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!