Off To A Shaky Start

Posted on March 5, 2015 // 6 Comments

We have now officially moved to Pondicherry, India. Here’s how it went down

I knew 2015 was going to be a busy year, but this is getting crazy. Over Christmas and New Year’s Eve, Anna and myself went to Hoi An, Vietnam with some friends of ours, however, they left early and we continued up to Hanoi before returning to Singapore. At the beginning of February, I quit my job because I was the best man at a friend’s wedding in Canberra, Australia and my mother’s 60th birthday was in my hometown of Traralgon two weeks later, plus we wanted to see friends in Melbourne in between. We returned to Singapore on the 22nd of February and Anna flew out to a conference in Arizona, USA on the 23rd. She returned to Singapore on the 1st of March and then we flew to Pondicherry, India at about 9:00am on the morning of the 2nd. I was excited! Sure, I love living in Singapore, but not a whole lot happens there. It’s essentially the Coke Zero of Asia so after my seven years in ‘The Lion City,’ how could I not be excited about moving to several countries in the space of 15 months, the first of which is a place where, when you open the newspaper on your first day, you are confronted with headlines such as these?

A 90 year-old woman went outside for a leak. Seriously.

It tried to give birth on a bunch of thorns

Do we really need to go into this?

There was only one small problem; when I am stressed, dehydrated, or lacking sleep, I’m prone to epileptic seizures and they now usually only occur when I’m sleeping. I wasn’t stressed or dehydrated, but I hadn’t had a whole lot of sleep over the previous few days so when I finally had a nap on the plane I apparently was the centre of attention for a short period of time once again. In fact, Anna was afraid they were going to make an emergency landing! Watching someone have a seizure is pretty scary, I’m sure, but it’s probably even worse when that person is around 200cm (6’7″) or so, 100+ kg (220+ lb), and is in a crowded, confined space travelling at the speed of sound 10km above the earth’s surface! Anna woke me up to tell me I had had a seizure, which to me was a surprise as I hadn’t had any of the warning signs that I typically experience, such as hallucinating smells or having deja vu. The guy across the aisle just looked at me like I had been checking out his wife. After a while I began to realise what had happened; I was starting to develop a headache, had bitten my tongue quite badly, and was drooling. The three hour drive from Chennai to Pondicherry in obscene Indian traffic was hell, I felt every bump, swerve and near-miss in my skull. We arrived at our resort at about 2:00pm, but most of the Monday and Tuesday are a blur, however, I did get out and do a lot of walking and this is a really beautiful place.

Pondicherry was controlled by the French for 280 years until 1954. There are still a fair few French people here, but most of them are middle-aged or older, not a whole lot of young whippersnappers like myself getting about. I’ve been to India before, Mumbai and Goa to be precise, and Pondicherry is like a busier Goa; It’s on the coast, nice and relaxed, a few smelly hippies with their shitlocks and hacky sacks, but with less of the stress, poverty, chaos, and filth of Mumbai. Sure, it’s there, but nowhere near as bad. Other things I’ve noticed in the couple of days that we’ve been here:

There is a lot less beach cricket being played than I expected. Actually, none. Maybe because the sea’s too dangerous.
There are mosquitoes EVERYWHERE!
There are crows EVERYWHERE, too! Anna is an ornithophobe, because she believes “they peck your eyes out”. She is also an eye surgeon who has never once treated a single person who has had their eyes pecked out by a bird.
Cars, motorbikes, and scooters honk their horns for no apparent reason.
The French here can be extremely rude and arrogant once they realise you aren’t French. I had one woman who ran a restaurant that, whenever I asked what something written in French on the menu meant, kept asking me what I thought it said, rather than just telling me. The Indians, on the other hand, are so nice. I went to an art exhibition and two women working there who were really shy and probably in their 40’s were curious about the tattoo on my leg. One plucked up the courage to call out to me and asked if it was real, the other blushed and whined, “No, it’s his socks!”. Also, last night we had a waiter from our restaurant run several blocks through back streets in the dark to find us because Anna had forgotten her credit card.
Pretty much every Indian male here has a moustache. As soon as their body is ready, they grow one. I’m going to grow one again, just like I did when we went to Greece back in October of 2010. I just figured all Greek people had moustaches so I grew one too and I thought it looked pretty awesome, but Anna just thought I looked like a paedophile:

Sorry, ladies, I’m taken

Anna and myself were supposed to be heading back to Singapore on Friday for a friend’s wedding and returning on Monday morning, but now I won’t be making the trip because we don’t want a repeat of the other day. Instead, I’ll just find a bar to kick back in and do my usual weekend thing. We haven’t checked out much of the nightlife besides restaurants, because Anna has had to get up early for work and continue to do a lot more when she returns home. Which brings me to Anna and the hospital:

Anna and Dr. Jap, beachside in front of a statue of Mahatma Gandhi.

Tuesday night for us was spent shopping for pants for her to wear under dresses, because Anna and her fellow Singaporean colleague, Dr. Aliza Jap, were told to cover up down to the ankle.
Every morning when Anna and her colleagues are trying to perform surgery, their eyes water and sting for about half an hour and they can’t see, as the operating theatre is sprayed with formalin for mosquitoes. Besides that and the lack of toilet paper, they said the hospital is excellent, impeccably clean.
In Singapore, while you are training you use pig’s eyes. In India they use cadaverous eyes. There should never be a shortage; there is a sign on the beach that says that one person on a scooter or motorbike was killed roughly every five minutes in 2012.