I awoke today with mixed feelings. On the one hand, I am excited to return home and tell my family and friends about my adventures. On the other hand, I am sad that I will be leaving such a close-knit group of friends. It is amazing how well you can know a group of people when you travel with them. During the last two weeks, I feel like I have made twenty close friends.

We awoke this morning with just one mission: see the Taj Mahal! The bus ride from Delhi to Agra was our longest yet–around five hours! While five hours on a bus might seem like an eternity, it wasn’t without adventure. Our bus was greeted by numerous beggars and performers armed with monkeys, cobras, and miniature chess sets, pounding on the windows of our bus and asking for money in exchange for goods. Morning turned to afternoon and it wasn’t until 3 PM that we arrived in Agra and made our way to the Taj Mahal.

Our last day in Hyderabad was also the best because we had several unexpected surprises. Although Nvidia was the last company on our schedule, it was one of the few development and design facilities we were lucky enough to visit. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Nvidia, they are a leader in chipset technologies and GPUs (graphics processing units) and were named 2007 Forbes Company of the Year.

Our day began in Mumbia’s “Film City” at the Whistling Woods Film School. Whistling Woods is a recently-founded private film school equipped with some very modern equipment. Craig, our tour guide, was a film school graduate from South Carolina who has been living and working in Mumbai for the past few years. He first visited India on a backpacking trip after college graduation and he always knew that he wanted to come back. According to Craig, Mumbai is a city that never sleeps and a place where anything and everything is available.

The night's sleep varied for many of us and we awoke still jet-lagged after our first night in India. Breakfast was served in our hotel and ranged from fried eggs and pancakes to curries and fruits. Afterwards, we took the bus to our first company: Larsen & Toubro (L&T). We were treated to two presentations during our visit. The first presentation was on the topic of energy conservation initiatives.

We arrived at SFO late Friday evening for the first leg of our journey towards India. Our flight to Hong Kong on Cathay Pacific left San Francisco at 12:05 AM and lasted more than 14 hours. On the way, we crossed several time zones and it was early Sunday morning by the time we arrived. The layover before our next flight left us a great deal of time to explore. We split into groups that morning and decided on taking a train into downtown Hong Kong.