Day 2 India: we’re all still pretty jet-lagged which means we’ve been up since around 4 am, going on about 3-4 hours of sleep, and feel like crashing in the middle of our evening keynotes. Hopefully we’ll adjust better after tonight as we don’t want to appear rude. Here’s a quick recap of the day. Had another monster breakfast before heading out by bus to Jaipur. It’s about 160 miles but takes about 5 hours on Indian roads. It was nice to know we were heading out of the intense smog of Delhi, however I was surprised how long it took it to disappear (4 plus hours). The scenery along the way was pretty much the same impoverished state of livelihood, all along the highway the entire time. Smaller villages would turn into more urban areas before somewhat shrinking again, but the level of well-being unfortunately appeared about the same until we got to Jaipur and then only the size of the city really changed. A lot of the poverty still seemed to exist.
Jaipur is known as the pink city. We have a walking tour bright and early tomorrow which will be a nice follow up to the lecture we had this evening (at the AIIS language school) on Jaipur history, development, and urban sustainability challenges. We were welcomed to the school with a lovely ceremony being blessed with a bindi (red dot over the third eye) rice and a rose. Had dinner there after the evening keynote and then gladly came back to the hotel (which will be our home base for 4 nights.)
I’m posting more pics than I thought since I think they turned out ok (especially considering I took almost all of through the bus window) and really give you a perspective of what I’ve seen today. I encourage you to click and zoom around on them a bit. There’s a lot going on in each of them. Most of these reflect both Indian work and home environments for millions of people. So much I could say about here and back home, but I’ll let the juxtaposition of my photos throughout the day, do the talking for themselves.
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