Tour De Coimbatore

After the grand event on 13th, 13 Microsoft Student Champs from Chennai and Bangalore, left for Coimbatore from where we had to proceed to Erode and Madurai after visiting some colleges there. As it was already late by the time we left Chennai, we stopped for a mid-night dinner at a nameless roadside dhaba. This is where all the fun started ;)

When the bus stopped, we were all shocked to have dinner at a place like this. Jk pushed all of us, came to the front like a gaint and asked, "Where is the damn menu card?"..We all roared into laughter when he asked that. Tell you, this was the worst place where i had eaten till now. The oothappam they gave started stinking the minute he served it. Donno how i managed to eat it :(. And Vivek gave us a surprise by ordering chicken noodles ha ha ha...and it was like "veratti (dried cow dung, used as fuel) cut in pieces and soaked in kurma"...

We reached Coimbatore next day by 10.30 AM. As it was already late, we had to skip our hotel and proceeded to PSG directly. Imagine all 13 of us, without even brushing and dull from the night's sleep entering a college ! Thankfully, we were given rooms for refreshment, which gave us enough time to brush and get ready for the 1 hr session at this college. We had prepared a separate set of quiz questions. The first question was an easy one; the CEO of Microsoft. Lots of hands came up immediately and a guy confidently told "Bill Gates". When i said the answer was wrong, all the hands came down in a milli-second. Another guy told it was "Allen Paul"...(some of the champs were already giggling). None of the colleges gave this sort of an answer. Well, PSG shocked us beyond the bizzare dreams. The answer is Steve Ballmer.

After this college, we went to GCT. The crowd was pretty ok there...no fumbling with the CEO of Microsoft. They also answered the $1 question. We reached the hotel by 7PM and had our lunch! On a side note, our breakfast was at 1PM :) Dinner consisted of juices and salads !

[15th Feb 2006]
This day was an awesome one! All of us went to Black Thunder water theme park, to chill out the travel pressure. It is very cheap. For Rs.260 per head, all rides are free and is allowed for unlimited number of times. Ofcourse, they don't give free lunch ;). We had a good time pushing everyone in the water after they got on to their floats he he...Reza triggered a mini-tsunami as soon as he landed on the water from the slide...Rajagopal had a tough time getting on his float and as soon as he got on the float, everyone pounced on him and pushed him once again ha ha ha...Even i got pushed twice or thrice...

Of all, the wave pool was the best. It simulated the sea environment by creating waves thro' the water. The whole pool had a depth of only 7 feet, starting from 3. It was awesome enjoyment when you have to jump up as the wave hits, otherwise a huge amount of water will fall on you.

The best part of this day was during the lunch when the hotel waiter was ragged for not getting us extra pappads. You should have seen the waiter's face go red when Deepak asked him whether they were still frying the pappads. He was embarassed by Krishnaa when he asked "whether water was the only unlimited thing here"...

This nice day came to an end after the excellent dinner at Recidency.

[16 Feb 2006]
We went to Kongu Engg. College today. The crowd was good here, they answered the quiz questions. Krishnaa finished off, by doing a demo of Office 12. Reza also did a demo of VS2005. On the way to Kongu, we had a really tough argument of netbeans vs. VS2005 IDEs. Though i wont say which side won ;), the argument was good enough 'cos we were able to able to convince the college staff's that we are more of student technologists :)

The evening passed off by a visit to Tirupur, the t-shirt town of India. We purchased some nice ones and rates were 5 times less than what you have in Chennai.

[17 Feb 2006]
We went to Thiagarajar College today at Madurai. After visiting KLN college and Sethu Institute of technology, we visited the Meenakshi Amman temple. On the way to the temple, the Sethu guys sang some Madurai folk songs for us. They were a really cool bunch.

This day was also the birthday of Siva. We were treated at Taj on Microsoft's expense ;) and he got splashed with chocolate cake all over him. The exciting trip came to an end with this.

It was an awesome experience in planning something this big and making it happen too. The main reason for some colleges not answering simple questions was that, their exposure towards the technology and industry as a whole is very limited/nil (null, for the geeks out there). At the end of this tour, we feel confident that we have sowed interest for technology in them.

This is just the beginning
Towards the end of the month, we are moving to Andhra. In the near future, we are touring Karnataka and Maharashtra too :D


And i wont hesitate to tell again that the new year 2006 is exciting :)