I arrived bright and early in Bangalore this morning after 28 long hours of travelling (with two layovers in Frankfurt and Bombay). Walking out of the baggage claim, I was very excited to see two of my teammates waiting in the lobby of the airport at the cafe we had agreed to meet at ahead of time. Our fourth teammate will be arriving in an hour.
The team from Harvard arrived from all over the world this morning. Stella flew from Greece and had just finished her second year studying Computer Science at Harvard. Richard flew from Lebanon and just finished his second year studying Electrical Engineering. Matt, my co-director for Ghungroo this year, is from New York and just finished his third year in Mechanical Engineering. Our last teammate Will is a first-year medical student at Harvard Medical School and is arriving in two weeks after classes at the med school get out.
After the four of us arrived, we found a cab to take us to the Indian Institute of Science (IISC) where we will meet up with the four Indian students from IISC we will be working with.
We obviously had a lot of luggage and it didn’t all fit in the car, so the cab driver just put our suitcases on top of the car! Didn’t strap it in or buckle it down or anything – literally just put them on top of the car and drove! I suppose the rack on top has a lot of friction to keep the bags from falling, because lo and behold, when we arrived at IISC, the bags hadn’t budged!
We met up with our four Indian team members from IISC, Vijayendra (a mechanical engineer), Heloise (an architect), Simran (a computer scientist) and Parveen (an aerospace engineer). They were all now first-year graduate students in IISC’s Center for Product Design and Manufacturing (CPDM) studying design.
They were so nice and helped us get settled in. We also for the first time got our taste of Indian bureaucracy. We walked back and forth from the International Office, to the Hostel Office (where we got our dorm keys) to the bank, to our dorm, to the department so many times to get the right paperwork, the right receipts, signatures, passport photos, photocopies of visas. But finally, almost three hours later, we got everything settled.
After things were sorted out, they took us out to lunch at a little restaurant on campus. Here’s the entire team at lunch:
(from left) me, Parveen, Richard, Vijayendra, Heloise, Stella, Matt and Simran
On our way over, the cab driver had told us that the IISC campus was beautiful – but we were not expecting it to be THIS nice! Every inch of campus is shaded and the roads are all lined by beautiful trees on both sides. We thought the university was built in the middle of a rainforest, but the students told us the trees were planted after the university was built. They also have a policy that doesn’t allow any trees to be cut down on campus.
The weather was also so amazing! I was very comfortable in jeans and a shirt and most people here wear long sleeves and long pants (mainly to cover all their skin from bugs because there are quite a number of little insects and mosquitos). Apparently the weather is this nice all year round in Bangalore because they happen to be surrounded by some rain forests and are in a fairly tropical area, close to the ocean. I could really get used to this!
The dorms (they call them hostels here) are set up apartment style, and each student gets their own room. This is the girl’s hostel. It was just built this year I think, so it’s very new.
The weather is so nice all year round here that there’s no need for air conditioning or heaters. The hallways of the dorm are all outdoors and creates a really nice breezeway in the mornings and evenings when I step outside my room. The rooms surround a courtyard where there’s a huge tree over 6 stories high. Here’s the view outside my room on the third floor:
My dorm is now all set up and cleaned. It’s quite a cozy little room with great sunlight!
The weather, the campus, and the people are all really great. So excited to be spending the next 10 weeks living and working here!
