Dear friends and family,
That’s right. Jamie and I woke up at four this morning, took a one-hour train to Chennai, and a six-hour train to Bangalore, where we met with one of our advisers for our research projects at Mudumalai Wildlife Sanctuary. We’ll not see the others for five weeks! Barring weekend trips to visit with each other.
Anyways, since my last update we completed the rural orientation at CCOORR with a visit to a waterfall and to a great institution of higher learning and outreach run by Hindus (the Chinmaya Mission). We said good-bye to Mr Amalan, our excellent host and mediator, and to Mr Chandran and Siva who always made sure we ate enough. The people I meet here are badly underrepresented in my emails and photos but they are the most charming part of India. Just today an Indian student on the train helped us figure out the station’s rickshaws after telling us all about how he was studying for the U.S. GRE. He was in fact narrowing down a list of U.S. universities to which he was going to apply.
Today the autorickshaw driver took my new notebook accidentally when he forgot to hand it back to me when we got dropped off. That, and it turns out that somehow I have Stephen’s passport. Hopefully he has mine, far away though he is. I’ll get it eventually!
Good news, though: Dr Suresh, our adviser at Mudumalai, described two promising subjects for our research projects. Mine will most likely involve monitoring of the avian fauna of the national park’s environs, and Jamie will probably do a project on seed selection in legumes there. Exciting! Much is still to be determined. By this time tomorrow we will be at the field station settling in, and I will elaborate on my project of the next five weeks.
Over the past week I have finally been encountering the more beautiful India. Our first three weeks in Chennai were great, but nothing compares to a train ride through the peaceful, cool countryside. I anticipate that the forests of Mudumalai will be even better.
I hope school is going well for students and professors and that the autumn has brought good sweatshirt weather!
Ever your loving,
Isaac H.
pseudoisaac 