February 14, 2024

No Longer Sick!!

It is 6:14 pm Tuesday, February 13th, 2024. It is 81 degrees Fahrenheit, mostly clear skies, and I am in Bangalore, India writing yet again from a UTC couch.

Anyways, after being sick all of last week, I was able to finally leave the house for a substantial time without passing out and enjoy the weekend. In an attempt to make up for lost time, I joined the Bangalore bird watching club in the botanical gardens, deliriously wandered around the mall looking for tweezers that apparently no shop sells, and bowled a score so high it put my fellow GCIL students to shame.

Additionally, with my appetite back, a big highlight of these last few days has been food. Saturday morning I ate my weight in American breakfast foods after accidentally ordering two orders of french toast. I went to three bakeries: one where Audrey got a box of cookies so full it could sustain us through the end of the program, another where I ate so many pastries and cupcakes I was close to relapsing from 3 days clean of vomiting, and the last where I went more conservative and just got one slice of the triple deluxe chocolate ganache truffle cake.

In terms of the actual project we’re supposed to be doing here, Swasti finally has a solid idea on what we’re going to do, and I have a growing confidence in my team’s dynamic and ideas for the grand challenge. Initially, I was unsure how I felt about working on a public health project as my environmental engineering capstone, but it has been really cool to learn so much about the health field and interact with so many experts. Once I finish writing this, I will continue planning my future travels after the program ends. A part of me finds it hard to comprehend this ever really ending. But who knows, maybe the fortune teller was right, and I will get in a freak rickshaw accident and die here; then I’ll never have to leave!

By Phoebe