Kerala (The Honeymoon State)

Day 1-3:

They don't call this state the honeymoon state for just any reason... it's beautiful! We flew out of Bangalore to Cochin, our first stop of four in Kerala, on May 23. We flew on a little airplane and had to get out on the track to board it, which was very cool and then arrived at our destination an hour later. The view from the plane changed from very dry to green and luscious in that plane and we were all fans of it. We were greeted with our bus and some more flower necklaces and started heading towards our first stop.

On the way, we saw a lot of rivers and bodies of water which I was not used to anymore and once we reached the hotel we had a some time to spare before taking a boat out on the Arabian Sea. The boat ride was for our whole group only and it was too cloudy so we couldn't see the sunset, but it was beautiful. We stopped at a fish market island and on the way back we were surrounded by rain clouds, but fortunately they never reached us!

The next day, we had an academic session in the morning and in the afternoon we went to a mini theatre. There we saw a Kerala martial arts performance, which was amazing, and then a traditional Hindu play with only three actors with elaborate make-up and dress. The play was especially interesting because the characters said their lines with dancing and drums in the background, but the total story wasn't long in writing (it was only front and back of one page and they play took about 2 hours!). We stayed in the area for dinner after that long afternoon and some people bought fish at a local seller and then brought it to the restaurant we ate at for them to cook it, which was really cool! Our hotel had an amazing pool, so when we got back we went for a swim which was incredible!

We left for our next destination, which was a tea plantation after a six hour bus ride up a mountain with a one way road.. It was a bit scary. After our six hour ride, we had to get off the bus and take Jeeps up a more narrow road to get to our hotel, which had an amazing view and very steep looking down, but the whole thing was so worth it once we arrived because this place is beautiful!

Bangalore: Day 3

Driving from the previous city, Mysore, to Bangalore took about four hours on the bus and we made a stop on the way at a palace which was extremely intricate on the inside and had a huge garden outside. Our tour guide showed us around the village outside of this tourist attraction which had a Mosque and a Hindu temple and then we stepped into the premises of the king's land (which was very beautiful!).

Continuing on our journey to Bangalore, the IT hub of India, we came to a rest stop that had a KFC and an Indian version of Starbucks (it's everywhere!) called "Cafe Coffee Day" along with an Indian restaurant and a handcraft store which had so many elephants and animals in every form.

We made it to the hotel and had to work on our upcoming climate change war games, in which we pretend to be Indian policy makers in different sectors, like water, agriculture and energy to figure out how this country should adapt its' cities, infrastructures and policies in order to be sustainable. We have to know a lot about our specific areas that we're contributing to the group and figure out how to negotiate with the other groups, which will be very interesting. Because of that, my group went to dinner together to Mahatma Gandhi Road which was recommended to us by the concierge but the only restaurant we found there was McDonald's, which had a lot of vegetarian options and no red meat, since it is rare in India. This road sort of looked like Times Square with the amount of people and the lights but with much more density of stores in one block.

Bangalore: Day 4

The next day we woke up early to visit the office of Swiss Reinsurance and talk to some of the people that work in this office to see how climate change affects the reinsurance industry and some cities more than others. Florida was discussed for a long time because it is highly impacted by hurricanes and is at sea level, so they had a lot of information on past hurricanes and their impacts as well as the reinsurance losses because of the natural disaster. When we came back to the hotel, some of us went to check out the pool on the top floor and it had a great view of the city as well as really refreshing water. We couldn't stay out for long because it was very hot and we had an academic session later that evening. In the meantime, we had to work on the presentation for our war game that will take place on Friday.

At night, we tried ordering pizza from Pizza Hut but there was a big miscommunication (even though I specified which branch of the hotel we were staying at...) and the delivery guy ended up 20 kilometers away from our hotel and wouldn't come to the one we were at. Since it was already late, we ordered room service (the first time I had ever done it!) and it was surprisingly good and very cheap!

Bangalore: Day 5

Today we went to visit the Indian Institute of Management- Bangalore to hear a professor talk about social entrepreneurship and discuss the benefits of this practice as a market. The campus was very big (150 acres) and it was beautiful with so much green space and open buildings. After our discussions and tour of part of the campus, we had lunch in their cafeteria buffet in a room reserved for our 30 person group and our guest lecturers that was not expected at all, but very nice.

The rest of the day was planned for finishing assignments and group work, but since my group had finished the day before we had the afternoon free! I was exhausted from waking up so early, though, so I took an extremely long nap and just hung out around the hotel, because by the time I woke up it was dark out and I didn't want to explore more of the surrounding area in the dark.

