Visit to IIT (India Institute of Technology)

We all went to the meeting site to see the lay of the land and to hear Art’s talk. His wife Lucille was also one of the Hefei 8. We made arrangements to go on a “shopping tour” in the afternoon. Some of us (Deena, Mary and I) decided to walk around the campus. The first thing that we saw when we exited the building was this bull in a field across the street:

Most of the campus has this very dry look to it. Sharing the field was a banyan tree:

We did see one green patch complete with monkey:

A little further on, we found a whole troop of them: Mommies, daddies and babies.

The buildings were either very new and modern, or concrete blocks with mold growing inside. (Of course, the people were still working in them!) Every building had a deep concrete ditch around it. There must be severe flooding here.

The campus is on the edge of a lake. At a talk which we missed, they said that there are snakes and crocs in the lake. A good thing that we hadn’t heard that before we took our walk. (They also said that there were panthers on the campus.)

Behind the cow, on the other shore are a group of buildings that includes our hotel. There is so much traffic that it probably would be faster to come by boat.

We had been SO excited by our first cow. Now, we are seeing them everywhere-just wandering around.

That’s Deena with another – we are getting really blasé about them.

Back to the conference for a buffet lunch and then on our shopping trip. It was a high end department store. We may have been the only customers there. It was a little embarrassing that we let the rug salesman go through his entire sales talk AND give us tea, when we really weren’t going to buy. The rugs were fabulous – wool and silk from Kashmir.

The first night’s entertainment was playing games and a BBQ. The playing games part was a little funny. These are physicists after all. Only a few played basketball. We all had a turn shooting at balloons with a pellet gun. They tried to convince us to play Frisbee, but no one joined in. Finally, it was time for the BBQ.

The green things on the skewers are fish. Many of the things were cooked in boiling oil.

Everything was very tasty. They did say that because of a bird flu scare in Northern India, they were not serving any chicken.

The mosquitoes were biting and we were fading fast – so the old farts took the first bus back. We fell into bed. Unfortunately, we had brought the mosquitoes back with us. I slept really well at first – but then have been awake since 3am. I think that I’ve killed all of them now, so will try to get a little more sleep.

A note from later:

It turned out that a maid had left the window open. No wonder I couldn’t kill all the mosquitoes – they kept coming in. I complained bitterly about it to the desk in the morning. I told them that I had left a trail of blood around the room. They apologized profusely and sent someone with a mosquito killing machine that gets plugged in. Unfortunately, the electricity is turned off when you take your room key to leave – so we will only have a little killing until we get back in the evening.