Day 1

Our adventures to get all sorted out with regard to administrative things here continue. There is a lot of miscommunication among people and we get bounced around a bit. The IT help desk experience was quite interesting, there were four girls all dressed in traditional saris working there and they seemed very reluctant to tell us anything, especially if it was not good news. This was probably the first IT help desk I have ever been to - and I've been to a lot that did not quickly and rapidly hand out lan cables to whomever needed them. The difference between this and the Queen's setup was pretty stunning. Without a l cable I am at the mercy of the wireless LAN which is causing me headaches in my room given my distance to the main building.

After that adventure So Scott and I were finally able to grad some food from both the convenience store on campus and the cafeteria. The convenience store is likely going to be a godsend - Diet Coke and KitKats! - but unfortunately conditioner is a foreign concept so I could only get Shampoo. I also bought two HUGE bottles of water to get me through the next couple days and other snacks etc.

The cafeteria is a mixed bag, I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that we are coming off a week off here since the place is half empty. The food is good but the western options are severely limited after breakfast. Breakfast has a mix of Indian curries, cereals and custom made omelets. The latter I suspect will be my lifeline for the next 6 weeks.

Lunch was a write off for both Scott and I. Out planned two hour naps extended to about 8 hours and we woke up for dinner. We decided to check out the other meal options besides the caf and walked into a smaller room beside it. We got a few looks from people which we attributed to our whiteness and I checked out the spread, which included tasty looking BBQ Chicken - neither Scott nor idea had had meat since Heathrow. The menu for the caf had the BBQ chicken so we signed up but there was no chicken to be found. We asked a few servers, most of whom have minimal English and eventually were told it was sold out. With a HEAPING serving of rice and various bean dishes Scott and I tried to get enough energy to get through until breakfast the next day.

After a coffee (for Scott) and some ill-adivised Ice Cream (for me) we went our separate ways to get some lingering Queen's work out of the way. On our way back we discovered that the beautiful peacock ofthe day are replaced by giant fruit bats at night. Kinda cool, but creepy - things are BIG. When I got back to my room, powered by DietCoke and weird square Indian Chocalte Chip Cookies, I finally finished by Dynamic Pricing sometime around 2:00AM. With the wireless network constantly flipping out on me I had to go out onto a table on the grass to send my Dynamic Pricing stuff to my team. Got eaten alive by mosquitos so luckily it was fast (FYI these are the malaria carrying mosquitos too :O ).

Tomorrow Scott and I are going to investigate going off campus to get some supplies, cigarettes for him, alarm clock + lan cable for me. Maybe we can also find some meat...