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Wednesday, March 13: Road to Pune

All fourteen of us have experienced some disordered sleep in the past few days. After last night's midnight adventure, though, I had no trouble falling asleep and, in fact, couldn't believe it was morning when the alarm went off. I've figured out that colleagues in the U.S. are active while I'm sleeping, so the e-mail inbox is overflowing when I wake up. I dispatch some responses and then will hear back the next morning. Not a lot of time to read messages this morning because we had to check out after breakfast.

We assembled in the hotel lobby with our luggage. Everyone marveled at the economy of my packing. While most Fulbrighters carried two large roller bags and a backpack, I fit everything into one carry-on thanks to Donald's savvy Christmas shopping. Our guide has already warned us that when we take a domestic flight on Friday, Indian airlines strictly limit the weight of checked bags. That led to a small skirmish over who would get to claim my unused baggage allocation. One colleague even took a photo of my bag so she could buy one when she returned home.

The trip to Pune took about four hours with Mumbai traffic. Passing through the suburbs, I noticed scores of tall buildings, many with cranes still attached but with work seemingly halted. The billboards, mostly in English, speak to the consumerist trend of a growing middle class. You never forget you're in a developing country, though, when you see the shantytowns on the side of the road and the risk-taking rickshaw drivers zoom across red lights.

On the road to Pune, we stretched our legs at a rest stop.
Traveling with the fourteen of us today were Josmi, the program coordinator and logistics whiz, and Reshmi, the academic facilitator. Adam, the Delhi-based director of USIEF, returned home, and Ryan, the head of the USIEF Mumbai office, will catch up with us later. They've all been knowledgeable and honest culture brokers, explaining everything from the dot (bindi) women wear between their eyes to the Indian system of counting, which has distinct words for 100,000 (lakh) and 10 million (crore).

No university visits today. We arrived at the hotel, a luxurious but more modest version of our accommodations in Mumbai. Pune is known as the cultural capital of Maharashtra, the state that includes Mumbai. Instead of skyscrapers, Pune has low-slung markets and historic sites. We ate a quick lunch buffet and then climbed back on the bus for a guided tour of the city.

The palace where Gandhi lived under house arrest.
Our first stop was the Aga Khan palace, a walled, leafy compound on the edge of the city. It was here that the British sequestered Gandhi before independence. The rooms display tributes to Gandhi, and our guide clearly revered "the father of the nation." Gandhi's wife died while they were held there, and we visited the memorial for her. We also toured an idiosyncratic museum inside a sprawling house downtown. The museum founders had collected 19th century crafts and art from around India with the only criteria being aesthetic beauty. They displayed them across several floors of their house, a kind of Indian Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
The museum transplanted an opulent royal sitting room.
The formal itinerary ended when we returned to the hotel around 6 pm. I took the opportunity to launder some clothes in the bathroom sink and visit the gym. Some of the fellow Fulbrighters ate around the illuminated pool. We all planned to go to bed early because the routine of two university visits resumes early tomorrow morning.

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