't even have the time to diagnose him before they shot him up with painkillers. I was pretty nervous the whole time and so I was looking up all these mysterious medicines on my phone to see what they were. One of them was a painkiller intended for the digestive system - good. But intended to be used on horses - BAD. Medical waste out in the open, no bandaids. I mean, it wasn't horrible but when the nurse gave him a shot and asked me to rub it (with my dirty hands) my hyper-sterile, Western nature cringed.

But it is always a lesson. What was interesting about the visit to the hospital was that the service was free - but the drugs were not. Right across the street from the hospital was the pharmacy where the patients' chaperons are meant to go buy the prescriptions and walk them back to hospital. In other words, if you could not afford the medicine, it seemed like all the nurses could do was put you on a drip and let you stay on a cot, or on the floor, until you felt better. And judging by the patronage of the emergency room, there were plenty of people camping out just in case they went into critical condition.