curmudgeon

Completey OT, The only day in elementary school geography worth remembering.

andi

Thanks so much for posting the report- I'm looking forward to hearing more about her trip. I bet there were big hugs all around upon her return!

interesteddad

Yeah. Especially because we had heard very little from her in India. Inconvenient Internet cafes and a schedule that just didn't allow for e-mail time.

interesteddad

And the final bit of good news. My daughter's large bag was lost (for the second time) on her return home from India. This one was really annoying because she had it in her hand going thru customs at JFK and then rechecked it for the short direct flight to Boston.

It contained EVERYTHING she had bought on her travels plus storage cards from her camera with over 1200 photos. Delta finally managed to find it today, four days later! Yippee!

interesteddad

BTW: a practical tip for parents of study abroad students. Thanks to the wonders of Google searches, you can probably follow along their travels by finding photos of places they visit.

For example, I found this photo of the beach on the southern tip of India where my daughter and five friends went for a weekend getaway:

http://www.indiamike.com/photopost/s.../cat//size/big

They rented two bamboo huts at the top of the cliffs, $1 per person per night:

http://www.indiamike.com/photopost/s.../cat//size/big

mini

Ah, been there, done that!

Congrats on the successful return (d. and bags) home!

Doubt that Microsoft or Infosys run two hours late in Bangalore. They would, if their workers had to fight traffic. That's why they build their housing around the workplaces.

If she ever wants to return to India, boy, do I have a deal for you....

interesteddad

Yeah. Daughter's case study in India was the Bangalore Mysore Infrastructure Corridor -- a massive highway project connecting the two cities with plans for self-contained industrical districts along the route. They slept on the concrete floor of a silk worm farm in the middle of nowhere along the route.

Quite a contrast to several days in the "New Socialist Countryside" outside of Beijing, where "farming" communities are being equipped with fancy guest houses and tourist amenities so that visitors to the Olympics can see "the Chinese countryside". Kind of like the Chinese equivalent of Vermont, I guess!

mini

Often, the number of homeless people reflects the growing wealth of a city, soaring housing prices, and the need for a surplus labor force. Years ago, I used to see hundreds of families living in unlaid sewer pipes on the outskirts of the Gujarati city of Surat. As the pipes were laid (by these same people), their families would move to the next set of pipes.

Mysore used to be among my favorite cities in all of India, a place of great culture and arts under the Woodeyar princes. Bangalore to me is unrecognizable.

interesteddad

On the other hand, Bangalore was the outlier among the rapidly growing cities my daughter visited. Buenos Aires, Beijing, Shanghai, and Singapore are all growing UP. From her descriptions (and photos), Bangalore is not seeing skyscraper growth....something that must be cultural, although it may be because Bangalore is a small town of only 5 million.

I love this photo (and caption) from Bangalore:

http://flickr.com/photos/44658211@N00/329315009/

It's very different style of development than, say Beijing, which is city of high-rise apartment buildings or Shanghai, which my daughter says reminds her of Las Vegas.

As far as homeless, I think the most moving days of my daughter's trip were two days visiting shanty towns in Buenos Aires....huge neighborhoods that appear as empty spaces on all the maps (they don't exist).

Homelessness was in the category of topics that were "not talked about" in China.

mini

There is that:

http://www.vakilhousing.com/vakil/aboutus/default.asp

But there are also massive high-rise complexes, built around the offices:

http://www.answers.com/topic/interna...park-bangalore

Have to search for some photos:

http://www.forbes.com/forbeslife/200...mcmansion.html

Meanwhile, we are building houses for $2,200. Costs have gone up from $1,200 two years ago as a result of the shortage of building materials brought about by the post-tsunami building boon. We've lost our free supply of sand, but the new coal-fired electrical plant has offered us all the free fly ash we can use, if we can get ourselves a fly-ash compactor (anyone got $45k to spare? It's only one year of fancy college education, and we can build 2,000 homes cheap if we can get a hold of one of these machines. Inquiries welcome!)

interesteddad

Right. There are self-contained live/work/play IT campus developments, but nothing on the scale of the high-rise apartments in China. It's actually an issue that my daughter's group discussed in their meetings with urban planners in each of the cities. In order to support the burgeoning urban populations, cities must grow up or else they simply devour the surrounding areas as they pave the entire country. For example, Indian planners envision an endless commercial corridor stretching from Bangalore to Mysore even while Banglore remains very inefficiently developed (two story structures as far as the eye can see).

I'm not particularly sold on the Chinese model, either -- high rise public housing.

In any case, the two countries appear to be fascinating contrasts. China has the infrastructure thing down to a science (thanks to a 10% annual economic growth rate), but has looming political issues with the government in a race against time on several fronts. India hasn't got a handle on infrastructure, but has a much more stable, sustainable political system.

BTW, I think my daughter might very well be interested in your housing project. I'll keep it in my hip pocket for the right time. She's really not receptive to questions from the parental units about specific possibilities emerging from her trip. I think she's still in the decompression mode and all the advice I've read is let them take the lead after returning from that kind of travel experience. She did have interaction with ex-pats in each country so I know that she is not oblivious to the possibilities. I think she's still assimilating and digesting.

cheers

My mother sent my boys the most marvelous set of books. I'm racing thorugh them before they are taken off to distant lands.

One of my favorites is a book called Oracle Bones written by Peter Hessler, the young Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker. He writes well and he has a keen eye for blending empirical observation with temporal interpretations of Chinese history. Hessler may be the English counterpart to Gao Xingjian. This book reminded me of Gao Xingjian's One Man's Bible

You and your D may enjoy it, idad. Hessler turns a cold eye on the many Bejing housing projects--and on life as an expatriate in China. (He spent three years as a Peace Corps volunteer before working his way into freelance journalism).

qwilde

interesteddad:

I read on the IHP website that you have to petition for the program? Was that true of your daughter? Unfortunately, it doesn't mention, which colleges actually endorse the program. What college does your daughter attend?

interesteddad

qwilde:

The IHP programs have a normal application procedure, just like any study abroad program. Application form, essay, professor recommendations, phone interview, etc. My sense is that it is reasonably competitive. They have to pay attention to whether or not a student understands the rigor of the program and can handle it. That is offset a bit by the expense of the program. Depending on how your college handles study abroad and financial aid, it can be one of the more expensive programs around, which tends to hold down the number of applicants. If a student is in good standing with a 3.0 GPA and comes across as someone who can handle the program, I think he or she would be accepted.

When I was looking into the program initially, I did some searches. It's an approved program for most elite colleges, although sometimes buried on the lists due to the fact that it doesn't fit a neat category such as "programs in Chile".

My daughter's group had 25 students. She was the only one from Swarthmore, but Swarthmore almost always sends one or two students per year on the various IHP programs. My daughter has been e-mailing with a sophmore who is applying for next fall.

Other colleges represented this past semester were Vassar, Wellesley, Barnard, UPenn, Harvard, Williams (they had two on this trip and have been regularly sending students), Bard, Berkeley, BU, Hunter, Trinity (TX), and Seattle Pacific University.

The longer list in the brochure of schools sending students in past years includes all of the Ivy League schools except Dartmouth and Cornell. Every LAC ever mentioned on College Confidential. Virtually all of the top-25 universities. And couple dozen top publics.

cheers:

Thanks for the Hessler recommendation. I passed it along to daughter and I'll look for it in the library.

Egelloca

Idad - thanks for a fascinating account of your daughter's study/travels.