Or am I just saving my words? Haha I think the way I talk now is very strange, and comes out in very poor grammar patterns. I guess my brain is switching to a Chinese way of talking? My inner voice is turning from English to Mandarin, interestingly enough! But wouldn't the title in Chinese be "dui bu qi wang le ni" - ? Maybe that's no good in Chinese either, but whateva! Maybe I'm a poet because it rhymes ya?
Well anyway, I have been busy! Trying to get SOMETHING done (like finish a bunch of prototypes) But I have only succeeded in getting a couple of prototypes done (built entirely in India from Indian materials!) All that's left really is to weld the faucet portion onto the body, and it's GOOD TO GO! (What I call 80% done, lol) There's still the matter of fixing it onto a storage container lid, but hopefully that'll just... come to me later haha~!
But that reminds me, I really should be documenting what I'm doing. I guess it eluded me because I was so involved in just getting the first two prototypes made completely in India. There were quite! a few things that had to be changed since coming here due to the lack of certain tools - working in another country is definitely something I have had to overcome. But I think in the end, this entire thing could be made with a lathe and a hacksaw... and a file.. and a mill.. and a welding torch.. well anyway! It could be easy to make someday in the future, and I really hope someday it can be made by just any old entrepreneur, and not by some mega corp trying to rip off the proletariat.
Okay! Just too a break to draw a little sketch of a crazy ice ram idea to make the hole without a mill... but it'd have to be CRAZY to work! But yeah please those of you who read my blog remind me to post pictures if none come soon... I'm finally starting the point in my project where I make a bunch at once! 8 to be exact! Yeah... I know I already have two done (the ones I brought with me from the states) but those seem ugly in comparison to these new ones! They're all stainless steel (no more copper faucet) and have all white handles and caps!
But in other news, I have been eating street food! And I think I'm finally getting a bearing of what to eat for breakfast and lunch. Dinner is still kind of peculiar, but I realized the trick to eating late is to eat an assload of streetfood beforehand! Haha so I have been getting this pakora sandwich (which Sandeep told me the kannada word for, but I have since forgot) and an ear of corn salted with a lime for two days now! They are delicious!
I'll take a picture of that later, too!
Well I better get back to work because I don't really use my computer that often. It ends up that I have a stack of emails that I have to look at. Very unsettling!
See ya!
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Monday, June 7, 2010
Making Progress!
CHICKEN HUT!
So on Monday we had a general meeting for planning purposes and I was just generally confused about our goals for the summer. Haha I guess I had thought of those long time ago for the class I took and ended up forgetting all about them right when I got here. (Heh culture shock made me forget about a lot of things) Coonie told me to eat lots of Indians, but that made me realize that I haven't really been talking about the food! I'm more of a eat-the-same-thing-everyday kind person (as those of you who knew me in my Thai-noodle-4x-a-week phase might already know) so in the morning I eat Puri (which is like fried puffy bread with two kinds of sauces. One I believe is known as chutney which is kind of sweet and yogurty, while the other is this orangish-brown that is spicy and filled with peas and carrots. So what you do is tear up the puri and dip it in the sauces. For cold drinks, I have slice, which is an Indian mango drink that is really freakin awesome... except after having it every day I'm kind of getting sick of it. For lunch I generally have a Tali plate (or Dali?) Basically it means some Roti Breads and a huge variety of sauces. Heh, I kind of think Indian food is kind of like Mexican food... lots of the same things prepared in very different ways.
But anyway, I found a machine shop! Right here on campus, and the machine shop superviser said all we had to do was write a letter of permission to get access to the shop. Then he told us where to go in the city to buy all the materials we need to get started! So hopefully today I'll go get the materials and tomorrow we'll fire up the machines! I'm excited
Sunday, June 6, 2010
The weekend!
Relaxation and settling in, mainly, for this weekend. I washed my clothes next to the street yesterday and a bajillion kids came up to me and tried to tell me things in Kannada. I tried to communicate that I didn't understand... but I guess that's obvious anyway lol. Then when we went out for dinner, I got lost and asked for directions. And the guy I asked wanted to know if I was looking for Chinese food... haha.
But did you hear in the news? Israel attacked a flotilla of aid ships trying to break through the blockade on Gaza. This obviously pissed off a lot of people, and I found these articles:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/weekinreview/06cooper.html
http://csis.org/publication/israel-strategic-liability
About the changing relationship between the U.S. and Israel... Sound a little familiar? =P
But did you hear in the news? Israel attacked a flotilla of aid ships trying to break through the blockade on Gaza. This obviously pissed off a lot of people, and I found these articles:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/weekinreview/06cooper.html
http://csis.org/publication/israel-strategic-liability
About the changing relationship between the U.S. and Israel... Sound a little familiar? =P
Friday, June 4, 2010
Hubli Day 2 - Settling I
First, some pics I had left out from Mumbai! The city skyline from the water side and a big building somewhere in the middle of the city.
