Friday, April 25, 2008
More photos
I've finally got the rest of the Indian photos online.
There are 70 of them, so I'd recommend using the slideshow option for viewing. Ah, the joys of iWeb. Having said that, I'll be moving them over here at some point in the near-ish future so they get a more sensible URL. And a link from my homepage, for that matter.
In other news, I've sorted out my trip to Valencia. There were one or two fairly major issues which needed attending to but I'm now flying out under my own name and staying in a hotel organised by the summit organisers (who know that I'll be attending the entire event). I haven't managed to sort out my expenses for the last trip yet, so I'm definitely looking forward to getting paid on Thursday. :)
A photo of my silly hat has been requested. Well here it is. It is very, very silly. Perhaps I should run a competition at Revel for the silliest hat, just so that I'm not along in my silly-hat-ness:
Very silly indeed. I've yet to line the veil, but it is officially wearable at this point.
0 comments
There are 70 of them, so I'd recommend using the slideshow option for viewing. Ah, the joys of iWeb. Having said that, I'll be moving them over here at some point in the near-ish future so they get a more sensible URL. And a link from my homepage, for that matter.
In other news, I've sorted out my trip to Valencia. There were one or two fairly major issues which needed attending to but I'm now flying out under my own name and staying in a hotel organised by the summit organisers (who know that I'll be attending the entire event). I haven't managed to sort out my expenses for the last trip yet, so I'm definitely looking forward to getting paid on Thursday. :)
A photo of my silly hat has been requested. Well here it is. It is very, very silly. Perhaps I should run a competition at Revel for the silliest hat, just so that I'm not along in my silly-hat-ness:
Very silly indeed. I've yet to line the veil, but it is officially wearable at this point.
Labels: India
0 comments
Saturday, April 19, 2008
Hot hot hot!
The temperature in Delhi today was about 45° C.
The original plan for the day, to go up to Agra to see the Taj Mahal, went out of the window with the weather forecast. 120 miles each way on Indian roads in this sort of heat is not to be recommended even for locals. Instead, then, we concentrated on some of the monuments that Delhi/New Delhi has to offer.
First stop: the Red Fort. This was built in 1638 by Shah Jehan. It is an incredible fusion of Moslem, Hindu. Christian, Sikh and Buddhist art, as the emperor designed the palace so that all of his subjects would find something there to make them feel valued and included.
The outer curtain wall - the postcard photo of the fort - was build later to protect the palace. The geometric design of the palace and the garden make it quite peaceful even though it's full of tourists (almost all Indian, which was good to see).
The Red Fort is in Old Delhi, not New Delhi, which is the southern part of the metropolis. Old Delhi was the original capital, while New Delhi was the British capital. The British architecture is very clear in Connaught Place, the centre of New Delhi, which consists of a large circular garden surrounded by a ring of buildings designed by Luteyns, now filled with shops (including the MacDonalds where we had lunch). I was very good and didn't go shopping - mainly because after this morning's ...er... distraction, I managed to leave my main purse in my work bag not my hand bag. D'oh! Still, it did mean that I didn't go wild and buy up the entire contents of the bazaar at the Red Fort. :)
After lunch we headed further south again, this time to the Qutub Minar, a huge sandstone tower that was the minaret for the first mosque in India. It is, indeed, huge. It's also built within what was originally a Hindu temple complex dating back to the 5th century AD. This is also the site of the Ashoka Pillar, which I recognised immediately from my teenage reading of Eric von Danieken. :) Just so that we have the requisite Nik in India photo, here I am with the minar and the pillar, and also my friend and guide Bilal beside one of the carved archways:
As these are predominantly Moghul (and hence Islamic) architecture there are large sections which are decorated with calligraphy and geometric designs rather than images. This was also the case at our next stop, Humayun's Tomb. This was the tomb of the second of the Moghul emperors, and is the direct inspiration for the Taj Mahal:
It has been restored by the Aga Khan Foundation, so it's in very good repair with working fountains, ponds and streams. I was a bit surprised here to find that all of the decoration is geometric rather than calligraphic. This simplicity makes it a very serene place. It's generally only visited by overseas tourists so it's a lot quieter than the other monuments. In particular I love the carved screens that fill some of the archways, providing light and air while still enclosing the interior space:
By this point I was definitely wilting in the heat, so we finished our tour with the parliament building and the viceregal palace. Now that was impressive. My sense of scale has been warped by Liverpool's anglican cathedral, which leaves me thinking of places like St. Paul's as small, but the viceregal palace and the parade ground it encloses is officially big. It was also very atmospheric; it was very easy to imagine it full of troops decked out in dress uniforms, sunlight glittering off buttons and lance points...
