Dear family and friends,

Right since the plane landed in Chennai, everything has been fascinating. Everything is worth stopping to look at, taking photos, and worthy of a moment of contemplation. I have taken about 70 pictures so far, and my camera is starting to fail me.

The CMC Hospital is a fine, modest one with first world facilities, and many doctors. We have yet to start our attachment, as we arrived on a weekend. I hope tomorrow we will get to meet the principal and let things settle down. We have toured the hospital compound and roughly knows our way around. The hospital annexe which we are staying in is comfortable. I am sharing a room with Gibran, a colleague of mine. It has got attached bathroom, and pretty clean, the bed is good. The canteen downstairs serves good Indian food. The fried brinjals is simply delicious. Things here are relatively cheap.

Across the street, there are many traders, restaurants, and this internet cafe. It is good to have internet access just across the hospital, it cost 25rupee for an hour, which means RM2.50, and Rs15 for 30mins.
So this is my first mail to you guys. Probably I will write another one next week. I will be attending a chapel service at 6pm local time with Justina. They have services of various language starting with Tamil early in the morning, followed by Hindi, Nepalese, malayalam, etc. English is perhaps the last priority.
Most of the people here like the annexe workers, the guards, the traders speak basic English, so there is no impenetrable language barrier. There are moments that we are as comfortable as home. This is definitely much better than I expected.

We have already started to plan our tour after the 4 weeks at the hospital. Probably, we will visit Bangalore and Mysore during the weekends. And then after the hospital attachment, we will move down to Kerala (which they say is as beautiful as Kashmir), and follow the coastal train lines up to Bombay, and then if money, time and energy allows we will go further up to the state of Rajashstan which will be a sight to behold with magnificent places like the Taj Mahal. Still debating whether Delhi is worth going. As India is such a big town, interstate travel may take a very long time, so travel time alone will eat up days from our travel plans. After the northern visit, we will spend our final days back at Madras where we will book our flights home and buy souvenirs. Everything is not certain yet, and things may change.

As far as the present moment is concerned, all of us are comfortable here, everything is good, and safe.

Vellore is safe town to me, although we can still see poverty, and child beggars here and there. The weather is quite good here, cooler than Petaling Jaya, Klang or Ipoh. I even switched off the fan early in the morning - cold! The drivers here are quite nasty, perpetually sounding the horn at the slightest need. However, no matter how crazy they drive, i believe they still cannot surpass our record breaking accident rate. I wonder why.
The people here are mostly friendly, and used to foreigners, although so far, we are the only Chinese Malaysians around.
Mineral water is easily available here, and all of us are safe from any food-water borne disease.
Please continue to pray for us. I am looking forward to start our studies tomorrow.
Another mail next week or maybe earlier.

God bless,
Chee Hoe

In the previous blog, I was so excited to coming back to Ipoh and meeting up with friends. Tomorrow, I shall be saying goodbye to my family and Ipoh and heading back to Klang Valley, with much thoughts on how to go through the foreseen 2 hectic months ahead.

Nevertheless, I had enjoyed my stay here and really appreciate the times I had with my buddies; sitting for hours in Kinta City, yum cha till early morning, etc.

At the same time, I believe many have also heard of the Times Higher Education Supplement's ranking of universities around the globe, in which UM is ranked 89th; incredibly high from my viewpoint.

I am looking forward to working on the database and MVC development of my project starting next week. A lot of knowledge and technologies to pick up.. real time for J2EE and all those open source stuffs.. I am seeking to get to know more about Apple machines and the comparison between Apple and IBM-compatible..

I am really looking forward to going back to Ipoh and enjoy relaxing life there!