The family comes on holiday

After the end of my term at IIM C I had arranged with my dad, that he and my brother would come to India, and we would travel for 1 month together.
They arrived on my birthday December 9 at Calcutta airport, I went to pick them up, so that I was sure they would get to the right place, after my own problems with the taxi driver that picked us up, I did not want to take any chances.
'I had arranged that they would live at campus with me for the first few days, so I had rented a room for them.
We spend the first days at campus, and in Calcutta so that they could get use to the heat, they came from below 0 in Denmark, so the 15-20 degrees we had in Calcutta, was a good change for them.
After the first few days we went to the makemytrip office in Calcutta, a travel agency that we had, had good experience with. They had planned our trip to Nepal for us.
We had decided that we wanted to take a trip to Rajasthan, and after that go back to Delhi for some days, to pick up my friend, then all of us would go to Goa for Christmas. For New Years we would go and see the Taj Mahal, and then finish the holiday with a few days back in Delhi, before going back home. For me this was a great way to finish my stay at IIMC
But first of all it was very fun to show my dad and brother the school and the city, even though we have traveled quite a bit, this was their first time in Asia, as it was for me.
I will write a post for each of the places we went to, Rajasthan, Goa and Taj Mahal.

The Sundarbans

At IIM C there are a lot of different club the students can attend, one of them is the adventure club. In the beginning of september the adventure club arranged a trip to the sundarbans. The sundarbans is a national park best known for its tigers and mangrove trees. It is located by the Bay of Bengal. Se more here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundarbans the trip started out Saturday morning at campus, where we were picked up by a bus, of course the bus was late :-) so we were just hanging out by one of the dorms at campus.

Finally the bus came and we were on the way. After a few hours of driving through the Calcutta traffic. After a few hours of driving we had a flat tire, so this meant us having a pit stop more, in a very small village in the middle of nowhere in West Bengal. Late in the evening we arrived at the dock where our boat were, the boat took us to a "hotel" within/close to the sundarbans, so that we could get some rest and an early start the next morning. The next pictures is from out "hotel"

The whole Sunday we were sailing around the sundarbans to see the area and maybe a tiger. No tigers showed up, but we got so see the beautiful mangrove trees and the rivers. Below there are a few pictures from the trip.

It was a great trip where I got to see some nature that are very different from the place where i grew up. :-)

My room at campus

Unop arriving I did not think much about how my room would be, I sort of imagined that it would be a lot like the dorm room I had at home. And in some ways it was, but there was also a few things that I had to get use to, for instance the lock. Of course this is just me being silly, and of course I got use to it very fast.

My room ended up being perfect since I did not end up spendng a lot of time in it anyway, between my classes, trips to the city and all of the pther stuff, I more or less just used it for sleeping and keeping my things.
Here are a few more pics of my room.

Arriving at campus

After the first week in Delhi we were flying to Calcutta. We arrived in the late afternoon, with rain and thunder. When we (me and 3 other student from CBS) arrived one of the guys had made sure that the school had booked a taxi for us that were waiting to pick us up. The interesting part came when we had to pack 4 Danes and all of their belongings for 3½ months into this kind of a car.

Not really the biggest car with the biggest trunk.... So we had all of our hand luggage on our laps inside the car. After some driving something strange happens - the driver turns around and says something in Bengali, of course no one understands what he is saying. After a bit more of driving the same thing happens, again some times passes and his phone rings. One of the guys I was travelling with got a bit of the context out of the phone call, he tunes to the rest of us and says" the driver do not know where we are going". So here we are in a taxi, in a city that has 4 times as many people as the whole of our coutry and our driver have no idea where we are going. And just to make it worse we have no chance of communicating with him because he only speaks Bengali and between the 4 of us we only manage, English, Urdo and a few other European languages... Of course we get really worried, but then some time passes again and the drivers phone rings. It seems he is getting some information and after 20 or 30 min more of driving we arrive at Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta. A bit releif to all of us.