First 48 hours in Chennai ...

I can hardly believe I've only been in India for 48 hours ... I've already crouched in the back of 15 swerving rickshaws, spent 5 hours visiting with doctors and mothers of jaundiced babies, prayed for a .9kg pre-term infant lying tangled in life support tubes and its own urine, eaten enough masala for a lifetime, and tried 4 unknown foods from street vendors.

Today we visited Pondy Bazaar, an intensely crowded outdoor market offering stands of everything from gorgeous exotic fruits, vibrant silk sarees, and plastic buckets for beach go-ers. Chennai is famous for its silks, and it's easy to see why; there are hundreds of stores and stalls with brightly stacked wraps of fabric. Some come ready as sarees, others are straight fabric. All are insanely inexpensive. I bought a gorgeous silk scarf for 110 rupees, or about $2.20. One can live quite well here if they don't mind the trash, the heat, and the traffic ...

We visited a temple, where you leave your shoes outside in the "Free Shoe" zone and walk barefoot on orange carpet to kneel in front of the temple's Krishna. Boys on one side of the temple, girls on the other. Orange-clad monks would come in frequently to kneel and bow their heads to the ground, then leave silently barefoot.

For dinner tonight, we found an American restaurant run by an expat from Newport Beach. He was featuring a "4th of July buffet", which offered Indian-spiced burgers, white chicken "hot dogs" floating in milky water, and overcooked corn on the cob. Not quite like the farmer's pick in Skaneateles. But we enjoyed the red, white, and blue cupcakes, and reminisced about our favorite 4th of July's.

Tomorrow we're hoping to visit a few hospitals, which will be both inspiring and disheartening. There is so much to be improved upon; improving jaundice diagnostics and treatment seems like a mere drop in the bucket ...