Bangalore: Day 2

We toured the campus of Infosys in Mysore (the city of palaces) and got to see where one of the best companies worldwide trains new employees right out of the university. The campus is a training center and has housing for all of the trainees, which makes this place huge!!

We then went to a palace for lunch which was really amazing! One of the rooms where they serve meals was served because someone booked it to film a movie (I don't know which one but the people were dressed up with weird dresses and some people were in the dress the people who worked at the palace used to wear, so it was interesting to see.

                                     This is made out of rice! It's beautiful!

                             His mustache was too great not to take a picture of it.

We later went up to get henna and after that experience at the mall we went up a mountain where there's a very pretty temple that's one of the top 10 holiest in India.

Bangalore: Day 1

We left the Mumbai hotel at six in the morning, went to the domestic airport, and then drove for what seemed like an eternity until reaching our first touristy thing in this new city: a palace! The palace was extraordinary in a city outside of Bangalore called Mysore, where we’re staying for a few nights before heading into the center of Bangalore, which is compared to Silicon Valley in California.

We couldn’t take pictures inside the actual palace, but we could take some outside which was good enough!

 

The palace was beautiful and huge! Every part of the ceiling and floor and everything in between was so intricate and planned out and the colors were amazing. On the airplane ride in the morning, there was an article on the magazine about the palace and I was looking through it with some of the people I was sitting next to and when we actually got to see it in person later in the day, it was an amazing thing. Once we got to the hotel, we had a welcome dinner since it’s our first night in a new city and after that we walked around the hotel for a bit because this is the place where the king of the palace would let his guests stay! The hotel has a courtyard in the middle of all the rooms and each room had a balcony looking into it (or at least most do..) and it’s unbelievable that we’re staying in one of the old king’s properties!

Mumbai: Day 8 & 9

While staying in the second hotel of our trip, we have focused a lot more on class and making connections with students and faculty of IIT- Bombay, since we were now 10 minutes away from their huge and beautiful campus. One of my favorite speakers who came to talk to us presented from an architectural standpoint how we should be designing structures to account for climate change. One program she talked about that many other students and I got intrigued about was a competition called Solar Decathlon in which a big group of students and faculty members from a university design and build a house that will generate its own electricity and be sustainable. As soon as her presentation had finished a group of civil engineers on the trip contacted her to see if we could learn more about the competition and see if we could implement that back at Northeastern.

The speaker, who is also one of the faculty that leads the project on campus, invited us to listen and learn more about the program in one of their final presentations before their competition in France. Since the meeting was on campus and most of the group was not going to the meeting, we had to get from our hotel by sharing taxis, but these were not just ordinary taxis... they are three wheelers with a driver in the front and space for three people in the back! The ride over there was an experience in and of itself because we were used to riding on a bus where we don’t notice how close we are with the other cars but from this motorcycle/taxi we were at eye level with everyone else, it was kind of scary and fun all at the same time. Once inside the correct building (did I mention the campus is huge?) we walked in the middle of the meeting and everyone stared at all the Americans that just walked in, talking quietly with their neighbors about who they think we are and what we’re doing there. Once they took a lunch break, we had the opportunity to meet the project leader and ask him a lot of questions about how much time the planning and designing took them and what major difficulties they faced throughout the process to be able to keep in mind if we want to start a team at Northeastern!

Later in the afternoon we spoke to professors and some students who specialize in engineering products for rural sustainability which includes things like more efficient water pumps and machines that reduce some of the manual labor from farming and agriculture. The professor that spoke about this was also very interesting because he knows that students that come to study at one of India’s elite universities to be successful, meaning earning lots of money, essentially, but the real focus should be building up the nation’s economy by concentrating on the biggest sector of the market, the agriculture. We then went to their workshop where they showed us some of their products that have been implemented in rural areas and they mentioned that they don’t patent the inventions so the farmers can make the products themselves.

That night the people who had gone to the talk about Solar Decathlon went to dinner to discuss how we can start a team and what we would need to do to accomplish our goal, which will be a lot of work especially with co-op cycles. Hopefully we can get the support of major faculty in the fall and see where to go from there if we want to compete in 2017, since we won’t be able to compete in 2015.

The last day we spent in Mumbai started out with a speaker from Swiss Reinsurance, which is a really interesting business because it insures primary insurance. He talked about how climate change is affecting the probabilities of natural disasters for many reasons, some of them being that people are moving to areas of risk, there are natural disasters everywhere, and in the areas of risk the concentration of people residing there is bigger now than in the future. In between that session and the next, we had a little bit of time to be able to check out the galleria, a mall with shops and a food court, right next to the hotel. It was there that I bought a shirt that is super colorful and I’m so excited to wear it!



