Let the journey begin!

It started as a silly thought, then it became my dream and then reality until finally tomorrow it will start - my long awaited exchange in India. The reaction when I tell that I am spending the rest of the year in India is from "wow, awesome" to a long list of advice and horror stories. You hear at the same time both extremely positive things about the country and  stories so cruel and disgusting you wish you hadn't heard it. I will go and judge myself  - somehow I have a feeling I will love it. 

I will be studying at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIAM). I will be living on the campus in single room but with shared facilities. I read that the university uses case studies as a teaching method, on the campus I can buy pretty much anything and that the food will be not too spicy. The city is rather small on the Indian context, with only some 4 million inhabitants. Ahmadabad is known for instance for being the home town of Gandhi for several decades. He established the Satyagraha Ashram, now a museum called Gandhi Ashram, in 1915. His famous Dandi March against the salt tax which the British wanted to implement, started in Ahmadabad in 1930. I will write more about the university and the city once I get there, but right now I can't wait to learn more and see it all with my own eyes! 

Applying for the visa was high on my priority list, and thank god my job this summer was flexible with the working hours so I could visit the Indian Embassy during working hours. The employees at the embassy in Helsinki were very helpful and the process was really fast. However, after they granted me the visa I had to wait for a month or so before I could collect my passport, which felt a little strange. Usually students are granted only single entry visas ("when you study there is no time for travelling") but I asked for a double entry visa and got it. Maybe it helped that I told I was planning to visit Nepal and the person handling my visa application was from Kathmandu. 

Communication with the university was rather slow in the beginning, but towards the end I started receiving more and more emails. For the visa I needed an acceptance paper from IIMA and after waiting for a month and contacting again, I finally got it. I also had to be proactive with questions related to housing and courses. Anyway, now I have two buddies from IIMA, I know where I need to be Monday morning and I have chosen the courses now. I can change them still before the fourth class, which is good because we got only the names of the courses and no description. 

Earlier this year when I was in Zagreb, I prepared rather poorly because it came with such a short notice. It was not a problem but I realized there how nice it would've been to learn a few words in Croatian before arriving. So, this summer I completed a Hindi course to learn the alphabet, some grammar and basic words. It is incredible difficult and frustrating to learn a new alphabet. I like languages and usually I am a fast learner but in the beginning it is just about memorizing the letters. And Hindi has only some 50 so it is not even that much. Actually, in Gujarat they speak Gujarati so let's see how much use the course has been.