We'd been out doing the tourist thing for about six hours and I was quite relieved to return to the hotel to have a rest before dinner. I was definitely sun-touched and fell asleep immediately. Later I received a call to tell me that the piece of jewellery I'd ordered had arrived. Well, I had to go downstairs and get that. It is what I was hoping for, and will go beautifully with my Tudor gowns. :)
B collected me again at about 20:30 to go off for dinner. On the way we drove past Jantar Mantar, the set of six astronomical instruments build by the astronomer-mathematician-poet-king Sawai Jai Singh of Jaipur in 1734. The site was, of course, closed by now but I was very happy to actually see these devices. I'm just going to have to come back to Delhi again to see them in the daylight.
We then went on to Nizamuddin, one of the Moslem areas of the city, to see the mausoleums of two of the Sufi saints. This was a fascinating place, as I'd never been into a mosque complex before - complete with poets, singers and musicians. Going later in the evening was a good idea, because it's generally quite busy during the day as the saints are revered not just by the Moslem community but also by the Christian and Hindu communities.
Dinner was at a local restaurant called Karim's which, B tells me, is the oldest traditional Mughal restaurant in Delhi. I was quite adventurous and had chicken Mughal - it seemed quite appropriate - which was absolutely delicious. I might well add this to my list of favourite Indian dishes (to go with the chicken Dhansak).
Our return to the hotel was delayed slightly by the fact that the hotel is playing host to a rather large wedding, and as we arrived the groom had also just arrived on his brightly-caparisoned horse.
Tomorrow I fly home. It's a shame, as I could quite happily have spent a week here visiting museums and monuments. There's only one thing for it: I'll just have to come back.
1 comments
The original plan for the day, to go up to Agra to see the Taj Mahal, went out of the window with the weather forecast. 120 miles each way on Indian roads in this sort of heat is not to be recommended even for locals. Instead, then, we concentrated on some of the monuments that Delhi/New Delhi has to offer.
First stop: the Red Fort. This was built in 1638 by Shah Jehan. It is an incredible fusion of Moslem, Hindu. Christian, Sikh and Buddhist art, as the emperor designed the palace so that all of his subjects would find something there to make them feel valued and included.
The outer curtain wall - the postcard photo of the fort - was build later to protect the palace. The geometric design of the palace and the garden make it quite peaceful even though it's full of tourists (almost all Indian, which was good to see).
