Evening Tea, Conference Morning

Well dear reader, yesterday I left you in the morning –with a full day ahead of me –let me fill you in on its details.
I had been feeling quite apart from the life here, there are many friendly students living in this building, but like grad students anywhere in the world, they are not eminently sociable. I spent some time walking about, trying to catch a photo of one of the many exotic butterflies I’ve seen. Here is a picture of the walkway where I was sitting under a palm. To make some connections I took it upon myself to go have lunch in the dinning area to try to become a bit more sociably approachable. My plan backfired though. As I was getting in line for food a nice Nigerian student informed me that there is a special lunch in a nearby pavilion for the conference students. And off I went. There I met Manjo and Arun, grad student and post doc. We ate together, talked about science, India, California and compared cricket to baseball. Manjo gave me a tour of the labs in the institute. He works in MBE, so he impressed me with his ultra high vacuum (UHV) instruments. A notable point was that they clean the surface of silicon substrates by flashing at 1200 C under UHV. Then they can watch the deposition of gallium nitride on to the surface and observe its nanostructures. Very nice, pretty difficult work I think.
Later that afternoon, just before dinner, I went out with Arun and another student to have some tea just outside the campus. Here they are sitting and eating out samosas and tea (really chai). Both very good. We were pretty close to campus but it was exciting to have stepped outside for a moment. In the final picture below you can see the table where we sat. Across the street is the campus and the spot where I took the photo looking though the gate in my last blog post.
I played some afternoon badmitten, which was terribly fun. Not such a terrible performance on my part, I think experience with squash helped me there, but the students were pretty good. More games to come I’m sure.
Off to breakfast. First day of the school. Better get going.