A Long, Rambling Post

Today we were scheduled to meet with a solar vendor and then to do a little site-seeing. Due to lack of cell phone and communication we had no idea what time we were suppose to go out. We finally got in contact with Rishi, Sam's brother-in-law later that morning and he took us out to yet another breakfast. Driving is an interesting experiance in India, and by interesting I mean terrifying. Basically anything with wheels share the road. The streets are clogged with bikes, Ricksaws, auto-ricksaws, people and cars and lanes don't seem to matter. Driving essentially comes down to flooring the car to make it through a gap, while narrowly missing cars, and mopeds, and then slamming on the breaks so you don't hit the ricksaw or random person making its way down the middle of the 'road'. We eventually made it a mini-mall kind of place and went to McDonalds(where else would we go to eat in India). The McDonalds here don't serve beef or pork. After Tejanks finished his delicious looking veg McMuffin we headed back to the hotel and meet one of our professional mentors Suresh Soman. We then headed to Gorguen(or however you spell it) to visit the first solar vendor. On the way there we stopped at a road side vendor, who cut open some coconuts for us to drink the water from. We waited there for around twenty minutes until our second professional mentor, Nitin Goel, arrived. We then continued on to met at the RGREP which was a park run completely on solar energy. The solar vendor we met with was Ankur Agarwal and he was the Founer and CEO of a small company call Advaitenergy. He was very knowledgable and gave us a lot of general information about PV's, as well as several rules of thumb that will help to determine the feasability of the project. The technical details and notes I took are the end of this entry. He confirmed that the data we planned to collect was more than adequate for the initial assessment which was great considering that a second assessment trip would be less than ideal. From the meeting it was evident that both our professional menotrs were very knowledgable in the field even though both claimed not to be experts. After the meeting we headed back to the hotel and Nitin and Suresh went home (both live in Delhi). Rishi arranged it that we could order pizza when we got back to the hotel(why eat Indian food when in India). We ordered some kind of pizza and it was...different. One of the guys that works in the hotel doesn't know english but every time we pass him he says "lookin fresh". Tejank and I then took a nap and Rishi woke us up to go site-seeing. We drove out to India Gate to see the memorial and it was pretty cool. For some reason the memorial was like a festival and reminded me of the Fourth of July at fire-work shows. There were a lot of people there and a lot of vendors seeing ice cream and different light-up toys and such. After the Gate we went back to the mall we had gone to that morning and finally got some Indian food. Rishi helped choose the food and it was great. The restaurant was South Indian was it wasn't too spicy and it had a lot of good desserts. The best part was that for three meal and two desserts, it only cost a little bit over 10 dollars. After dinner we looked around the shops a bit and then headed back to the hotel to sleep. Sorry for the long post, I can't tell a story in any kind of concise manner and tend to ramble.