Day 13 Oct 30 2009 - First meeting with IBM in Ahmedabad, Start of Udaipur weekend

As Friday was the day we had planned to go to Udaipur, we went to work somewhat earlier to document the week's new results as well as to prepare for the meeting with the IBM Territory Sales person which had been scheduled for the late morning. Our IBM collegue from Ahmedabad arrived on time and held the meeting together with Mohammadi and Rushi from the SEWA IT team. Mohammadi did a short intro on SEWA before we continued discussing the project's current status and next steps, asking for the local IBM team's support. After the meeting Soon and I continued to work on the documentation before we headed home or better to the hotel in the late afternoon to get ready for the trip to Udaipur, a trip we had planned and arranged before our trip, thanks to Eva's, Susanne's and Soon's research and booking upfront.

At around 5.30 pm we left Ahmedabad in a 10 seater Force bus, heading North towards Udaipur. This was going to be a long drive as Udaipur is about 4-5 hours away, most of it on highways. Highways here however do not mean that you will not see any cows, pedestrians, cyclists or other potential accident causes on the street. It is always an interesting sight to see people clinging to the back of a truck or bus. One wonders that one does not see any more accidents here but surprisingly it all works out quite well.

We made it to Udaipur around 10 pm but it took us quite a while to find the Tiger Hotel, the hotel Eva had previously booked for us. The hotel turned out to be a very nice one, with cozy rooms, directly located at Udaipur's main lake with the famous lake palace of which more is to come later on. After a quick check-in the Rangolis headed for the roof-top terrace where we enjoyed a cool beer after having been in the dry state of Gujarat, where one can buy alcohol only with a special tourist permit.