The Red Fort is in Old Delhi, not New Delhi, which is the southern part of the metropolis. Old Delhi was the original capital, while New Delhi was the British capital. The British architecture is very clear in Connaught Place, the centre of New Delhi, which consists of a large circular garden surrounded by a ring of buildings designed by Luteyns, now filled with shops (including the MacDonalds where we had lunch). I was very good and didn't go shopping - mainly because after this morning's ...er... distraction, I managed to leave my main purse in my work bag not my hand bag. D'oh! Still, it did mean that I didn't go wild and buy up the entire contents of the bazaar at the Red Fort. :)
After lunch we headed further south again, this time to the Qutub Minar, a huge sandstone tower that was the minaret for the first mosque in India. It is, indeed, huge. It's also built within what was originally a Hindu temple complex dating back to the 5th century AD. This is also the site of the Ashoka Pillar, which I recognised immediately from my teenage reading of Eric von Danieken. :) Just so that we have the requisite Nik in India photo, here I am with the minar and the pillar, and also my friend and guide Bilal beside one of the carved archways:
As these are predominantly Moghul (and hence Islamic) architecture there are large sections which are decorated with calligraphy and geometric designs rather than images. This was also the case at our next stop, Humayun's Tomb. This was the tomb of the second of the Moghul emperors, and is the direct inspiration for the Taj Mahal:
It has been restored by the Aga Khan Foundation, so it's in very good repair with working fountains, ponds and streams. I was a bit surprised here to find that all of the decoration is geometric rather than calligraphic. This simplicity makes it a very serene place. It's generally only visited by overseas tourists so it's a lot quieter than the other monuments. In particular I love the carved screens that fill some of the archways, providing light and air while still enclosing the interior space:
By this point I was definitely wilting in the heat, so we finished our tour with the parliament building and the viceregal palace. Now that was impressive. My sense of scale has been warped by Liverpool's anglican cathedral, which leaves me thinking of places like St. Paul's as small, but the viceregal palace and the parade ground it encloses is officially big. It was also very atmospheric; it was very easy to imagine it full of troops decked out in dress uniforms, sunlight glittering off buttons and lance points...
We'd been out doing the tourist thing for about six hours and I was quite relieved to return to the hotel to have a rest before dinner. I was definitely sun-touched and fell asleep immediately. Later I received a call to tell me that the piece of jewellery I'd ordered had arrived. Well, I had to go downstairs and get that. It is what I was hoping for, and will go beautifully with my Tudor gowns. :)
B collected me again at about 20:30 to go off for dinner. On the way we drove past Jantar Mantar, the set of six astronomical instruments build by the astronomer-mathematician-poet-king Sawai Jai Singh of Jaipur in 1734. The site was, of course, closed by now but I was very happy to actually see these devices. I'm just going to have to come back to Delhi again to see them in the daylight.
We then went on to Nizamuddin, one of the Moslem areas of the city, to see the mausoleums of two of the Sufi saints. This was a fascinating place, as I'd never been into a mosque complex before - complete with poets, singers and musicians. Going later in the evening was a good idea, because it's generally quite busy during the day as the saints are revered not just by the Moslem community but also by the Christian and Hindu communities.
Dinner was at a local restaurant called Karim's which, B tells me, is the oldest traditional Mughal restaurant in Delhi. I was quite adventurous and had chicken Mughal - it seemed quite appropriate - which was absolutely delicious. I might well add this to my list of favourite Indian dishes (to go with the chicken Dhansak).
Our return to the hotel was delayed slightly by the fact that the hotel is playing host to a rather large wedding, and as we arrived the groom had also just arrived on his brightly-caparisoned horse.
Tomorrow I fly home. It's a shame, as I could quite happily have spent a week here visiting museums and monuments. There's only one thing for it: I'll just have to come back.
Labels: India
1 comments
Friday, April 18, 2008
Horn please
This is written, in brightly coloured letters, across the back of every large vehicle in Delhi.
The calligraphy is generally quite beautiful, leaning towards the Carolingian, and the drivers of these vehicles - truckwallahs - don't move unless you honk at them. The trucks (and buses) are themselves often brightly painted, and I saw several during my travels today decorated with large paintings of Ganesha and Lakshmi.
I got to see these quite close up as I took the journey from Delhi to the Institute of Management Technology in the satellite city of Ghaziabad. Ghaziabad is actually in the neighbouring state, so I couldn't get a normal metered taxi but instead hired a private car with a driver. Normally this would be an 8-hour hire for a fixed price of about 5000 rupees (£1 is about 75 rupees) but as I was going to be away for 12 hours it made much more sense to hire him for the two journeys (about an hour each way), leaving him free to do other things during the day. This dropped the price to 2000 plus border tolls, and I considering the skill with which he wove through the chaotic traffic I was quite happy with this (it's considerably less than the cost of a taxi from Reykjavík to Keflavík airport for about the same distance).