Later that night we had our farewell dinner because we were headed off to Bangalore the next morning for the next part of our trip!

Mumbai: Day 5-7

We are in a new hotel as of Sunday night to be closer to the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay in order to make connections and dive deeper into our classes about climate change adaptation and science and policy. The first full day in this part of Mumbai called Powai we started a little later than what was originally planned because everyone was so exhausted from all the touring and presentations that went from six in the morning to ten at night. Our late start began at the hotel on the same block as ours in an area that seemed very modern and vibrant, and at breakfast we were told that 15 years ago this part of the city was undeveloped and it now has multiple hotels, a galleria and lots of restaurants. We had the afternoon free to work on some assignments for the class and later that afternoon we heard presentations from many people including Monika Jain who spoke about the architectural aspect of designing resilient cities for climate change and spoke about a competition called Solar Decathlon in which a team from a university builds a sustainable house that can produce its own energy and then compete at a national, or in IIT Bombay's case international, level. This peaked a lot of our student's interests and we decided to try and start conversations about starting a team at Northeastern because it sounds like an amazing opportunity and experience.
The next day was another academic session and presentation day with highlights from a professor at IIT Bombay who talked about the Indian monsoon, what affects it and how climate change will impact it in the future with modeling techniques. At night, after getting some work done in our individual teams to prepare for the war games, in which each sector of the Indian government (which will be our class split up into 5 groups of 5) is trying to decide how to allocate its resources and pass rules and regulations to prepare accordingly to climate change and its implications on the Indian infrastructure, I went out to dinner with some friends to a place called Aromas (not the Israeli one unfortunately..) and then for some ice cream that was delicious. It was prepared like in Cold Stones but with real ice cream and for decoration they put some fudge on the cold stone to harden it and then place it on top of the ice cream for chocolaty goodness.
Today our water sector team met up at breakfast to put the finishing touches on our presentation and we then headed over to the other hotel for our classes. We heard from other presenters as well today but what was particularly amazing was that whoever wanted to go to a Solar Decathlon group meeting and ask them questions about how they got it started at IIT Bombay to model our start to be similar.

These past few days have been very informative but not so much touring, so next weeks can be more relaxed in Bangalore and Kerala, which I'm so excited for!!

Mumbai- Day 3 & 4:

                                               Baby cow on the street!!

We started day three early to tour a famous slum called Dharavi, this slum is different from others because the people who live there have thriving businesses making pottery or recycling plastics and the only different thing about them is that they live in a place that is not very clean, but there are no street beggars because they accept their destiny and think that maybe in their next life they will reach a better state. That's how most people here think, mostly because of their beliefs of reincarnation and karma. It was very interesting to see this place and walk through their city within the city.
We came back in mid afternoon to the hotel and had class and after that there was a cricket game of the Mumbai Indians against some other Indian team and a lot of the group watched it in the hotel's bar along with fans, while we were trying to understand the rules of the game. It was very interesting to see and funny to understand because it's similar to baseball (which I don't even fully understand) so all the comparisons were made between the two and I couldn't exactly follow..

Sunday started very early since we were taking a boat to an island called Elephanta Caves (they don't have elephants, though, contrary to what I believed..), which has a cave that was built to praise Shiva and it is now a ruin because the Portuguese used the temple to practice their shooting. We had to walk up a lot of steps to go see the cave, but it was so worth it! Along the steps were a lot of vendors that live on this island and live off of the tourism that the caves attract.
That day we were moving from our hotel in Colaba, close to the water to a hotel close to Indian Institute of Technology Bombay to be able to have more academic sessions on this campus. We got to the campus, and it's huge!! It is one of the hardest schools to get into in India, next to all of the other IITs because it is only based on one entrance exam that people study for since grade 6! This university is a leader in world technology and advancement and we met some grad and PhD students that work on trying to predict the Indian monsoons, one of the hardest climate predictions, using very advanced computers and statistical models. We then took a tour of the nanotechnology lab, which Biden took a tour of a few years back, and that was very interesting. Driving from the campus to our new hotel, the scenery changed to look a lot more like downtown of a city in the United States with a shopping mall and even KFC inside, which was a change from our last hotel which was in a residential area of Mumbai/ Colaba and had an open street market around the corner. But this is a beautiful area, so I can't wait to see what we explore around here!

