First week in India, Pune

The past week passed very quick and it happend some funny and also serious stuff.
I will divide that into categories to make it easier for you to read.

People: I actually enjoy how people treat us here. Every one is helping out in any case of issue. The chef in the mess facility offered us to cook different food if the everydays food is too spicy for us. We didn’t accept this offer because we are not here to eat roasted pork.
Our room neighbours coming to our room and introducing theirselfes. So we have nice chats each day. And we are also invited to playing playstation in mates rooms.
People ask you whether you want to go out for a walk and chat. They ask if you want to join their sporting activities.
Usually at 10:30 pm the hostel is locked up and everybody needs to have signed for staying in the hostel during the night. Although we have not been on time back in the hostel each day it looked like that is not a big issue if you know the right people.
It was also nice to see that people are willing to work some extra to issue our temporal student id card which is needed all over the campus.
Once the mess chef gave me a lift on his motorbike from the upper campus to my campus so I saved about 15 minutes walking.
All this is really really nice to have to feel a bit more like at home!

Food and Beverages: First of all there is chai almost everywhere. It is tea with heaps of milk and sugar. Once I ordered orange juice and it came with ice cubes. I was not sure whether to drink it due to the ice cubes and stopped drinking after the very first sip. Mohit was asking why I do not drink it and I explained him the issue. He just gave the juice back to the waitress and ordered another one for me – free of charge. This is what I mean by everybody cares. And then there was Lassi. No not the dog. It is a kind of yoghurt I think and it is drinkable and sweet. It tastes just like you want to have a full bucket of it. If you buy a hot chocolate somewhere you get it in an large glas and it tastes amazing.

Now food. We had so many different kinds of food last week that i just give you an idea of what we had:

  • Italian Restaurant called “Little Italy”. Pizza with veggies on it. Nice!
  • Chicken tandoori. Plain, curry and red spicy
  • Butter chicken with roti
  • Chocolate sandwich. Nope not a usual toast with chocolate spread. It was a toast with Cadbury chocolate topping. This was the most amazing chocolate sandwich I ever had. According to this I drank a cold Cadbury Chocolate. This is a bit thicker than chocolate milk but not as thick as molten ice cream. Awesome taste!
  • Pizza @ dominos: The pizza is like an explosion to your tongue. Once we had a cheesy cheesy chicken pizza and it was just an awesome pizza.
  • Lamb Sizzler: Sizzler is served on a hot metal plate. The plate is embedded in a wooden thing so that you won’t burn your fingers carrying the metal plate. Then there was of course fried lamb on the plate, mushrooms, corn, mangold, onions, other vegs, rice and fries and a nice sauce. Savoury!
  • Streetfood. Please never ever do miss Momos. These are dough bags stuffed with vegs or chicken. You can have them boild or fried. I am not that into spicy food so I just skipped the pepper sauce. There are also pancakes stuffed with cauliflower or paneer (cottage cheese) or onion
  • KFC. I had a chicken snacker there. It is not the best food on earth but still it helps to fill the stomach.
  • Chicken nuggets at Apache. Chicken pieces bedded in fried onions and soaked in a spicy sweet sauce. Hell, I like food!
  • Food in the mess. It is not really changing but it is cheap and fills your stomach. Once there were some pancakes and we thought how awesome is that. I wanted to top them with sugar but actually they were not ment to be sweet. Actually they were spicy. Mum, no and never bake spicy pancakes when I am back to Germany. The Food Court on my campus is a little better and the Food Court up hill is again a little better. Up hill I had already some Chicken Hakka Noodles – nice and cheap and not even rice!

Weather: We were lucky with the weather last week. It didn’t rain heavily but the weather changed this week: It was still warm (round 25 degrees Celsius) but the rain grew stronger so that I needed to buy an umbrella (200 rupees) this week. On Monday Anton thought that he does not need an umbrella due to not strong rain. Actually since this week he should have better bought one.

