Arrival in India!

 I made it to India!  The flight was long but everything went smoothly.  I was a bit concerned about entering with an unfamiliar visa (research/visiting professor visa) and making sure all my luggage arrived, but luckily there were no issues.  The U.S. Consulate in Mumbai had arranged for an airport pickup to take me to the Sofitel Hotel, which was pretty swanky.

Here is my first view of the city in the morning.  I have been to Mumbai before, but I stayed in a very cheap hotel and definitely did not get shuttled around like this.  

On Wednesday I was picked up by Simran, a woman I have been in contact with at the Consulate, and she took me around for all my orientation meetings and introduced me to the people who work in the Education and Cultural Affairs office.  They are very excited to have an English Language Fellow, and since the others were not able to get their visas renewed, I will be the only one for this year.  That afternoon I was taken to the airport to board my flight to Vadodara, the smaller city where I'll be working.  When I landed everyone was checking the news and watching the countdown to India landing the Chandrayaan 3 rocket on the moon, the fourth country in the world to land on the moon.  It is a great source of national pride for their space program.

In Vadodara I was taken to the Marriott hotel and crashed for the night.  I have had pretty bad jet lag so I fall asleep early and wake up early.  The next morning I met Ananya, another woman from the Consulate, who has been up here in Vadodara for the week meeting with university people and scouting out possible apartments for me.  She took me to the Maharajah Sayajirao University of Baroda, where my primary project will be to teach English to the Environmental Science graduate students.  I met my main points of contacts, Dr. Neha and Dr. Manthan.  They also introduced me to a few of my future students.  I'll be teaching the same students around 2.5-3 hours a day for the next 9 months.  They also took me on a tour of the college campus.  They have offered me the computer lab to teach in because it is the only room that has air conditioning, but I might just take one of the lecture halls even though it will be warm in there. Here is the building where I'll be working.

The next day we drove about 40 minutes to Parul University, where I'll also be teaching English to Environmental Science students, but just once a week on Fridays for two hours.  This will be my secondary project.  

On the way back we had a typical Indian traffic jam where buffalos were being herded down the main road.  

After a long day of looking at 6-7 different apartments, I finally settled on one that is close to the University. We quickly met with the broker (what they call a real estate agent) to sign and finalize the rental agreement.  The pictures all have two fingers because that was how I differentiated between the pictures that I took of each place we looked at.  

It's a spacious three bedroom apartment that came furnished.  Some of the places we looked at had amenities like a gym and swimming pool (which I was very interested in) but they were all further out from the city center.  In the end I decided I would rather not be dependent on calling a taxi anytime I wanted to go out.

I haven't been able to unpack yet because the cleaners still needed to come do do a deep cleaning.  The owner had arranged and paid for them to come as soon as someone wanted to rent it. Today as they were cleaning, my next-door neighbor stopped by to introduce herself.  They are a married couple from the Mumbai area with one son who just went to college down in Bangalore.  He works for the government so they have moved all around different cities in India and have been here in Vadodara for about two years.  She has already loaned me some kitchen items, told me about some good grocery stores nearby, and helped me translate with the cleaners.  Hooray for good neighbors!

I should have everything set up by the time Gregg arrives in just over a week.

If anyone wants to come visit, they are welcome to.  I have plenty of space and two empty bedrooms now!