The conference venue was a modern campus on the outside of Ghaziabad. It has its own arboretum (with labelled trees and squirrels), tennis courts and internal courtyards. Inside the entrance was the Om, written on the floor in flowers (the photo is from a little later in the day by which point part of the symbol had been disrupted a little, but you get the idea):
I was handed my conference pack and ushered into the Special Guests reception with the other overseas guests - from Brazil, Alaska, Turkey and Sweden... although of all of the countries of origin I think that only one person (one of the Swedes) wasn't an ex-pat. We then had the opening ceremony, during which the organisers and the two VIPs gave light to the event. This is an Indian tradition at the start of any new undertaking (such as a conference, opening a shop or moving house) where lamps are lit to bring light (and therefore good fortune) on the undertaking. I rather like this custom. The lamp in this case was a large brass thing over a metre high which supported five separate flames and a curious brass bird:
The conference was then officially open, and we began with a set of keynote speeches before hi tea - elevenses with added parathas - and then we were into the first session. This was the one in which I gave my presentation (slides and original paper), that went down very well, particularly as I could confirm that it was all primary data (most of the other papers were based on the analysis of other researchers' data). The editor of one of the US-based peer-reviewed marketing journals wants to put it in his next issue - woo-hoo!
This was also the first of the two sessions I chaired (Challenges and opportunities in e-marketing), and I was rather surprised at the beginning of the session to be presented with a bunch of flowers, and even more surprised at the end of the session to be presented with this:
I've seen how they make these on How It Works but I'd never thought I'd actually own one. After a light lunch I chaired my second session (Internet banking and CRM in banking(, which resulted in a lot of lively discussion about the role of internet banking in rural India, plus more flowers and this:
So I now have not one, but two acrylic awards for my office and a couple of bunches of flowers (now sitting in glasses of water in the corner of the hotel room - they won't survive the trip back to Iceland (nor, I suspect, count as legal imports) but I did at least photograph them:
Next came lunch, during which I was invited to join the editorial team of a peer-reviewed cross-disciplinary journal. That's (probably) fine by me - it helps the journal to have European names associated with it and gets me points on my stigamat (ah, the tyranny of the academic review board!). Then it was off to the final technical panel of the day, two papers and something of a rant on the topic of innovation from the session chairman; nothing two strenuous other than that. Unfortunately the two papers I was looking forward to in that session weren't presented (thus giving time for the chairman's rant) but one of them on wifi mesh networks was quite interesting.
There was then a bit of a breather, during which people wandered away for a rest and I wrote a question for my Java programming exam paper. :) We then reconvened for drinks and dinner - although as we were running over an hour late and my taxiwallah was waiting I didn't actually get to eat more than the pre-meal chicken nibbles. No worries; the hotel has a 24 hour coffee shop. :)
Even at ten o'clock in the evening the roads were packed and filled with the peep peeeeeep of car horns. It's now almost midnight local time (18:30 Zulu) so I'm still quite awake and jet-lagged. This may be a problem, given that I have an 07:30 departure tomorrow to get up to Agra. I must remember to pack the ibuprofen, as although I seldom get travel sick the chaotic nature of car travel here did leave me feeling a little queasy on the way back this evening. I shall attempt to go to sleep anyway. Maybe the after-effects of this morning's 06:30 rising will kick in soon.
1 comments
The calligraphy is generally quite beautiful, leaning towards the Carolingian, and the drivers of these vehicles - truckwallahs - don't move unless you honk at them. The trucks (and buses) are themselves often brightly painted, and I saw several during my travels today decorated with large paintings of Ganesha and Lakshmi.