Some photos of Mumbai

Mumbai: Day 2

Today we woke up very early to head to the United States consulate to Mumbai to listen to a woman who spoke about a variety of things relating to Indian government and the U.S. India relationship. A new government will be elected by May 16th so everyone is very anxious to know what the results will be, since India is such a big country the democratic voting takes place in 9 sections and 7 of them have been completed so far. The speaker spoke very well about a wide variety of topics from agriculture and Indian demographics relating to workforce to how the U.S. and India collaborate on climate change policies. She also focused on disaster mitigation in the city relating to a flood that occurred in 2005 and the reaction of the terrorist attack in 2008 in Colaba, which is a couple blocks away from where we are staying now. The dialogue was very interesting and made me want to learn more about the various topics that we discussed and opened my eyes a bit more to what we will discuss on this trip and how complex the conversations, and eventually the war games, will get to be.
Coming back to the hotel we had a bit of free time for lunch and some of us ventured out to the open market to see what we could buy. There were so many beautiful pants and shirts and art pieces and so many noises from traffic and haggling prices. That area kind of reminded me of Once in Buenos Aires, especially with the amount of people walking in the streets and the traffic. We came back to the hotel, basically drenched in sweat because the humidity and heat is ridiculous here, and headed to our first official class with Professor Ganguly.
After class some people went to play cricket, which can be compared to baseball but with very different rules, and soccer but Mariana and I were exhausted so we decided to take a nap. Lindsey and I then decided to venture off the the Chabad House of Mumbai, which we are very close to, because we needed to experience Jewish life in India and it was amazing. Most of the guests were Israeli or at least spoke Hebrew, but since it's a time of the year in which not many tourists come and the kids are out of school the guests were mostly residents of Mumbai or in town for business. The Rabbi and his wife welcomed us very well and the conversations around the Shabbat table were amazing (even though I could only understand some things since most of the time everyone was speaking Hebrew) and the stories of why or how some people are in Mumbai were very interesting. It felt like a community and I'm so glad I got to experience Shabbat with this awesome group of people!

Tomorrow we are off to a slum very early in the morning, so I'll see you in the morning Mumbai!

Mumbai: Day 1
Today was a very interesting day- from walking around a residential area, to crashing a Hare Krishna wedding and experiencing a bit of the outdoor markets. We woke up really early after our long days of travelling and had a really good breakfast at the hotel and then went on our journey in our magical bus with a our travel guide. Our first stop was in a residential area with some kiosks right by what I think was the Arabian Sea or Indian Ocean. There we saw some men doing laundry by hand as their job, an area of water in which washing and I think some sort of rituals take place and some playgrounds for the kids of the neighborhood.
We drove around for a bit while our tour guide explained that some city workers have their home cooked meals delivered to their offices by a system of workers that pick up lunches from their houses in the morning and by 12:30 pm their lunch is in their office. This allows their wives to cook their meals as the men travel to work and allows them to save money by not having to eat lunch out. Also this costs like 8 rupees per month which is not even 15 cents!
Our next stop was the Gandhi Museum which was very interesting and beautiful! There was one floor that had maintained his room almost identical to the way he used it and another with the story of his life drawn our with miniature figurines in separate wooden boxes. The stop after that was the Hare Krishna temple, in which there was a wedding and we were a part of! The building was beautiful with a lot of wooden arches and the music was even better. A woman who was part of the ceremony even asked me to take a picture with the bride and groom for their official camera, so I think I'm going to be a part of their photo album! All of the people there were very welcoming of our group and some members even came up to us to explain the significance of the ceremony. We then had lunch next to the temple and went back to the hotel to learn about some Indian culture and a sort of orientation of the classes we will be taking this month.
Before dinner we walked around the area of our hotel and experienced the overwhelming open market! The patterns and cool clothing looked amazing, but I couldn't decide what to buy in very little time we had so I'll definitely be going back there soon. :)

WE'RE IN INDIA!!
We finally got to Mumbai after over 24 hours of travelling, layover in Munich and all!!  The first flight from Boston to Munich wasn't bad since it was overnight, and I slept for a little of it but the second seemed like it took forever because we were advised to stay awake in order to get a good night sleep once we arrived in Mumbai, so that's exactly what I did.. Needless to say I'm exhausted! The Mumbai airport looked so modern and new and as I was walking around I could not believe I had finally arrived to the place I have been thinking and wondering about for so long, it's so unreal. We got picked up in a bus that was narrow and on the way to the hotel we saw the slums, people hanging out by the sea and all sorts of small taxis that we had seen on TV. I'm so excited for the rest of this trip and what's to come. Apparently tomorrow we have an early day with tours in the afternoon as well as a sort of orientation for the whole group, which from all the time travelling together seems like will get along perfectly.

See you in the morning Mumbai, can't wait to explore!