… and now I’m here.

Hey everybody,

I’ll try to write a few first impressions, altogether I’m fine, trying to get used to the weather and the different culture.

The way from the airport in Mumbai to Pune was already an adventure. It is one thing to watch videos on youtube that show crazy traffic scenes, but suddenly to be in the middle of the chaos is alone worth a visit of India. We got picked up in Mumbai and it took us about 3 hours to get to Pune. Strangely I didn’t worry too much and felt safe the whole time. As we got told, traffic rules do exist in India, however nobody really cares about them and usually the bigger or stronger car wins. The streets were crowded with cars, trucks, persons (sometimes whole families) on motorbikes, pedestrians, and of course street dogs (despite of the time, it was 2 am). Everybody was honking, sometimes leaning out of the window to emphasize the intention of changing a lane. However lanes are not regarded as that important anyway…
Well, we got to our apartment, and the highway from Mumbai to Pune is really good. It was fun.

Today we spent a few hours at work (most of the time just waiting) and at the local registration office. We were told by our mentor that bureaucracy in India is even worse than in Germany. I didn’t believe it at first, but now officials here even know now how many pillows we have in our beds … however that went well too. We had great help and although at the end it turned out that most of us didn’t have to register at all, we were accompanied the whole time by a nice guy from our company. Without him, no chance we would ever have managed the whole process!!!

Oh yeah, and we already got lost twice. It was kind of funny both times, and we survived (what honestly is not THAT easy for German pedestrians in Pune’s traffic).

The first two days were very intense. We had a lot of things to do, oh and of course we went to dinner twice and had really, really delicious indian food. :)

Sorry, I’m too exhausted to write more for now. I will add a few pictures to show some first impressions. I'm sure things will slow down here eventually and I'll have more time to write.

that's our group, still in Heidelberg


our arrival in Mumbai, happy to be in the right car and on the way to Pune


It is fun to take rikschaws for transportation. Especially if they drop you of at the right place... otherwise ... well, we survived. :-)






That's close to our apartment building