I got to see these quite close up as I took the journey from Delhi to the Institute of Management Technology in the satellite city of Ghaziabad. Ghaziabad is actually in the neighbouring state, so I couldn't get a normal metered taxi but instead hired a private car with a driver. Normally this would be an 8-hour hire for a fixed price of about 5000 rupees (£1 is about 75 rupees) but as I was going to be away for 12 hours it made much more sense to hire him for the two journeys (about an hour each way), leaving him free to do other things during the day. This dropped the price to 2000 plus border tolls, and I considering the skill with which he wove through the chaotic traffic I was quite happy with this (it's considerably less than the cost of a taxi from Reykjavík to Keflavík airport for about the same distance).
The conference venue was a modern campus on the outside of Ghaziabad. It has its own arboretum (with labelled trees and squirrels), tennis courts and internal courtyards. Inside the entrance was the Om, written on the floor in flowers (the photo is from a little later in the day by which point part of the symbol had been disrupted a little, but you get the idea):
I was handed my conference pack and ushered into the Special Guests reception with the other overseas guests - from Brazil, Alaska, Turkey and Sweden... although of all of the countries of origin I think that only one person (one of the Swedes) wasn't an ex-pat. We then had the opening ceremony, during which the organisers and the two VIPs gave light to the event. This is an Indian tradition at the start of any new undertaking (such as a conference, opening a shop or moving house) where lamps are lit to bring light (and therefore good fortune) on the undertaking. I rather like this custom. The lamp in this case was a large brass thing over a metre high which supported five separate flames and a curious brass bird:
The conference was then officially open, and we began with a set of keynote speeches before hi tea - elevenses with added parathas - and then we were into the first session. This was the one in which I gave my presentation (slides and original paper), that went down very well, particularly as I could confirm that it was all primary data (most of the other papers were based on the analysis of other researchers' data). The editor of one of the US-based peer-reviewed marketing journals wants to put it in his next issue - woo-hoo!
This was also the first of the two sessions I chaired (Challenges and opportunities in e-marketing), and I was rather surprised at the beginning of the session to be presented with a bunch of flowers, and even more surprised at the end of the session to be presented with this:
I've seen how they make these on How It Works but I'd never thought I'd actually own one. After a light lunch I chaired my second session (Internet banking and CRM in banking(, which resulted in a lot of lively discussion about the role of internet banking in rural India, plus more flowers and this:
So I now have not one, but two acrylic awards for my office and a couple of bunches of flowers (now sitting in glasses of water in the corner of the hotel room - they won't survive the trip back to Iceland (nor, I suspect, count as legal imports) but I did at least photograph them:
Next came lunch, during which I was invited to join the editorial team of a peer-reviewed cross-disciplinary journal. That's (probably) fine by me - it helps the journal to have European names associated with it and gets me points on my stigamat (ah, the tyranny of the academic review board!). Then it was off to the final technical panel of the day, two papers and something of a rant on the topic of innovation from the session chairman; nothing two strenuous other than that. Unfortunately the two papers I was looking forward to in that session weren't presented (thus giving time for the chairman's rant) but one of them on wifi mesh networks was quite interesting.
There was then a bit of a breather, during which people wandered away for a rest and I wrote a question for my Java programming exam paper. :) We then reconvened for drinks and dinner - although as we were running over an hour late and my taxiwallah was waiting I didn't actually get to eat more than the pre-meal chicken nibbles. No worries; the hotel has a 24 hour coffee shop. :)
Even at ten o'clock in the evening the roads were packed and filled with the peep peeeeeep of car horns. It's now almost midnight local time (18:30 Zulu) so I'm still quite awake and jet-lagged. This may be a problem, given that I have an 07:30 departure tomorrow to get up to Agra. I must remember to pack the ibuprofen, as although I seldom get travel sick the chaotic nature of car travel here did leave me feeling a little queasy on the way back this evening. I shall attempt to go to sleep anyway. Maybe the after-effects of this morning's 06:30 rising will kick in soon.
Labels: India
1 comments