Eventually there will be a day when nothing really out of the ordinary happens and I'll have to resort to summarizing little things that I've noticed here and there but haven't really been able to fit into any other post. Today is not that day. The first half of the day was pretty normal. Exact same breakfast buffet as described earlier (except I tried watermelon juice). Lectures weren't excessively noteworthy except for the fact that our second lecturer ran 40 minutes over because he had gotten the wrong stopping time. I got to unicycle during lunch, yay! My hand pump to inflate Tweaker broke while I was trying to inflate the tire--not surprising since I paid only $2 for it plus shipping--but Keshav's friend had an air compressor in his car so I was soon tooling ... read more

Today was another solid day in my Bangalore trip. It started out quite early, around 4:30am or so, because my body still hasn't quite adjusted and decided that it had had enough sleep, thank you very much. I actually wasn't tired because my brain had gotten into the habit of sinking straight into deep REM the instant I fell asleep (thanks to excessive sleep dep.) so even though I only slept for less than 5 hours I was awake. Around 4:40 or so the islamic prayer came over the outside loudspeakers--a man's voice in a wailing, ululating cry that echoed a bit eerily around outside. Not that I really heard it over the howling dogs. Yes, that's right. People who have been here for a couple days inform me that every morning around that time the ... read more

Whew! So much has happened already on this trip to Bangalore (or Bengaluru if you prefer) that I've decided to write a blog about it. This way my mom can keep careful track of me, my friends can see what hijinks I get up to, and maybe other people can benefit from the experiences I had traveling from North Carolina, USA to Bangalore, Karnataka, India. My flight schedule was: 2-hour flight from NC to JFK (Friay afternoon), 7-hour flight to BRU (arrive Saturday morning), 8-hour flight to Delhi (arrive Saturday night), then (next Sunday morning) a 2-hour flight to Bangalore. Since I did not book my own tickets--they are courtesy of my Smart Structures program--I didn't even notice that I was overnighting in Delhi for about 7 hours. Luckily I was traveling with two other participants ... read more