Ev Star

As my title suggests, the last few days have been busy!!

On Tuesday and Wednesday we did volunteer work with Smita’s eldest brother.  He started an NGO that has two branches to it.  He first started with doing blood drives to get blood for blood banks in Mumbai.  It is kind of crazy as there are 55 bloodbanks in the city and now he is pretty much the central agent for them all.  He runs blood drives at colleges and different businesses and then distributes the blood to the blood banks that need it.  The other side of his NGO deals with a blood disorder called thalassaemia.  I’d never heard of it before, but it afflicts a lot of Indian people.  The problem is that a lot of people are thalassaemia minors and don’t know it, and if two parents are thalassaemia minors their kid might be a thalassaemia major which causes huge problems.  The kid will need a blood transfusion every 15 days for the rest of their lives as well as have an injection every night that lasts 8-10 hours to remove excess iron from the blood.  So, what Vinay (smita’s brother) does is he goes to colleges and gives a lecture on thalassaemia and then the next day he goes back with a group of nurses and does a testing camp where the students can be tested for free (normally it would cost about 400 rupees).  The first day Mad and I went and listened to his lecture and then the day after we helped out with the testing camp.  Mad was in charge of writing down the students’ names and phone numbers and so on, and I numbered the bottles and wrote the students’ names on them.  It proved to be a bit difficult as we are not familiar with Indian names.  Even worse, when the students spelled them out for us it was difficult to understand what letters they were saying.  P, B, D and so on all sound kind of similar especially when you are not used to the accent!  Anyway, we made it through and just over 500 kids got tested which was great.  After that, Vinay, 2 of his co-workers (they kind of joked that they used to volunteer with Vinay during highschool because they got free food at the various colleges but now they have made it their profession!!) and Vinay’s driver decided that instead of taking us straight back to the apartment that we’d take a little trip to downtown Mumbai (it’s at least and hour or so away).  We had never been into downtown yet so it was lots of fun.  Especially because we we had 4 middle aged Indian men as tour guides.  They were hilarious!  We went to the gateway of India and then drove around the city a bit looking at the various sites.  They then decided it would be a good idea to go out for beers.  All in all it was a great time!

Yesterday, Thursday, we went to a Bollywood movie soundtrack release party.  The whole thing was kind of ridiculous but definitely an experience.  In preparation we had gone out shopping with Smita and Minti and bought fancy salwar kameez outfits, bangles and sandals (i ended up with man sandals that i swear are made from camel hide…i guess indian girls dont have size 11 feet).  So on Thursday morning Mad and I ironed our outfits, painted our toenails, put on make up and all that sort of stuff.  Then at about 10 30am (weirdly for us, this thing was a morning event) the driver drove us to a hospital where we were to meet a surgeon and a politician (the politician being a cousin of Smita’s and the surgeon being his friend).  It turns out the surgeon is the head of the neurosurgery department and his wife the head of the gynecology department…and he is a bit of a nut.  In any case, off we drove with the surgeon (who is called “doc”) and the politician cousin (his name is krishna) to Film City.  Once we arrived in Film City we could see sets being built and general film stuff which of course got Mad all excited.  Our actual destination was a place called Whistling Woods International Limited (i’m still not entirely sure what the place is, but apparently at least part of it is an international film school).  In any case we arrived and followed Doc around.  He told us he was the trustee of the place and that we could do anything we wanted.  We soon learned that he meant it when he ushered us into some private elevator against the protests of the front staff.  They were like “excuse me sir, that elevator is not for guests”.  Doc loudly replied, ”I am not a guest!” and up we rode…to the private office of the film director of the film for the launch party we were at.  Apparently Doc wanted us to meet him before he came down to join the launch party.   Anyway, after that we went back down to the lobby where there were tons of photographers and so on and stood around waiting for all the guests to arrive.  Doc introduced us to lots of people, including bollywood film star Anil Kapoor, and always referred to us as his Canadian friends.  It was kind of funny.  Actually what was most funny, was that he kept trying to be in all the pictures.  Anyway, after all the pictures we went into a theatre where there were speeches, a film segment on the making of the movie and the music in it, a small concert by the singers of the soundtrack and then this ridiculous opening of the CD.  There were 6 cds in this HUGE gift box wrapped in a giant bow that they ceremoniously cut open on stage.  I think my favourite part was the concert…i really enjoyed the music!  After that we went out for lunch with “Doc” and Krishna.  Krishna wants to take us out one night before we go (apparenlty he is in with the party crowd and goes out every night…) and “Doc” wants to set us up to go sunbathing at a five star hotel and then the two of them will pick us up and take us out for lunch.  Who knows if that will happen but it would be both fun and funny if it did! 

Today was a little less busy.  In the morning mad and I booked our flight from singapore to Thailand (18 Singapore dollars…woohoo!) and a couple nights at the Hive hostel in Singapore for the next two times we are there.  We also have found the group we will probably go with for our trek in Nepal.  In the afternoon we went out with Minti to downtown.  We went to the Prince of Wales museum which was great!  We also walked around and looked at some of the fabulous architecture left over from the days of British rule.  As Mad pointed out it is kind of weird to be so into architecture that was designed by British and built with Indian labour…but it is very beautiful!

That’s about it for now….i’ll try to make my next post a little shorter…

xoEv