Excuse Me, Madam

Hi everyone!

I think I’m going to go in reverse order of what happened this past week and conclude with my trip to Mahabalipuram on Sunday where I saw some sweet ancient temples and ruins. I also named this post "excuse me, madam" because everyone calls women here madam which I think is funny but I can get use to.

Thursday

Today was the first day I had (kind of but not really) a lot of stuff to get accomplished and I actually got everything accomplished…as long as I don’t fall asleep while typing this blog post, haha. We had to get to the lab by 10:00 a.m., which was the first time we were on time for reasons I’ll mention later, to finish our training for the machine that will fatigue our samples and then finished our training which was simple.

Once the training was over, we went to the place where they have a juice stand and few other stores to grab some lunch. I intended to just order chicken nuggets because I knew it would’ve been a safe call but stupid me decided to try one of the daily specials, (very spicy) veggie pasta, that wasn’t that good but luckily my mango milkshake was buy one get one free where the little one in the picture was free of course.

I then had to add minutes and text messages to my phone so I went to this weird little shop to do this. I tried asking the worker how much it was to do what I needed and there was a language barrier even though we both spoke English. Luckily there were two students there to help me out so then I was able to tell the worker what I needed and he gave me a receipt for the cost. I then had to take three steps in the other direction to pay what I owed and walk three steps back to the original guy for him to add the stuff to my phone. It didn’t work at first and was taking a long time but soon enough it worked and I checked another thing off my mental checklist.

Morgan and I then walked to where she parked her bike that the university let her borrow to fill up the tires but we couldn’t loosen the nuts on the tires and we gave up. Luckily this wasn’t on my checklist for the day so I was still in a good mood.

We continued to walk and I continued to get my shirt and backpack straps sweaty on our way to Dr. Krishnan’s office where we left our passports for safe-keeping temporarily. We needed them for our flight to Hyderabad tomorrow. We only had to wait for about 5 minutes or so which is our record in that office. Soon enough we had to be back by 2:30 so we could start impacting our samples.

A graduate student not under Dr. Krishnan, Kavitha, and another new master student helped us with the impacting machine and Shiva and Renil helped with the inferred. I really appreciate the help these four people gave us because Morgan and I really didn’t have to do much to impact our samples. I think at home it would have been more like these people would be there to tell us what to do but they did most of the stuff for us with no problem. We first practiced with some practice samples and then impacted the three samples we had to do at 40 J and the damage is shown below…exciting stuff. Next week we’ll pull and release these samples for 1000 cycles and then see how the damage increases.

 The group that helped



Side 1 of damage

Side 2 of damage

Shiva with my umbrella

Then after trying to wait out the heavy down pour of rain we decided to head to the bus and had to walk through some rather deep puddles, the worst of which was ankle-high on the dirt road by our hotel.

Soon enough we eventually got a cab to go and visit Tim’s friend Srinidhi (Nidhi) and had Chinese food at a beer and Chinese food at the restaurant. Oh, but the traffic on the way there was terrible where our car was turned off for at least 10 minutes and at a standstill for another 10 minutes most likely due to aftermath of the flooding and the increased traffic problems during rush hour.

All in all it was a good day and I mostly feel good about accomplishing the stuff mentioned, getting my emails caught up, and feeling progressive with our research project.

Wednesday

Not too much happened on Wednesday. We got to the lab only a little late for boring training in the morning then Morgan and I walked to the food court outside the campus to get Subway. It was only semi-satisfying because the worker drenched my sub in dressing. But then we had to walk all the way back which produced probably a bucket of sweat and then got trained some more. We then waited to work with Kavitha because she said she’d be available but we couldn’t get a hold of her so then we just went home.

Later at 10:00 or so we went to a nearby movie theater that our auto driver told us only showed Tamil-language movies and saw Man of Steel in English (that silly liar). The tickets were very cheap, around $2.25, and then we even got pop and a popcorn for a little less than $5 or so I think. I found out today there’s a ban on an increase in movie ticket prices because they want to make sure people outside the city with lower income can still afford to see the movies.

