Random thoughts thus far

Some random thoughts about the trip thus far …

• A trip to India is truly awesome, but being on the trip as a staff member is definitely not as fun as being a student. We (the staff and faculty) put so much work in to setting up the class, the projects and the trip but once we are on the ground, the teams are basically on their own, working with their clients during the day and then using their cars/drivers to go off to dinner or out shopping or whatnot in the evenings. So, they are off going on amazing site visits and fun things with their friends and most of the time the staff are behind at the hotel or off running errands. The whole thing was even stranger for me since most of the students are only a few years younger than me (and some are my age or even older). But in the end, the point is that the students have a valuable, educational experience and I think that we are accomplishing that!
• The Internet sucks in India (ok, at least in our hotel). It’s ironic to me since India is supposed to have all this technologically capability, with software developers everywhere, outsourced call centers and the like. Apparently, someone needed to inform our hotel of that. The only thing more annoying than the lack of internet was the amount of complaining that the students were doing about the lack of internet.

• Indian food is awesome for vegetarians, which makes me very happy. On the other hand, for someone that was trying to cut back on carbs the constant array of rice, naan, fried samosas and other tasty treats makes eating healthy a bit difficult (but delicious!)
• Pigeons are crazy. They are everywhere (apparently they eat mosquitoes so people encourage pigeons to be around – a fair tradeoff I suppose, nasty pigeons in exchange for less malaria). But sitting in my hotel room felt like being in the midst of Hitchcock’s “The Birds”. The pigeons on the windowsill were constantly making a racket and sounded like they were trying to peck their way in to my room – totally creepy way to fall asleep at night and wake up in the morning!