Where do I get to buy real food?!

Hello again!

Another interesting day has passed, and I though I would share some highlights with you!

The day started with getting up at 6.45 to get early to te office for some training on solar water heaters before the normal action started. Now I know everything about vacuum tubes and aluminium nitrid coating! ;-)

For the rest of the day I went to different sales meetings around the city, on the bike as usual. Since we need to bring samples at some meetings the bike gets a bit packed at times. Take a look at the picture below! And people here don't understand why I would like to buy a helmet even though I am not required to by law...

Most of the sales meetings have unfortunately ends up in Hindi, so I am not really adding much value at the moment. I manage to pick of a few things here and there though, and getting to hear what happened in the meeting afterwards are giving some hints about what is important and not for customers. Indian business culture also seems to be quite interesting. There are pretty much no small talk or social talk at all, it just jumps right into technical details and negotiation. One meeting was about two minutes, and many do not last more than 10-15 minutes. On the other hand I have only been here for two days, so it is a bit early to draw conclusions.

One of the products of the company I am working for is solar lanterns. The project is mainly targeting NGOs for supplying the rural areas with poor lighting conditions. Many people are facing issues of health problems, fire accidents, and poor lighting making it hard to live during night time, among other issues, since the normal source of lighting for many are burning kerosene. (Fotogen for Swedish speakers) These lights are both cheap and very effective for addressing many social issue. The main "problem" though is that all the costs are up-front and then adds no costs for the rest of its lifetime except change of relatively cheap batteries every two years or so. Many poor do not have the possibility for that kind of investment even if the payback is less than a year and then free and sage lighting for decades, hence the use of NGOs for distribution.

At night I tried to scout around for shopping food, which turned out harder than one could expect. There are small stores at kiosk size every here and there with a very limited asortment. You cannot browse the goods easilly and you just have to tell the shop keeper what you want, which was hard since I had no clue what I could buy. I asked around a bit and got to know that there should be some bigger super market around, even though no one seems to know where. Soon I will find somewhere to buy other things than bread, cheese and eggs!

Stay in tune, and I'll send you another update as soon as I have enough interesting things to share!