We made it! First Days!

Hello Friends and Family!

We’ve been in Pune 2 days. It feels like 2 weeks!

We arrived 7am on Wednesday morning, after a 3 hr ride from the Mumbai airport. Nanded City – the part of Pune where we’re staying – is a big residential “city” on the outskirts of Pune. It has 60,000 people packed into high rises on 700 acres, and has a community center, Eco Park, some schools, shopping, etc. Everything seems conveniently located.

Navigating everything however is not easy. We are incredibly grateful to Nachiket and Shilpa, Parag’s cousins, who have helped us ENORMOUSLY. Not only are we staying with them, and enjoying amazing meals (Acadia rates Shilpa’s chole as top in the world!) and good company, but they’ve helped us with logistics that seem more complex than you’d expect. Renting furniture, for example, we couldn’t just do ourselves. It required not only a copy of our lease (which by the way itself required our pictures, our thumbprints, and signatures, along with seal), but his cousin’s ID card and some other documents.

For highlights, the girls had a blast yesterday playing and making friends with the small gaggle of tutees that Shilpa has every day after school. Here’s a picture of them playing “Sharks and Minnows.”

The girls have also become a favorite “cousin” to Nachiket and Shilpa’s neighbor, Swayam, who is a very sweet 5 year-old boy who knows a little English.

Two more fun pics — Here’s some jetlagged people :-).

And here are Cadi and Alex at Eco Park on our first day here.

Warning: This paragraph may not be of interest to a general audience, but is fascinating to me!

Systems here are totally different. It’s fascinating to learn them, and to see how the systems definitely promote a smaller footprint than our American style! First, there is wet garbage and dry garbage. The wet garbage is essentially compost. It’s collected here in the city and used for fertilizer and soil in the parks. I don’t know what yet happens to the dry garbage, but there isn’t much of it. There’s one small bag under a sink, and I’d say they create less than a gallon of trash each day. Second, there’s a card for water. Electricity is the same. You have to “charge” or load the card, and then the card goes in a little wall unit in your apartment (electricity), or you just swipe the card near the meter (water). There are separate cards for cold and hot (where you’re charged more for hot). As you use the water, it keeps track. When you get low, it warns you, and you have to fill it back up. You can buy as much as you want, but it makes you super aware of your use! Water is even more regulated than electricity in that there’s only hot water from 5:30 am to 10am. So if you want a shower, or to do laundry, that’s your time! Or else, a nice refreshing one is available later in the day .