The Six Greatest Meals of My Life

6. 2005 - Last night with Meg- Rishikesh, India - Cheese tomato toast, sweet corn egg drop soup, veggie burger, farfalle pasta with tofu, mushroom, spinach, capers and cheese, lemon cake and a chocolate coconut donutball. After six weeks of dal (lentils) and rice, we reveled in our Chinese-Italian-German-American fusion meal in a place called the New Bandhari Swiss Cottage. Globalization, I love thee. Total cost (for two)- $4.

5. 2001 - New York City - My buddy Zanja always demonstrated remarkable patience with me when I'd visit him at his apartment near Columbia and demanded that every meal consist exclusively of bagels and pizza. But on one sublime Sunday morning in September, we woke up from a late night of partying, went to Koronet Pizza (110th/Broadway) to get the biggest slice of pizza you've ever seen, dripping with oil and mozzarella, ate it, ordered another massive slice each, ate it, then walked down to Absolute Bagels (108th/Broadway), got an everything bagel fresh out of the oven, loaded it up with cream cheese and a slice of tomato, ate it, and then in a burst of pure genius, returned to Koronet and ate another huge, perfect slice. I then took a siesta till sunset. Total cost - $6.50.

4. 2000 - Coroico, Bolivia - After a day of mountain biking from a 15,000 foot pass in the Andes to a 3000 foot-high rainforest in the Amazon (sooooo gringo, but so fun), I hiked 2 miles to a random French expat's house, where we talked for 3 hours and drank red wine while he made a four-course meal - french onion soup, a three-cheese souffle, a salad with pears and roquefort and chocolate crepes. The thing is: I hate French food, don't really eat salad, it was too hot to be drinking soup, and I firmly believe that souffle is for wussies. But hey, it worked. Maybe it was the wine. Total cost - $3.

3. 1989 - Paramus, NJ - My first Cinnabon in the Paramus Park Mall. Hotter than I expected. Sweeter than I could possibly have imagined. Like losing my virginity, but messier. Total cost - $1.65 (w/extra icing).

2. 1996 - Fort Yukon, Alaska - The last day of a five-week backpacking trip off-trail above the Arctic Circle finally brought us to "civilization", a fifty-person Inuit village. Two guys took me to their fish wheel and let me choose a two-foot salmon to eat for dinner that they had caught about ten minutes earlier. We scaled it, seared it, squeezed lemon on it, and ate it straight off the bone. As we were finishing, around midnight, the August Alaskan sun was starting to finally drift towards the horizon, and the two guys pulled out four Reese's peanut butter cups for me. Ah, the Inuit - not only do they have 100 words for snow, but they also know about Reese's. I was so happy that I gave the two guys many Eskimo kisses in return (note to Dad: just kidding, it's a metaphor, I'm straight, really). Total cost - $3.

1. 1997 - Florence, Italy - The granddaddy of them all. In the middle of a month of post-graduation boozing around Europe with my boys from Stanford, we ended up in a little family restaurant on the outskirts of town with two women from Oregon that we had met in Prague. We were there for four hours, but I've forgotten everything that we ate. All I can remember is that the waiter kept making the same joke over and over again with his three words of English, we each finished two two-liter bottles of red wine, and I kept thinking to myself - "this is the best meal of my entire life." I was so inspired by the food (and, perhaps, the wine) that after we finished eating around midnight, I became convinced that I had discovered the answer to all of the secrets of the entire universe. I scaled the steps of the local cathedral and decided to preach my transcendent wisdom to my friends (who were either too polite or too drunk to stop me, probably the latter). For twenty minutes, I truly believed that I could make lightning shoot out of my fingertips and that I had achieved complete and total enlightenment. Then I ran into an alley and puked my guts out onto the cobblestone streets. Lost all the food. Lost all the wine. And by the next morning, I had lost all of the enlightenment too. Total cost - $60 for 6 people, Total cost to my pride, after realizing the next morning how totally full of crap I was: priceless.

---rahul

We're in Rishikesh, India, the "Yoga Capital of the World." There are lots of white people with flowy clothes and dreads here. We haven't done any yoga. We just wrapped up a week in a tiny village called Than Gaon. Here's the highlights:

• Getting lost on our 10 mile hike in the Indian Himalayas, stumbling upon a piece of land called Cloud's End that had a sign saying "Warning: Infested with snakes, scorpions, and spiders" and eventually getting so disoriented that Rahul asked for directions from a cow.
  
• Watching five year-olds beat each other with a stick if they got their ABC's wrong.
  
• Celebrating Valentine's Day with two candles, a jar of Nutella, and two 200ml bottles of wine (which we only found after a countrywide search for a "wine shop" that sold anything other than whiskey).
  
• Meg treating some of the 12 patients who had all managed to survive the week before when their jeep when hurtling off a local cliff in a rainstorm.
  
• Learning the chords to Springsteen and Avril Lavigne songs.
  
• Waking up to hail pelting our bed.
  
• Doing yogic headstands at sunrise.
  
• Building a fire to make hot water for a shower.
  
• Being guided through the mountains by a guy who insisted on changing out of his work clothes and into a sharkskin suit for the entire hike.
  
• Spending the whole week hanging with a painfully serious former professional field hockey player named Rahul, who, after consulting with 3 different priests, solemnly told me that our name "means absolutely nothing."
  

---rahul

My 15 Seconds of Fame

I used to have to ponder awhile when asked to name my "most embarrassing moment." Not for lack of blunders, mind you, but I didn't have a bona fide bury-your-head-in-the-sand doozy of a story. Well, that's all changed now. . .

