Ahmedabad - day 1

After several successful attempts at running late while trying to catch airport coaches and connecting flights in Kista and Dubai (none of which were my own fault) and with three hours top of accumulated sleep, I finally arrived in Ahmedabad early this morning. As the sun was shining and temperatures had reached 30+ degrees Celsius, the Panama hat I so cleverly invested in recently proved to come in handy (and it was on sale!). We were immediately driven to IIMA, where we were then greeted by the merry men of the Student Activities Centre, who provided us with forms to fill in and the keys to our dorm rooms. The rooms, as can be seen on the photographs, are very plain and simple. A keen interior decorator myself, I would perhaps have tried to scale down the prison cell-esque approach to modern student housing, but I seriously can't complain. Definitely not as there's somebody else doing the cleaning for me, for as my closest friends and family know, cleaning remains the one activity in the world in which I prefer to engulf as little as possible.

Stage 2 in my settling-in process was to head for the Student Exchange Office to sort out more paperwork. The big question hanging in the air now was whether I would have to register with the local police authority. This is mandatory if you have a visa valid for more than 180 days; mine is a mere five-month student visa, but you never know where the sudden lapses that so characterize discrete bureaucracies might take you. Since having to register in about every single case requires not one but two trips to the police office, where service is not so swift as one might like, my relief was sincere that only one such visit was needed to decide I really wouldn't have had to go there in the first place. The waiting room provided napping space, so it wasn't a complete waste of time after all.

We took a ricksha back to the campus and I'm not going to claim we almost died in the process, as the chaos on India's roads is hugely exaggerated. Since nobody bothers about the traffic rules, misunderstandings of the kind "oh, were you just about to turn left here? I should have realized, as no sane person would ever try to do that, how foolish of me" seldom seem to occur. Traffic in Ahmedabad is no worse than in Moscow or Shanghai, it just contains more animals (fearless ones, especially the cows.. and donkeys..). In fact, animals are far more common to see here than anywhere else I've been (my first monkey stereotypically was consuming a banana at the time of spotting). All over the campus there are dogs. On some floors cats live. Pigeons are literally nesting in our hallways. And I have a lizard in my room. I've named him Pluto and decided he can stay so long as he behaves.