Fun With Zippy

Reports of my incarceration are greatly exaggerated.

I’m a free Lobster.

I’m still in India and I can take care of myself.

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I am just trapped.  Help!

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My host scanman sometimes takes me along for the ride when he goes out on the roads of Salem.

scanman’s got a nice car…

… but it’s built funny though. The driver’s seat is on the wrong side of the car…

…and the Indians drive on the wrong side of the road!!

Some of the roads in Salem are dangerous, with potholes, under repair with piles of stones and of course crazy traffic…

Most cars have some sort of religious icon in them. Probably to safeguard the people on these dangerous roads. scanman has a neat statue of the elephant-headed Hindu god Ganesha in his car…

I was curious about these yellow cab like three-wheeled vehicles with what looked like tent roofs,

scanman told me they are autorickshaws, called auto(s) and are found all over the place. They are the most common form of taxi available. I got to sit in one…

the friendly auto-driver even let me sit in his seat and experience the driver’s-eye view…

I saw a lot of bikes and scooters. Dr.P has one that she rides to work on…

Personally, I feel a lot more comfortable in a bicycle basket

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Hello again everyone. Like I wrote in my last post, I’m going to tell you about all the fun that I had with scanman’s daughter Aathi in Salem. 

Aathi is 8-years-old and is studying in third grade, they call it third standard here in India. She talks a mixture of Tamil and English at home. She lives with her parents in an apartment block, a condominium to us Americans. The bad thing is there’s only one other kid in the entire condo, Saakshi, a 6-year-old girl who lives one floor above Aathi and is in her second year of kindergarten (they have two years of kindergarten here, lower and upper KG). Saakshi speaks a mixture of Gujarati and English at home.

Aathi has a bicycle that she rides in the ground floor parking area of the condo or in one of the quieter roads in the neighborhood when her mother Dr.P goes along in her bicycle. 

Aathi lets me ride in the basket in front..

I actually spent quite a lot of time being carried around in that basket

Aathi reads a lot of comics. Here’s one about one of the ancient Tamils kings, Raja Raja Chola who ruled the land a thousand years ago (between 985 and 1014 AD).

I was happy to see the sea and ships. Tamil Nadu has a long coastline and Aathi tells me that some of the Tamil kings sailed across oceans to conquer nearby countries like Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Indonesia.

Aathi likes dolls. She took me to a toy store near her house…

Aathi has a kiddie doctor Barbie with a clinic, an examining table, stethoscope, syringes, tape measures and other cool stuff. Here I am playing with Aathi, her little cousin Samyu and her friend Saakshi…

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Hello everyone, I know many of you, especially Dr.Rob, have been worried that I’ve been very quiet for a while now.

I’ve been in India as scanman’s guest for three weeks now. What with being in a completely new country with a very different culture to the one that I was used to in the USA, it’s been a very busy time for me. I just got the time to sit down and write something to keep all my friends updated about what I’ve been doing.

Some of you may have seen the scanman’s blog posts about my arrival in India. Doesn’t matter if you haven’t seen them. I’ll tell you what happened.

You all know that I went to the Bahamas with Gruntdoc (check out the cool comic book that he created about my visit to the Bahamas). It was while I was there that I decided I wanted to visit scanman in India next. Gruntdoc and Dr.Rob agreed to send me to India from the Bahamas. But we weren’t able to get air plane tickets directly from the Bahamas to India. So I went back to Texas with Gruntdoc and caught a plane from Dallas to Bangalore, which is the nearest city with an international airport from scanman’s place, Salem.

It was long flight. Nearly 21 hours to cover the 9746 air miles. I watched movies and slept most of the time. I was sore by the time I got off the plane. The worst part about the journey wasn’t even the duration, it was the fact that I wasn’t allowed to take along all of my luggage. The airline people said my stuff was way beyond the maximum luggage weight allowed. So I had to leave some of the heavy stuff including my orange tent behind in Texas (I hope Gruntdoc takes good care of them).

scanman sent a car to pick me up at the Bangalore airport. We travelled by road to Salem, which is about 100 miles southwest.

I got a very warm welcome at scanman’s house and I quickly became friends with his daughter A. A helped me to unpack my stuff …

… and she introduced me to Zappy, who’s a little orange crab. The little guy, who is probably a very distant cousin, is great fun. I showed Zappy and A my blog and told them all about the wonderful places that I’ve been to and the great people that I’ve met.

I was jet-lagged and tired so A made a bed for me and let Zappy sleepover with me. She also got two of her dolls to tell us some bedtime stories.

Zappy nodded off soon after A left us, but I couldn’t go to sleep. I guess I was a little nervous in a strange new place among strange people, talking a strange language. And I was a bit homesick. scanman and his wife Dr.P, came by and chatted with me for a while till I got too sleepy to listen.

The next day, scanman took me to his hospital to show me what he did. He’s a radiologist, a doctor who does x-rays and scans on people to try and find out if anything is wrong with them. It was interesting to see the different xray and scan machines…

…but I got bored just sitting around seeing him look at films and the scan monitor. Noticing that I was bored, scanman asked me if I wanted to report a few CAT scans. He gave me a really big book to read up a bit about scans …

There was no way I was going to read up all of this stuff. After I’d flipped through the pages for a while, scanman allowed me to look at some CAT scans on his workstation…

It was cool for a while but a bit boring for a lobster to do. So when he told me he had to go to the NICU to do some ultrasound scans, I went along with him ’cause as everyone knows, I love kids. Even the teeny tiny ones that are in the NICU. The nurses at the NICU are pretty strict about not allowing non-medical people into the NICU, but they made a special allowance for me after scanman told them about all my famous medical blogger friends

They didn’t let me go near any baby in the NICU though. I just stayed on the  scanner, which looked only a bit bigger than a laptop computer and was mounted on a trolley…

scanman is very excited about his new CAT scanner, which can do scans of the heart really fast. He kept talking about it. But when he tried to get me to read another big book…

…this one on the diseases of the heart, I put my feet and claws down and told him I wasn’t interested. I wanted to have some fun, not work!!

So he left me with A the next day.

More about my adventures with A and her friends in the next post…

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