Brunch

This morning I enjoyed a lovely brunch with some of the ladies of the hospital.

There is a Swiss couple here, both doctors, who are visiting for a couple of months with their two sons, ages 3 years and 18 months.  (The kids seem immune to culture shock and appear to feel right at home.  It's amazing.)  The husband and wife alternate days working in the hospital while the other stays home and watches the children.  The guest house where they are staying has a little garden in front, so when the Medical Director’s wife offered to make us all brunch, their garden seemed like the perfect spot.  Katie and I went over early to help Goli, the Swiss woman, bring a coffee table and chairs out into the sun, then the Director's wife, a doctor at the hospital herself, brought over pancakes made from scratch with honey.  Another doctor's wife was there, and she brought a south Indian dish called idli, which is a bread-type thing made out of rice and lentils and dipped in tomato chutney.  So yummy.  Fruit salad and Western coffee rounded out the meal.  The weather was perfect, sunny and warm.  The two Indian women brought their children, too, and all the kids, Indian and Swiss alike, played together on a blanket in the shade of a big tree.  Another woman we all knew happened to walk by, so she stopped to sit and chat and eat for a while.  It was really lovely.

Today is the first day of the World Cup of cricket.  It goes from now until the beginning of April, I think, and it's a huge deal here.  I walked up to Vikas Nagar to do some shopping this afternoon, and every shopkeeper had the game playing on his television.  The hospital is even having its own cricket tournament among the men on staff.  I feel like someone should tell them about baseball.