Downtown Delhi – Pics
2009
Hey folks,
while I’m sitting here in the heat, I thought I share my „Experiencing India“ stories with you guys 😉 On Friday I had planned to sleep a little longer in order to rest a bit – that didn’t work out… At nine somebody knocked on my door and offered my a ride to Teri-Institute, which is in the middle of Delhi whereas the University is really on the outskirts… Even though I was really tired I thought it might be a good idea to meet up with the guy I’m supposed to work with. Well, so far I’ve the feeling that he neither is really interested in my project not got an idea of what I want to do here… BUT, that’s not a bit deal as I found at the library a great book that’s only half a year old, written by some guy at Teri and covers most of what I wanted to research on 🙂 Great, that’ll help me a lot! Especially, as my initial idea to see the actual e-waste sites and do some interviews probably won’t work, as only the „well educated“ speak english down here. In general I think a lot of research on each part of our project has been done already, but no one has tried to connect the dots as we are going to do it 🙂 Thus we can build on lots of already available knowledge and still come up with something new 🙂 That great!
Even better, I already have lots of nice contacts down here (already, big stunner… :-D) In the library I met Navarun, a researcher who had spent some months in Berlin and he invited me to join him on a little dinner later that day. Perfect, especially as another friend of his, a german girl working for the GTZ, showed up as well and thus I already got lots of useful informations 🙂 The dinner was great and after my first trip alone with the „auto“, these funny threewheel „knatterbüchsen“, I was back „home“ at eleven – to the big relief of the guards, who had started seaching the campus for my at nine… 😉
Yesterdays was great as well. After lunch I got back to Teri in order to meet with Vasundhara and Taruna. Before starting our „Delhi Sightseeing“, Taruna and me tried to buy an indian sim-card which turned out to be more complicated as initially thought. But finally it worked and now I’ve an Indian number – yeah 🙂 We travelled with auto, bus and so on through the city and the girls showed me many nice places (see below). After a nice dinner I returned safe back home 🙂 You’ve to know, the campus is really remote and thus the drivers normally don’t know it. So just like the day before, he found the way up to a certain point and then I gave him the direction by pointing the way – here my very good orientational sense really helps 🙂 It’s really an experience to drive around in Delhi  – especially in an auto. Cause while in Paris it was rather normal to see drivers making four out of three lanes, here you’ve two and they use five… It’s without kidding normal to have two or three centimeters space between the cars!!! And they drive and honk like crazy, but if they wouldn’t, it probably wouldn’t work 😉
Alright, today nothing special is going on but tomorrow is going to be a huge holiday and I’ll be going downtown with Navarun to check out the craziness 😉
Take care,
Strothi
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