I woke up yesterday at 8am hoping to be ready by nine. I had woken up much earlier, like around 5 am because a bug bite on my foot had been bothering me. (I think the only reason i had a bug bite on my foot was because it was hanging off the bed) I'm so glad that my aunt bought me so much stuff because I searched for the anti-itch cream she had given me and it worked like magic. I took my bucket bath from the questionable bucket that had been left in my bathroom ( a squatting toilet and a faucet with no sink or mirror) but found myself with more time. I used the toilet, which made me rather proud of myself because it was my first time using that kind of toilet. But that ended up making me late for the 9 oclock meetup time.
The whole group then went to this small restaurant, which I think is called a canteen, and had a small breakfast with some chai. The canteen was right across from the BVB campus and we walked out there for the first time to meet with Dev in the HMS office. It's a nice room shared by a couple of different NGO's ( one woman worked on a project known as "safe hands" which trains women to be security guards and housekeepers as a form of employment. Come to think of it, I'm not sure what the unemployment rate is among women in India. I'm sure they're doing good work though because the security guards at the Deshpande Foundation were from their organization.) After the meeting with Dev, we met for a short planning meeting and acquainted ourselves with the only room in the city that we know of that has wifi.
Right across the street from the school, the whole gang got passport photos and cellphones (my number is +91 973 816 9761) and had a late lunch around 4. Then it was back to the Deshpande Center to meet with one of the fellows and give him our welcoming present: Ghirardelli Chocolates! Zach then left to pick up one more Berkeley student who will be staying with us (a girl named Anu) while I discovered that there are western style toilets at the Deshpande Center =]
Doug, Jasmine and I searched around for necessities and found many small shops. I had some really good cold apple drink and then we went out to dinner at around 8pm. But dinner lasted until 10 and we had to rush back to get home before the hostels locked up for the night. I realized I had fotgotten my wallet at the restaurant and jumped off the rickshaw I was on and ran back to grab it. Then I found another rickshaw and asked the driver to take me to some hotel. He dropped me off there and I was like wtf? But I was supposed to tell him to take me BEHIND the hotel, so I got directions from zach and ran home. Barely made it alive because I had just had dinner, but now I'm safe and sound at home. Love home... Miss Carolyn!
Thursday, June 3, 2010
Hubli!
Hi all! I've been in Hubli for a day now, but I wrote this journal entry last night. I'm finally getting internet access at the Deshpande Foundation, one of our awesome sponsors which has a building on the college campus across the street from where I live.
After boarding the bus at around 9:45 (there was some packing difficulty which was resolved by just piling things into the seating area of the bus) I shared a double sleeper bed with Sean for the 9 hour bus ride. I had originally been told the ride takes 5 hours, but it really ended up taking 12 hours. Sad thing is the night before I had been fighting diarrhea, and didn't eat anything for lunch or dinner that day. I woke up not feeling too hungry, but once I had finished lugging my luggage all th way up to the top floor of our hostel, it hit me! Our local man on the ground, Devadanam Talapati, helped us check in and deal with the room arrangements. We ended up with two rooms with five cots for six people. The room we were supposed to get has a giant bees nest right outside the window! The landlord said it would be gone by Sunday (which I'm kinda sad about because bees are disappearing and getting rid of the nest only makes matters worse) but in the meantime, he let us stay in an extra room where the tenant had just moved out. So here I am all alone on the floor below everyone else in the deserted room. The kid left behind a lot of things; a lot of school notes as well as his bedding and sheets (along with soap, underwear and some socks... he must have left in a hurry).
The school notes show he was a mechanical engineering student at a nearby college (BVB, where I'm at right now) and I found a note for his parents mixed in with his papers. Apparently, in order to take his finals for his classes, he had to have at least a 75% attendance rate, but the paper showed he had gotten below that for some classes. Maybe that's why he left. But it was sheer coincidence that his papers also showed descriptions of lathes, mills, and other machinery. That means that there's a good chance that the mechanical engineering department has the machines I'm looking for. That's doubly good too because one of our sponsors, the Deshpande Foundation, has their office on that very campus! (Lol i wrote this last night)
But back to the timeline of the days, after settling in we walked over and checked out Jasmine's girls hostel, which is much nicer and cleaner, and paid for her room there. Then we went to eat lunch at piccolo's, where we waited an hour for our food! That was terrible, and the food was just ok and really overpriced. The whole gang of 7+1 then went over to koppikar road and shopped for mattress pads, towels and sheets, and some cleaning supplies. I cleaned my bathroom, tried out the messhall at the bottom of our hostel (which was 35 Rs for all you can eat of one dish (~75 cents))
Today I'm going to get a data card so that I can access the internet using a USB drive from anywhere! Which will be AWESOMEEE.