Introduction: There was an Introduction on our second day last week. This introduction was meant for the “Freshies”, the students who are starting their studies this term. I actually had problems to understand the content of the introduction because we were sitting in the last row. The things I got were:

  • large sport offer on campus: badminton (up hill), gym, swimming pool (up hill) and table tennis
  • Dancing lectures
  • Free shuttle bus to the city
  • Free Wireless internet connections in the rooms and university buildings (this is not good enough for streaming; Skype, Youtube etc. is not working)
  • There is a stationary shop on campus as well as up hill in case I need to buy basic things

Each and every professor from the computer science departement introduced hisself and the subjects which he is teaching. I am not sure why only 2 of about 20 professors are male.

The campus where I will study for the next 4.5 month is still under construction. It is a bit as it was when I moved in the flat in Ingolstadt 1,5 years ago: The interior of the building is almost fully developed but the paths and the face of the buildings are not finished yet.

There is a second campus up hill for business management and medical departments. This campus is already fully developed and hence looks much better. The food court there offers a wider range of food than on our campus. First time I have been up there I tried to get some cash from the “Bank of India” – ATM but that did not work. The ATM said: “Invalid card issuer”

The construction of a third campus close to mine has just started.
All three campuses together will be in future the Symbiosis learning Village.

Leisure on Campus: I was hanging around on the campus a lot last week because there was hardly any lecture.
As said the laundry is done by a on campus laundry. Hence I brought a full bag of dirty clothes to the laundry facility and paid 120 Rupees for it. We finally got our laundry back after 7 days. The second bag is already being washed but still needs to get dry and pressed. As I don’t want to wait 7 days again and again for my clothes I will wash my clothes in a bucket in my room. Another issue with the laundry is that they are not washing boxer shorts or panties so I did that myself in the room with “Rei in the tube”.
I have been to the library several times last week. But the library is not the place to be for study purposes on this campus. There are not many books in about 10 shelves and the computer desks there look like an alibi because there is only one computer which is functional.
There had been a cultural festival last Friday for which our buddys prepared a dance. They asked us whether we want to participate and exactly being aware of my dancing skill I said that I will participate. We trained for about 4 hours 6 different dance moves and put them together. Our dance teachers Shreya and Probha amongst others were not giving up even when it looked like there is no chance that I do a nice performance. I had to wear a traditional Indian robe with stitchery during the dance. I was still not perfect at the performance but everybody congratulated me after the big show to the great dance. The song to which we danced was “Bachna Ae Haseeno” and is about a playboy who just opens his arms and women just want to celebrate with him.

I don’t know why I have got this information but there is a smoking corner behind the food-court. To understand this it is good to know that the whole campus is supposed to be completely smoke and alcohol free.
There was an funny issue one day. The door to our room has two locks, one to lock it from the inside and one to lock it from the outside and they are both not connected to each other. I left the room before Alex and Anton and randomly locked the door from the outside. Hence Anton and Alex were not able to leave the room until the room cleaner came through and opened the door from the outside. I was sitting at breakfast that time and wondering where these guys are.
Last sunday I noticed that all the sporting facilities are closed. So there is not much to do on campus on sundays.
Some day I played table tennis with some mates from the hostel. I actually enjoyed doing a bit of sport to keep my body fit. But that will be enough for the next days because I do not want do overdo myself.
I am not sure whether you have heard of that movie “Teeth”. But it is all about a vagina with teeth. A girl was having her first sexual act and her vagina was biting the penis of the boy off. She was really confused about that but in the end she knew how to control the teeth in her vagina to self defense her from abuse. Then there was this other movie with the title “Insidious”. I don’t really know what it is about because I missed more than half of it due to a nice walk in the night with two mates.

Tech Festival: This week on Monday Mohit told us that the data structure lecture will be cancelled. Instead there was a meeting for the upcoming Tech-Festival. This is held throughout the whole computer science. On that day in August, i am not sure which one it is, there will be a tuturial on a topic choosen by the students.

