From: danny@cs.usyd.edu.au (Danny Yee)
To: Postcard-List:;
Date: Thu, 19 Nov 1998 15:01:56 +1000
Subject: Postcard - Pune, India

We've arrived safe and sound in India, and are now in Pune, Maharashtra.
So far we've just been having classes/lectures, but the project visits
start this afternoon, and tomorrow we break up into groups of 4 for travel
to outlying areas of the state.

I'm travelling with a really great group of people
(there are 20 of us altogether, including the two
leaders) and I suspect we'd manage to have fun even
if we were stranded on a desert island and not in one
of the most happening places on the planet.

The computer setup here is really pretty flash --
the street our hotel is on (admittedly next to
one of the colleges) boasts a dozen or more
places offering Internet access, with rates from 50
to 90 Rp per hour (about US1.10 to US$2).  The connection
speeds leave anything I found in Britain or France last
year for dead, too!  I'm typing this in notepad on
a PII-266 with 80MB of memory running Win98... (they
have a modem per computer and no LAN that I can see,
though, ...)


It feels like Indonesia in many ways, and I've
even started speaking Indonesian a couple of times!
Almost everyone seems to speak English, though the
street signs are all in devanagari which I can't make
out at all.  Hardly any beggars (despite all the warnings) and the locals just ignore me for the most
part - stray Westerners are obviously not that unusual,
or just not that interesting.  (I went for a 15km hike
across central Pune on Tuesday, by myself, so this isn't
just true of the affluent area we are staying in.)


It's 9.50 here and our project briefings start in 10
minutes, so I'll sign off for now.  (The modem just dropped out and is redialling.)

I hope you are all healthy and happy,

Love,

Danny.