Essais de Vie

Carnet de Voyage: Inde, 4ème partie

Posted by Frenya Thu, 27 Jul 2006 23:51:00 GMT

July 17th, 1st day at work.

The night was not so peaceful but I nevertheless ended up sleeping a bit. Breakfast was yummy… typical south indian food. The day went on. A long meeting in the morning with everybody involved in the study, then I went on delivering the study medicines and discovered that this task apparently completely brainless was not because a lot of details were not thought through… Happy me since I had not idea a week ago that I would be responsible for that! Anyhow, eventually things went fine. We had lunch at the guest house and dinner downtown, at the Supreme hotel’s rooftop restaurant with view of the towers of the Meenakshi temple.

The clash of societies:

The clash of the different levels of society is amazing around the guest house in Madurai. The house is comfortable, the rooms are simple but air-conditioned and we each have our own “occidental” bathroom. On the other side of the street though, there is a slum, animals hang out on the sidewalk, around the trash (which is everywhere!), kids follow you and offer you to take their pictures - apparently simply because they like to see themselves on pictures! People have roofs over their heads but I do not think these roofs would resist strong winds. In Chennai, the clash is even stronger… logical since it is a larger city… there are very rich people and there are people with nothing else than just a little rug used as mattress to sleep on the sidewalk every night. Nevertheless, from what I could see in Madurai, people are happy. They play music and organize expensive festivals regularly.