Ahmedabad

I finally got here to Ahmedabad last night - to the Nest Hotel. The taxi ride to my hotel was phenomenal. Did you know that a family of four can all ride the same Moped? We were surrounded on all sides by hundreds of Mopeds with Saris flying all around. You could taste the ozone, and the adaptable sari was being use by many as a face mask against all the fumes. Electric rickshaws were common but so were bicycle rickshaws pulling cart loads of people. I saw a small truck of futons piled 10 feet high with people sleeping on top. The traffic rules seem to dictate that cars drive on the left side of the road but it's hard to tell. We got rear ended once which seemed so inevitable that I was surprised that our driver even bothered to stop and berate the guy behind us. He got back into the car mumbling that this crazy guy was in a hurry.




I saw cows - sacred cows with huge horns - wandering amongst the traffic, and dogs, and I just can't understand the physics here that no-one on bike or foot seemed at all perturbed by the mass of traffic. I sat quietly just taking it all in until a camel stepped in front of us, and then yelled 'a camel' and started laughing. The driver was pretty excited that I had not seen a camel before so after that he was more chatty and pointed out a few more camels for me.

My room was quite a come down after the swank hotel in Mumbai, and last night I woke up itchy and there were BED BUGS in my bed. Ick. I squished the ones found and decided I couldn't worry about it too much - tried to think about them as being no worse than mosquitoes. Other than that I slept well and do not seem to have much jet lag at all.

This morning I met others from the conference at breakfast. Its very easy to talk to people here at the conference because most people are from far away and the Indian people are excited to have us here. I met a group of people from an environmental organization in Nepal this morning - most of them are Indian, but I met a Nepalese boy who works with training farmers in sustainable practices, a man from Kenya who trains teacher in environmental education and a plant systematist from Sri Lanka. I had breakfast with some folks at my hotel who are attending the conference and they were able to introduce me to good food to have for breakfast and the correct way to eat it! I had Puri Bhaji - which is a flat bread that you eat with potatoes and vegetables. They, however, had omlette and toast ;) I asked them about bed bugs and they were horrified and told me to tell the hotel management which I did and was promptly moved into their 'best room' - which honestly was a huge step up from my previous room - its beautiful in comparison so I am looking forward to being there tonight. So there was an upside to the bed bugs!