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Published: January 31st 2010
After a month of preparing, getting shots, talking to doctors, organizing technicalities with the co-op department and finallly trying to shove all the things I thought I would need for three months into a couple of large bags, by the time the day finally came to leave, I had nearly forgotten that I had to do one more thing: actually go to India.
It's one thing to talk about going somewhere as foreign to me as India, and completely another to actually hop on a plane and stay awake for the 52 hours until I could finally drop dead into my bed at the end of the "day". Needless to say, I was a little worried about the living conditions, what my residence would look like and how the students would act towards us.
It took a solid 31 hours of travel time - get to the airport 3 hours ahead, then about 7 hours to Brussels, a 3 hour layover, an 8 hours flight to New Delhi, three hours to find the bus and get organized and a quick 7 hour bus ride to campus. We left officially at 6:25pm on Wednesday, skipped Thursday entirely in our mad
dash over various time zones and arrived safe and sound and completely exhausted at 8:30am on Friday. Then, we all stayed up for another 12 hours to get ourselves acclimatized to Indian time (10.5 hours ahead of Ontario), called IST (Indian Standard Time) or something more commonly know here as Indian Stretchable Time. Like when we met Ajay (who was to show us around campus) at 3pm, but, as we learned, when you convert it to IST, it ended up being 7pm. I have learned my lesson from that. I won't show up for meetings on time again.
So. I am here now and fairly well settled in. I have met several girls from our hallway and a few others that I met while wandering around campus. I have a room mate, named Sadie, who I met in first term back at my residence. Our rooms are nice, and much larger than those we got in residence back in Canada. We have put up pictures and a big Canadian flag and the rest of the room is comfortably disorganized. We have spent the past two days getting ourselves oriented around campus (which is not too big and much less
confusing than Waterloo) and getting adjusted to the food, the people and the Indian versions of some familiar sports and some not too familiar sports.
Our first day of school is tomorrow, so I'm sure I'll have lots to say then.
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Elise F
Elise
Hello all
Hope you guys enjoy reading about my adventures. It has taken quite a bit of effort to get this whole thing set up, so I hope it was worth it to you back home. Please leave me lots of comments so I know that someone is reading! Lots of love, Elise