How was your trip?

This is the most frequent question i got since Ianded in the midnight of sep 2nd. I thought I will just write a blog and redirect people here. 

In case you have not seen any of my status messages I ended up going to USA for a competition called International Aerial Robotics Competition. You can find the link to the competition here http://iarc.angel-strike.com/ . Nobody won this year. I will talk about the competition in a future post.

My travel path was the following chennai->San Juan(Puerto Rico, USA)->Mayaguez(Puerto Rico)->New York->Washington DC->Columbus(Ohio)->Dayton->Westchester->New york -> Chennai. I would say I did decent for a 20 day trip with the competition taking the first few days :).

I experienced a little of a lot of things.
Some Facts:
we are not any bad compared to USA in terms of the technical competency for building our robot.

Quite a few number of people even in US (general population) know about IITs. We met these Univ of Michigan guys and introduced ourselves that we are from IIT. One of the girl in their team comes the next day and says "Shit! You guys are like MIT in USA. I dint know that." I dont like telling people that we are from an awesome institute but I really like it when they find it out and come to us saying that. It gives some kind of ego pleasure i guess :)

Forts in US dwarf before the forts in India. They dont stand anywhere in comparison to the forts in India.

Hispanic girls are beautiful. no more comments :)

Salsa originated in the island where we stayed - puerto rico.

The island is a beautiful island with awesome beaches.

Puerto rico is a carribean island which was attacked by "pirates of carribean"

what I learnt:
I learnt
1)about about 25 words in spanish.

2) little bit of salsa. The learning stage progressed from terrible to bad. I met this very nice girl who taught me a couple of steps.

3) quite a bit of "how to start conversation with girls arbitrarily". This is pretty useful even here

4) that US guys are pretty methodical


5)that rum and booze taste decently bad. lost the fear for booze but I am still wary of them

6)the rules of poole-I could have learnt it here but never took time - and the guy taught me so well that I beat the guy who taught me in the first game :)



Some Interesting Incidents:

Incident 1:
New york hall of science(science museum):
female volunteer: oh. are you guys from India?
me: ya
female volunteer: do u guys know this famous college in India which is better than harvard, mit and stuff?
me: where did u hear about it?
female volunteer: CBS 60 minutes





me: we study there

 
silence for a couple of seconds
female volunteer: you have to throw all the three balls with the same force.
me: I cant throw with the same force
female volunteer: Have you not done science experiments? Dont you know that the external conditions should be same for the experiment

me: I did science experiments but I never did them right!


Incident 2:
Geography and Kedar went into quite a decent distance in the beach and they were swimming back. They saw a couple of girls in bikinis from distance who were playing in the beach. They started swimming towards them.

They just reached the beach and
girls: (smile)
Geography and kedar: Hello beautiful girls! We are from the ocean and we came to meet you!
(no comments on what happened next.)




ok. thats enough. The usual crib is that my posts are long! So I stop here. write to you later :) I will end this with quote from laplace which I found in the New york hall of science. Please click and open the photograph in a new window