After five weeks of gallivanting around Bali and India, the time had come for Rahul and me to settle down for a month and do a little work. I was actually looking forward to donning the white coat and stethoscope in a foreign land, to seeing patients with exotic infectious diseases I'd read about but never seen, to working with doctors who make do without all the advanced technology we rely on in the US. I showed up for my first day at the clinic full of curiosity and ready for action. The 36 hours prior hadn't been kind to Rahul and me--digestive derailment had struck with a vengeance--but we'd turned the corner and were on the mend. When asked by my two fellow medical students how I was feeling on our way in to see the first patient, I'd answered honestly, "Oh, I'm fine now."

And then five minutes into the first patient examination, I passed out. I remember feeling a little funny and saying, "Matthew, Alison, I'm kinda dizzy. Uh, actually I can't see you guys anymore." Then suddenly I awoke to 20 brown faces I'd never seen before staring down at me from a tight huddle. "I think I passed out!," I said helpfully and incredulously from the floor.

Matthew and Alison then told me the glorious story of the seconds that had just passed. Immediately upon announcing my inability to see, I had performed an elegant eyes-rolling-back, knees-bucking, keeling-over routine. I swooned into the capable arms of Matthew, the 200-pound stolid Army doc who caught me on my way down, easing me to the floor. Supine and unconscious, I then delighted patients, doctors and nurses alike with a spastic arm and leg dance, my eyes obscenely wide open throughout. And then came the kicker. I pooped on myself. Not wanting to be left out of the fun, my intestines did some spasming of their own during my 15 seconds of vulnerability. Oh the betrayal! So there I was, 5 minutes into my new stint as a visiting medical student in India, lying on the floor in a white coat that was most certainly no longer white.

Ironically, the tainted goods behind this debacle turned out to be a lowly bag of raisins we had eaten with the hope of getting the old bowels moving after 3 days of unwanted inactivity. And therein lies the essence of the Indian travel experience: all extremes, nothing in the middle. You poop too much, you poop too little. You remember the days back home when pooping was so routine that you scarcely gave it a passing thought. You also remember a time, not so long ago really, when you couldn't say the word "diarrhea" aloud without squirming, forget memorializing your colonic catastrophes on the web for all eternity. Ah, India.

-meg

I want to write my name in the sky...

The Himalayas!! After a decade of dreaming, we can see 'em all around us and they are gorgeous. Dehra Dun, India, home of basmati rice and a surprisingly good Starbucks knockoff called Barista. Meg started her first medical rotation here on Monday and she's got a hilarious story about her first five minutes on the job coming at you momentarily. Tomorrow we're headed out to a little village called Than Gaon. (Meg'll be trekking through the hills looking for villagers to heal, and I'll be teaching environmental education to a bunch of four year-olds who don't speak English). Sweet.

While Meg goes to work each day here, I've been kicking it with our host family, The Mehtas, mostly with their fourteen year-old Varun. We've found common ground in our shared love of professional wrestling, though he's an Undertaker man while I've always had a soft spot for Stone Cold Steve Austin. Whenever we get tired of talking about wrestling, I pull out my guitar. I'm teaching him the wonders of Tom Petty and Pink Floyd. He's helping me learn to love Avril Lavigne. He's one chord away from having "Free Fallin'" nailed. I'm shocked at the musical complexity of "Complicated." The Indian cultural exchange continues....

By the way, we've got a new set of photos up from our last week of travelling in India before we hit the Himalayas. Click here and click on "Play as Slideshow" to take a look. And as always, you can click on individual photos during the slideshow if you wanna see captions.

---rahul

Dispatches from the Dromedary (where every day is hump day)

1. A 72-hour camel safari is excellent grundel preparation for the Nepali MS150.
2. Camels exist in a perpetual state of pooping and farting.
3. Camel farts are the foulest vegetarian death farts we have ever encountered (even worse than Kimmy's!).
4. Rahul's sister, Leela, has been inducted into the Bad Ass Hall of Fame for catching "Montezuma's Revenge" the morning the trip began, puking after every meal, and getting back up on the camel each time with a smile (and vomit) on her face.
5. Leela's boyfriend, Sam, wins the TLC award for being ready at a moment's notice to hold Leela's hair back for 3 straight days.
6. Camel drivers are bad-ass (but not as bad-ass as Leela).
7. They brave extreme heat, cold, sun, wind and sand for 10 months of the year and manage to father 6 children in their two months at home.
8. They walk barefoot for miles across the prickly, barren desert.
9. If your camel driver goes by the name of "Desert King," he's especially bad-ass (but not as bad-ass as Leela).
10. If Desert King offers you "desert cake," say no.
11. Every song sounds good in the desert, whether it's Desert King botching "Country Road" or Rahul missing the high notes of Bon Jovi.
12. No amount of sunscreen in the desert can curb the explosion of freckles across Meg's face.
13. Resolved: Rahul should never wear long underwear in public. Ever. (Exhibit A above.)
14. When Desert King says someone is "bubbly," he means horny.
15. When Desert King assigned us to camels, he paired the fartiest, chattiest, and bubbliest to Meg.
16. Desert King is an excellent judge of character.
17. We're not sure which is cooler: watching a sofabed fold into itself or watching a camel's legs bend in impossible directions when lowering itself to the ground.
18. You know you're in the middle of nowhere when there are so many stars in the sky that you can't find the Big Dipper.
19. Playing frisbee is the second-most fun thing to do in the sand-dunes.