Well ttyl's all. Cya!
After boarding the bus at around 9:45 (there was some packing difficulty which was resolved by just piling things into the seating area of the bus) I shared a double sleeper bed with Sean for the 9 hour bus ride. I had originally been told the ride takes 5 hours, but it really ended up taking 12 hours. Sad thing is the night before I had been fighting diarrhea, and didn't eat anything for lunch or dinner that day. I woke up not feeling too hungry, but once I had finished lugging my luggage all th way up to the top floor of our hostel, it hit me! Our local man on the ground, Devadanam Talapati, helped us check in and deal with the room arrangements. We ended up with two rooms with five cots for six people. The room we were supposed to get has a giant bees nest right outside the window! The landlord said it would be gone by Sunday (which I'm kinda sad about because bees are disappearing and getting rid of the nest only makes matters worse) but in the meantime, he let us stay in an extra room where the tenant had just moved out. So here I am all alone on the floor below everyone else in the deserted room. The kid left behind a lot of things; a lot of school notes as well as his bedding and sheets (along with soap, underwear and some socks... he must have left in a hurry).
The school notes show he was a mechanical engineering student at a nearby college (BVB, where I'm at right now) and I found a note for his parents mixed in with his papers. Apparently, in order to take his finals for his classes, he had to have at least a 75% attendance rate, but the paper showed he had gotten below that for some classes. Maybe that's why he left. But it was sheer coincidence that his papers also showed descriptions of lathes, mills, and other machinery. That means that there's a good chance that the mechanical engineering department has the machines I'm looking for. That's doubly good too because one of our sponsors, the Deshpande Foundation, has their office on that very campus! (Lol i wrote this last night)
But back to the timeline of the days, after settling in we walked over and checked out Jasmine's girls hostel, which is much nicer and cleaner, and paid for her room there. Then we went to eat lunch at piccolo's, where we waited an hour for our food! That was terrible, and the food was just ok and really overpriced. The whole gang of 7+1 then went over to koppikar road and shopped for mattress pads, towels and sheets, and some cleaning supplies. I cleaned my bathroom, tried out the messhall at the bottom of our hostel (which was 35 Rs for all you can eat of one dish (~75 cents))
Today I'm going to get a data card so that I can access the internet using a USB drive from anywhere! Which will be AWESOMEEE.
Well ttyl's all. Cya!
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
No WIFI!
Ah... blogging without wifi is such a hassle. I can't upload pictures, I can't write at a nice pace; because i'm renting a computer from a pc cafe right now and I can't upload my pictures to some straaaangers PC! But I can tell ya'll what I've been doing!
So I got off the plane at around 1:30AM Bombay time. First thing I did was wait for my bags, but as I was walking out, I saw a currency exchange and I was like... good idea! Except there was this group of French tourists in front of me who took FOREVER! I mean, if they're all one big family, couldn't they exchange money together? Time consuming old people, no wonder French tourists are rated the rudest in the world, lol. Well then I got out, and it was HOT! I was wearing 3 layers + a jacket and jeans and shoes, and right when I got out, I was drenched with sweat. My friends met with me right at the front of the airport, and we all took a taxi to our place of residence, which was really just down the street in Andheri East.
Where I'm staying right now is this really nice 3 bedroom apartment on the 3rd floor of a building in this housing society. The people on the 1st floor are really nice, and the girl who lives there, Pageshre, came out and introduced herself to us. Apparently, HMS stayed in the exact same house last year, so they got to know her really well. The apartment has three rooms with AC and it is GODSEND! Lol I swear the difference between an airconditioned room and one that's not is like 30 degrees and a bucket of water. (The bucket of water being in the air) But I slept that night
The next morning, I went out for some Indian breakfast/lunch and got myself a Masala Dosa, something I had before in the states! It was fantastic, and the sauces they give are good too. I struggled for a while trying to eat with just one hand (in India, they eat only with their right hand, and they eat WITH their hand) so I was all clumsily trying to tear the bread with one hand. Heh it took me about twice as long to eat, but that's no problem. Mangos are ReaALLy good here, and everywhere you can buy this awesome drink called Slice... or basically Mango nectar. It tastes JUST like mangos and I can't get enough of it. It's also a cold drink, so it really hits the spot.
After that... a friend joined us after his plane landed, and we went out to explore. We went to a bagel shop (lol ridiculous right? eating western food before even getting sick of Indian food) and they had free wifi there. But finding Wifi is actually pretty tough. Then we walked around, sat by the ocean side, had some beers, and then ate at a pizza place. While we were sitting by the ocean side, there was this charismatic young guy who was acting out scenes from lots of bollywood movies. Then at the end, he totally approached us and just demanded money! I was like... I don't see a collection cup.