We had to reserve our seating when we bought our tickets and the theater played the movie very loudly. But don’t worry, we could still hear the crying babies and a few phones going off. I was just most confused why people would bring their baby to a very loud theater at 10 PM but whatever I guess.

Tuesday

Tuesday was the day we were told we would start training for the machine we needed so we were supposed to get there by 10:00. We thought we left enough time to catch the right bus but there must have been some bus issue somewhere because we had to wait at the bus stop for one hour. I’m sure we could have walked to our building in that time but it was too hot and we were too lazy to do so. We didn’t actually get there until maybe 10:50 and then we were told that training was postponed until after lunch at 2:30. So we waited some more and planned stuff for our trip to New Delhi.

We had lunch at Café Coffee Day on campus, which doesn’t really serve lunch meals except weird sandwiches, to relax with our American group. Soon enough we had to return and we finally began training. Our lunch didn’t do much for Morgan and I and we both ended up feeling like shit after standing for a long time during the training.

Soon enough training was over, Kavitha wasn’t answering so then we went home to eat dinner and relax. We chose to have dinner in the restaurant downstairs and I really just wanted a plain omelet. Stubborn me though decided to order egg noodles to challenge the worker there because on Sunday he had the nerve to tell me that they only serve noodles on Fridays. Then I got my noodles, I said Happy Friday to my friends, and then I barely ate them because I wasn’t hungry for them.

Monday

We didn’t do much on Monday except find out we weren’t having training that day as we planned and then Morgan and I got to see the impact machine. We opted for a late lunch in hopes after we could just go home. We got our late lunch but then decided it was too late because we had to return to campus to meet with Aarabhi and Anu regarding the other project we picked up. Eventually though we got home and played Euchre I think. It was Bob’s first real time playing Eucher and I stole the deal from him once and told him which card he should play three times because his cards were practically horizontal. What a newb. But at least he had a good spirit about it and then he taught us how to play Nerts after.

Sunday

We decided to go to Mahabalipuram which is only about an hour south of us because our friends recommended it. We were able to go with three Indian guys, two of which work in our lab and one who works in Bob, Mike, and Evan’s building. We took the bus there and I slept nearly the whole way there.

At the first location in the town we got a tour guide which I found to be helpful because he explained the three main different gods of Hinduism and repeated their purpose with the G.O.D. acronym: Brahma is the generator, Vishnu is the operator, and Shiva is the destroyer. As long as we knew this he could explain the story of the gods carved into the temples. For example, the first one is Krishnan, who was a ladies man, is holding up a large rock or mountain to protect the people from the rain. There were also many other stories but I can’t remember them all.

I found it crazy how everything we saw was created around 600 AD or so which kept me thinking about the other stuff I learned from this time period, but never Indian history. I know this was about the time of the Byzantine Empire and I’m sure I learned about the Chinese dynasty of this time but never anything about Indian or even South American, Middle Eastern, African or Australian culture. The way in which they carved out the granite or basaltic rock must have taken a very long time as well and I’m curious who at the time had to do that job. Were they forced to do so? Or was it an honor?

Later in the day we visited another area of ruins that were in a plot of sand. By this time by fee were really blistered but I pushed through. This is also the place where my profile picture with me on the cow was taken. After this, Tim and I had coconut milk for this first time and this lady wacked of the top, cut a small hole then threw a straw in it. It then tasted like nothing I imagined but could have been worse. I’m just glad to say I’ve drank coconut milk straight from a coconut.

Lastly we saw the Shore temple right off the water and then walked to the beach where there were many people. My feet hurt from the blisters so I didn’t really go in the water but I enjoyed my time observing my surroundings.

Soon enough, the six of us left to go home, we thanked our friends for coming with us because it was really helpful and then we went back to the hotel to eat dinner. This is where the worker told me that they only served noodles on Fridays and I was quite peeved after a long, hot day in the sun.

 

That's all for now, I'll update you on my Hyderabad weekend sometime next week.