Saturday, May 28, 2011

Adventure time with Autumn and Stephen

Today was pretty interesting.

    The thirty plus minute walk to work has gotten much shorter and increasingly enjoyable (Red Path).  From work, I have a ten minute walk to Tiffany's for lunch (Blue Path).  It is a student mess hall that serves vegetarian Indian cuisine.  It is quite amazing.  At lunch, I am the only American, but more importantly, I am the only ridiculously white skinned person.  This is not a bad thing in any way, but it means I stand out, which means people want to talk to me.  I meet people everywhere I go because people are just curious as to why I am at their campus.
     Today, at Tiffany's, I made a friend in a doctorate student named Paul.  He saw me sitting alone and decided to befriended me.  He is a Catholic from Chennai studying philosophy.  He was extremely interested in my opinions of: Catholic education in America, president Obama, president Bush, American curriculum in philosophy, American implementation of technology in classrooms, the difference between urban and rural education, as well as my opinions of India and Chennai.  I tried my best to keep the conversation up, but he was much smarter than me.  The difference between American hospitality and Indian hospitality is staggering.  After talking for only ten minutes, he gave me his whole dessert (one that is only made on fridays) and offered to take me around the city.  It was a very good lunch.

     As I was walking home from work, I ran into Stephen and Autumn.  They were on a mission to find a lake that is on the IIT campus.   With them, I walked to the swimming pool, ping pong club, hindi temple, and finally the lake.  The lake was very pretty, and we ended up taking a nature walk.  We trekked through game trails and dense forest as we worked our way toward our hotel. I got nervous the further in we went because there were signs of random people living in the forest.  However, we had gone too far off the beaten path to turn back.  Instead of people, we ended up seeing beautiful birds and a wild rey mongoose.  I was quite afraid we might see crocodiles (we were warned by signs), but nothing came of it.  We eventually made it though the jungle to a debris laden road that led to our hotel (within IIT).

THE MAP
Red: The way I walk to work Blue: To lunch Green: The big jungle adventure


     After getting refreshed at the hotel we left to go visit the City Center.  We took a rickshaw to the train station- a waste of 40 rupees since it was only a 15 min walk.  At the train station several groups of people assisted us in reaching our destination.  The sanitary quality of the stations was appalling, but it is more than acceptable in light of the ten cent fare.  The city center mall was awesome, and offered beautiful views of the city.  We really enjoyed our time in the city center and loved the train experience because the locals were so friendly and helpful. The spicy chicken sandwich was not spicy!!


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