It's 6:00 p.m. on Tuesday here in Hyderabad, India. I actually wrote this entry earlier today, but as I was about to send it, the power went out, and I lost everything. Apparently, the city of Hyderabad has regularly scheduled power outages; this one occurred a bit earlier than scheduled. I don't think this sort of thing would go over too well in the States, but here in India it's pretty much taken in stride. There's a lot of those types of things. Sometimes they offer a refreshing perspective and other times they're a little frustrating.
I left Denver for India on Sunday at noon. A little more than 30 hours later at 2:00 a.m. on Tuesday morning I arrived in Hyderabad, the capital of the south central state of Andhra Pradesh, India. I was met at the airport by two of my colleagues from the Geological Survey of India (GSI) -- Dr. Kumar Ayyasami, the Director of Paleontology for the Southern Region, and Mr. Anantharaman, a retired geologist. They drove me to my hotel in the city of Hyderabad. I had asked them to arrange more modest accommodations than the ones they arranged for me in 2006. These are definitely modest. They're in an unfinished concrete building and include a dank room with a hard bed, a sheet, and a blanket, a danker bathroom with a turkish toilet and a bucket-shower, and a diverse insect population. Not a big deal though; we'll be taking off for the field tomorrow morning.I'm definitely feeling the wear from the travel and the time difference, but tonight I'll go shopping for some supplies and get reaquainted with south Indian cooking.