So that was kind of a spoiler, but afterwards we went to the pizza place across the street because it was the only thing open at that hour (11pm) The pizza was good, and we got two Local Specials, Bombay Masala and Indian Smoke. Both were really good and hiddenly spicy! I guess they worked the spices in with magic.
Aftewards, we took a train back home, and I fell asleep around 2. I woke up today around 10 and went out to eat indian breakfast. I ordered a tomato omelette, but it wasn't made of eggs, it was a pancake! I'm kinda confused as to why eggs arent vegetarian (oh yeah, btw, everyone here is vegetarian) but dairy is. But whatevaaa. Eggs are good but overrated, and the pancake was good anyway.
So now it's about 6pm, and the time difference between here and the states is terrible! I don't think I'll ever be awake at the same times as you guys, so that makes webcamming pretty hard. But I did buy a logitech webcame today for about $20, and it works great with my laptop. So expect to see me on skype sometime once I figure out where the best spots for wifi are, and after I get to my permanent city.
Tomorrow night, I'll be sitting on an overnight bus from Mumbai to Hubli, so I'll hopefully just wake up where I need to be =D No time lost, and no boring bus ride. Well cya all later, and hopefully I'll be able to post up some pictures soon!
So I got off the plane at around 1:30AM Bombay time. First thing I did was wait for my bags, but as I was walking out, I saw a currency exchange and I was like... good idea! Except there was this group of French tourists in front of me who took FOREVER! I mean, if they're all one big family, couldn't they exchange money together? Time consuming old people, no wonder French tourists are rated the rudest in the world, lol. Well then I got out, and it was HOT! I was wearing 3 layers + a jacket and jeans and shoes, and right when I got out, I was drenched with sweat. My friends met with me right at the front of the airport, and we all took a taxi to our place of residence, which was really just down the street in Andheri East.
Where I'm staying right now is this really nice 3 bedroom apartment on the 3rd floor of a building in this housing society. The people on the 1st floor are really nice, and the girl who lives there, Pageshre, came out and introduced herself to us. Apparently, HMS stayed in the exact same house last year, so they got to know her really well. The apartment has three rooms with AC and it is GODSEND! Lol I swear the difference between an airconditioned room and one that's not is like 30 degrees and a bucket of water. (The bucket of water being in the air) But I slept that night
The next morning, I went out for some Indian breakfast/lunch and got myself a Masala Dosa, something I had before in the states! It was fantastic, and the sauces they give are good too. I struggled for a while trying to eat with just one hand (in India, they eat only with their right hand, and they eat WITH their hand) so I was all clumsily trying to tear the bread with one hand. Heh it took me about twice as long to eat, but that's no problem. Mangos are ReaALLy good here, and everywhere you can buy this awesome drink called Slice... or basically Mango nectar. It tastes JUST like mangos and I can't get enough of it. It's also a cold drink, so it really hits the spot.
After that... a friend joined us after his plane landed, and we went out to explore. We went to a bagel shop (lol ridiculous right? eating western food before even getting sick of Indian food) and they had free wifi there. But finding Wifi is actually pretty tough. Then we walked around, sat by the ocean side, had some beers, and then ate at a pizza place. While we were sitting by the ocean side, there was this charismatic young guy who was acting out scenes from lots of bollywood movies. Then at the end, he totally approached us and just demanded money! I was like... I don't see a collection cup.
So that was kind of a spoiler, but afterwards we went to the pizza place across the street because it was the only thing open at that hour (11pm) The pizza was good, and we got two Local Specials, Bombay Masala and Indian Smoke. Both were really good and hiddenly spicy! I guess they worked the spices in with magic.
Aftewards, we took a train back home, and I fell asleep around 2. I woke up today around 10 and went out to eat indian breakfast. I ordered a tomato omelette, but it wasn't made of eggs, it was a pancake! I'm kinda confused as to why eggs arent vegetarian (oh yeah, btw, everyone here is vegetarian) but dairy is. But whatevaaa. Eggs are good but overrated, and the pancake was good anyway.
So now it's about 6pm, and the time difference between here and the states is terrible! I don't think I'll ever be awake at the same times as you guys, so that makes webcamming pretty hard. But I did buy a logitech webcame today for about $20, and it works great with my laptop. So expect to see me on skype sometime once I figure out where the best spots for wifi are, and after I get to my permanent city.
Tomorrow night, I'll be sitting on an overnight bus from Mumbai to Hubli, so I'll hopefully just wake up where I need to be =D No time lost, and no boring bus ride. Well cya all later, and hopefully I'll be able to post up some pictures soon!
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