What an adventure I’ve had these past couple of days! I still can’t believe everything actually happened. Our main program director, Professor Charles Nuckolls, was invited to speak at Jawaharlal Nehru Technical University as a part of their annual Internationalization Day and when they learned that we were all here the university’s Vice Chancellor invited all of us as his special guests as well. The adventure started when the university sent two nice, air conditioned vans to pick us up and drive us down to Kakinada, a town about three hours south of our town Visakhapatnam. We had been told to bring our nicest clothes because we were special guests, but also told to bring sheets and towels because we may be staying in a youth hostel. To my sheer joy, when we arrived at the university we were ushered into the official guest house and shown to our air conditioned rooms! Including en suite bathrooms with western toilets and working shower heads and semi-hot water. JOY!! For every meal we were taken to the finest restaurants in town, which were surprisingly nice and always air conditioned with cold, bottled water available. After we rested for a few hours, we were taken to a near-by village that used to be a French colony, and taken out on the river (not too sure which one ) in a boat of questionable seaworthiness. We were also shown a lovely fountain of two huge elephants and a Shiva lingam, which was over-sized and super cool. The way the water came out of the fountain, it splashed over the sides and on to the ground, kind of like an umbrella. And it was built in such a way that there is a dry spot where you can get underneath, and then walk around the circumference of the fountain, which we all did. And apparently that means we will be blessed with many children. Thank goodness I only went around it once, I think 40 children might be a bit much for me. After enjoying a LOVELY night’s rest in the air conditioned room on the fabulously comfortable mattress, we were awoken at the luxuriously late hour of 9:00 am to a knock on our door from an attendant with tea cups containing their delicious equivalent to hot chocolate. After we returned from the restaurant where we were fed some kind of breakfast that I didn’t relish but by no means hated, we met with the Vice Chancellor and all of the heads of department. We were then carted around to lecture halls all over campus where we were introduced to and interacted with students from the different colleges (Electrical, Mechanical, etc.). Later that afternoon we were informed that each of us would now be asked to speak for about a minute about internationalization, and our experience at the university. At the big event that evening, we were all introduced by name and subject of study and called up one by one to receive bouquets of roses. This was made all the more exciting by the fact that we received the same treatment as our professor, as well as two other professors from MIT and Texas A&M. Unfortunately we have some born entertainers in our group who, after the speeches were over, volunteered our group to perform something as part of the cultural performances that followed. Students from the university were singing, performing dances and skits, and somehow we got talked into going up on the stage and doing some ridiculous line dance that seriously hurt my dignity, but I survived. When we tried to leave the program at 10:00 to go and get dinner, we were basically mobbed by students wanted to take our picture or take pictures with us. After we escaped and had eaten our dinner, I was more than ready to enjoy a nice warm shower and then go to bed. Unfortunately, as I was drying off from my shower, a cockroach of truly epic propotions skittered across the bathroom floor right in front of me and wedged itself in the space between the bottom of the door and the floor. After screaming my head off, I finally calmed down enough to tell the girls in our room what was going on. I’ve been in pickles before, but never like this. There I was, stuck in the bathroom with a cockroach longer than my index finger. If I opened the door, he would get into the other room and might skitter away somewhere that we couldn’t cath him. But if I didn’t open the door soon, he might turn around and skitter back at me! I wanted to vomit and cry at the same time. Eventually, we all calmed down enough to decide that the girls on the other side of the door would get a bucket and try and drop it over the cockroach as soon as I opened the door. After mustering every ounce of courage I possessed, I took a deep breath and opened the door. The cockroach didn’t move!! He just sat there, twitching his disgusting little antenna at us. After some serious coaxing on the part of my roommates, I slowly inched passed the creature and made it over the threshold, at which point I ran across the room and jumped on to the bed and curled up in a ball. After some creative thinking and serious heroics on the part of my new hero Megan, the cockroach was evicted from the room. Later that night, we discovered a frog and a baby cockroach in the bathroom, but were too tired and allowed them to live. The next morning the Vice Chancellor and several of the heads of department came with us to breakfast, and then we all said goodbye at the restaurant. We then headed back to VIzag in our air conditioned vans, although some of the girls were feeling a little worse for the wear. It had been a long couple of days and we were all pretty exhausted still, so we were a little less than thrilled when we stopped every half hour or so to be shown random things on the way home. It wouldn’t have been bad at all, except the university had sent along a newspaper photographer with us to take pictures of us seeing all the sights. It’s bad enough that people here stare at us and take picture of us on their cell phones where ever we go, but to have an annoying little man with a big camera following you around and telling you to move over there or over here so he can get a better candid shot was more than I could handle. I think I now have a better understanding of why famous people punch paparazzi and smash their cameras. By the end of the trip I was pretty surly looking in most of the group pictures, and when I saw him aim his camera at me I would turn around or hide behind someone taller. The beachside mini-temple and the hilltop temple were both beautiful and interesting, by all means, but we were more than ready to get safely back to our city.
