Incredible India!

Dear friends around the planet,

this is the start of my blog marking the my first weeks out of yet another nomad phase of my life that I now spend in India and next year in Cameroon, Africa. With this I hope to bring my experiences closer to you even though I may be more than far away from you.

The conventional nature of such a blog might be that it is structured in a certain chronicle order, however I have to break with such conventions as outstanding events and mindblowing experiences deserve priority attention. So I thought initially I shall tell about my first three weeks in a very concise way to avoid boring stories – and what would be more concise than some simple statistics?

• One visit to an entirely golden temple
• One illegal beer obtained in a dark spot of the streets of Bangalore
• One visit to a beautiful 'normal' but significant temple
• Countless people living in misery everywhere
• A medieval fort where I almost felt like beamed into the "Prince of Persia"
  
• Numerous quarrels with auto-rickshaw and taxi drivers re-negotiating prices after the provision of their services
• Dozens if not hundreds of temples seen from outside
• A visit to the Muslim quarter of Hyderabad and its astonishing markets and bazaars
• Got to know to a chancellor (in Austria that somehow corresponds to the rector) of a renowned university plus his director for international relations
• Talks with dozens of experts in space industry specialized in reducing the digital divide for the poor
• Smalltalk with the cool guys from the ‘Google X Prize Lunar Challenge’
• Wasted digestion - more than once
• Smalltalk to the Indian minister of education
• Probably one deceased person in the streets observed
• One temporarily broken laptop
  
• One bath of my passport in the Bengal Sea (not myself as it is not advisable for Europeans to swim in the sea in or around Chennai)
  
• A couple of great expert interviews for my diploma thesis
• One ride on a public city bus (amazing experience but not for daily use)
  

All in all lots of things happening all the time and I am living through a cultural shock each day again. Once I popped into the kitchen of a restaurant and found a place that really looked like I had expected kitchens looked 1000 years ago in Europe (seriously!).

Generally speaking everything works slow and things are not too easy to accomplish, so there is still some way to go for my thesis, but as the laptop works fine again I am more than happy and quite confident for the future studies.

In my next posting I promise to include some photos!
All the best from Chennai, Tamil Nadu!