Definition of a Village: One day Abhishek showed us the village which is close to the campus. The meaning of a  village out here seems to be very different to what we call a village in Germany. Here a village is wide spread with a few houses along dirt roads. Abhishek used the chance to teach us local plants. He also talked about opposites and corruption in India.
Once Mohit took us to the restaurant in the village. The courses which are offered are a nice taste of indian dishes. The restaurant turns into a night club after 10 pm.

Leisure in Pune: I have been to the city of Pune several times in the first week. I was mostly hanging around with Mohit, Probha, Abhishek, Alex and Anton when we went to Pune.
It is the easiest way to commute with the free shuttle bus at 5 pm to Pune and come back with the 9 pm bus which will be the last. Nevertheless on weekends, especially on saturdays and sundays, the 9 pm bus was full. No standing is allowed when the bus moves which is why students which didn’t get a seat need to wait until the bus returns from the campus. This happend to us twice last weekend. We used the time we had to wait for a chai in a close by bar. Another day we decided not to go by the 9 pm bus and return with a taxi which was about 700 Rupees for 6 students but the taxi did take 2 hour to come to the Apache bar. When it was there we noticed that it was not big enough for us 6 so we ordered two of them.

The traffic there is just chaotic. No one uses lanes and when you think there is no space for anything between one car and another you can be sure that a motorcycle just rushes through the gap. There are not only cars, rickshaws, busses, lorries and motorcycles on the road. You will find also cyclists, cows, elefants and dogs. There are thes “Don’t horn” signs but noone cares. It’s just horning from everywhere.

In this kind of traffic it is no wonder that I already witnessed two traffic accidents. First one was when our rickshaw hit a bicycle. The rim of the back wheel was badly bent but the rickshaw driver did not care. He just shouted something in Hindi and carried on. The second accident happend 4 days ago. Our bus was hit by a van in its side. There were no people hurt. The bus driver exchanged the contact details with the van driver and both are carried on.
The transport of our choice is motor rickshaw. The pricing is easy if one goes by meter. The minimum price is 11 rupees. With every 100 meter there is added one rupee. Basically multiply the travelled distance shown by the meter by 10 and add 1.
There is a cinema in the city at the E-Square on SB-Road. I watched “Batman – The Dark Knight Rises” and “Ice Age 4 – Continental Drift”. First one is a great movie if one is asking me with loads of special effects, nice dialogues and a perfect cut. The only thing I would change is the end. Second one was almost as good as the three Ice Age movies before. Again I liked the performances of Scrat and the stupidness of Sid – just loads of fun.
Abhishek and Mohit brought us to the shopping one day because we needed some basic stuff: pillow, second towel, shampoo, replacement for “Rei in the tube”
There was supposed to be an international Food Festival at Symbiosis SB Road, Pune at 5:30 pm this monday but it was still closed at 6:30 pm so we decided to have our own dinner somewhere in town.
Yesterday I bought a laptop. Abhishek called several computer shops across the city to negotiate where to go and look for the pricing of a certain computer. Finally I bought a DELL Inspiron 15R in a small shop somewhere in the city.

Data Structure (DS) Lecture: The data structure lecture is the only one I had in the last week. I missed already 7 classes because I just arrived on the 23rd of July. First of all I had to show how familiar I am with the C programming language. So I had to develop a simple program to input 2 numbers and add them. Second program I had to develop was operating on 2 matrices inclusive input and menu. Third program is all about addition, subtraction and multiplication of polynoms inclusive menu and sorting of polynoms with bubble sort. Our teacher praised Anton and my programming skills. Our teacher repeated for Anton and me the different kinds of data structures and also explained what operations are available with lists.

Money: I have got the first money from the government. Nice to see that there is support! Beside that I have got the acceptance for the DAAD scholarship.