Jaipur
We have been super lazy here in Jaipur. Sean is still not feeling well so while he was trying to sleep I have spent my time reading, blogging, contemplating my future, and drinking chai.
Chai has become a favorite of mine since we have been in India, it is much better than any chai I have had at home. The interaction between me and the person I am ordering with is usually the same, I say “I would like a cup of chai” they say “Indian tea?” but when they say it there is a look of suprise, almost as if they are shocked I would order it. Coffee, which is normally my breakfast and afternoon snack at home isnt quite the same here. India just isnt the same coffee culture as home. One morning while we were in Mumbai I thought it would be nice to go and get Sean a fancy coffee or what most people call a latte 
So at around 9:00am I headed to the coffee shop to find that it was not open yet. I was shocked, it wasnt like I was there at 5:30 in the morning. Needless to say I have embraced the drink of choice for many and will save my early morning coffee drinking for when I get home.
Anyways… back to Jaipur. There really isnt anything super to write about considering we have spent the two days here in our hotel with a couple of outings for food. As with the rest in Udaipur we have needed this time to relax.
On another tangent… I had to go to a chemist to pick up a medicine, I will spare the details of what it was for but the price of the medicine is the story. At home to get a prescription you first have to visit the doctor where if you are lucky enough to have insurance is going to cost you probably a $25 copay. Then you have to go to the pharmacy where you might have to shell our another $20 for the medicine. In India you don’t need a prescription so right there you have cut out a doctor’s visit. Keeping all of this in mind, when I went to get the medicine I brought 1000 rupees ($15) to get it hoping that was enough. When the chemist told me that each pill was 850 I was shocked. That seems like a lot for 1 pill. Turns out there was a decimal point making it 8.5 rupees, again I was shocked. That is so cheap, leading me to get 5 pills when I only needed 1. It was at this point I understood why senior citizens go to canada for cheap drugs. For the one pill it cost me about 25 cents where the same pill in the US would have been $50. Part of me wanted to go back to the pharmacy and buy a dozen, but I would hate to be caught by customs thinking I was smuggling in drugs.
Well that was about as exciting as our time in Jaipur has been. We are headed to Delhi tomorrow for a couple days before flying to New York City. We originally were going to shorten our time since the bombings there this weekend but decided to still spend 2 days there and hope there arent anymore bombings. I am still surprised that I didnt get frantic emails from my family after the bombings. It is definetly something I expected in my inbox the following morning
Hopefully we get out a little in Delhi and see something since we have been so lazy the last few days.
Filed under: Uncategorized on September 16th, 2008
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