day recap

its been so great getting the emails and comments from all of you. its great to know you are all reading - its fun to share our experiences.

I have traveled a lot, but never quite like this. Gone is both the urge and obligation to 'take advantage of every moment' that is incumbent on such big trips; the feeling that I have to go out and explore, to experience new things, and to see all that I possibly can at every waking moment. Instead, I've replaced that sentiment with the focus and determination to work on my project with the zeal normally reserved for exploration.

Today was indicative of such a determination, it found both Jeff and I working from the apartment all day long. It was one productive day. I spent around 4 hours working with my coder to squash a new bug we discovered while Jeff spent even more time on a few projects of his own. We shared dinner and drinks at the one trendy spot in town, called Zara, a fancy tapas bar which was packed. Jeff had a cocktail called a 'harvard', with cinnamon infused rum. Pretty tasty.

We could not have found a better place to get our work done than Chennai. There are literally no distractions to our work: no friends around, nothing on TV, no idea where to go, how to communicate for the most part, no big tourist attractions, etc. Perhaps most importantly, there are no girls here to divert our attention. Because of the culture here in Chennai, women are rarely out alone - and never out to a bar. In fact, drinking is frowned upon here, so bars close at 12 on the weekends. It is incredible how much work you can get done when going out and chasing girls is not part of the itinerary. So, we basically picked the boringest town but we couldn't have picked a better place to really crank through our work.

We will be leaving here in the next few days to go to Bangalore, which is known as the Silicon Valley of India, where I am sure there will be some more distractions, but thats where we need to go next, so we just have to hunker down.

There is, however, one tourist spot I will try to make an effort to see, and that is the St. Thomas Cathedral. I took a very interesting class last semester called the Making of Christianity and we spent a good amount of time focusing on St. Thomas and his contribution to the rise of Christianity. For those of you who don't know, he was one of the 12 gospels. His writings were lost for almost 2,000 years until an entire codex in Coptic was found in a cave in Egypt in 1945. The writings were met with great fanfare from academics, but with great disdain from the Catholic church. Unlike the canonical gospels, Mathew, Mark, Luke, and John; Thomas' writing did not speak of stories of Jesus, but claimed to have literal sayings haven been spoken by the living Jesus of Nazereth. It also made no reference to sayings of Jesus after his crucifixiton, something which both shook and troubled the Church. To scholars, it was very interesting to possibly have the literal words spoken by Jesus to provide some first hand account of the actual, living man. The word of God has long been sought after, especially because the first line of Exodus proclaims "In the beginning, there was the word, and the word was God." Did Thomas' writings hold the key to deciphering thousands of years of mystery and debate?

Either way, when this document was discovered it sent shockwaves through the academic and religious world. To make a long story short, this guy, Thomas, wandered all the way from Egypt eastwards to India bringing the Gospel with him and preaching to anyone who would listen. It was here, in Chennai India, of all places, where he eventually settled in the first century AD and was then executed (martyred to some). His remains have been here ever since, and a cathedral was built in the 1500's to house them. I look forward to going to explore this place, given how much time I had spent studying him in class. Very serendipitous of me to stumble into Chennai I guess.


Ill let you know how it turns out. I also owe you a recount of the meeting with my coder, which I began to detail in an earlier post. stay tuned. off to bed now...