Anna
Jan. 15, 2007

Bombay is my favorite city in India thus far, hands down. I love the atmosphere here. And I love the fact that it’s by the sea. There is just something about being near the water that I just love. And this city is so easy to get around in.

Today we went to the BSE, which stands for the Bombay Stock Exchange. We sat through two presentations, which were really informative and well put together. The only problem that I had was that I had no background about stock trading, or the stock market or anything like that. So I felt I was in a little over my head, but it’s OK, I survived, and I came out of it with some good information. I was hoping that we would get to see the big room with all the traders going at it with each other and yelling quotes and trading stocks and the whole nine yards. But sadly, that’s not how stocks are traded at the BSE anymore, because they do all their trading online.

After we got back to the YMCA later that evening, Patrick, Ryan, Mike, Ashley and I went to explore. While we were out, we got to talking to this man, Hassan, who owned a little café. We got to talking to him and learned that he had so much wisdom to share with us, and I feel we learned some important little tidbits from him. In my opinion, some of life’s greatest lessons aren’t learned in a classroom from people with loads of degrees and perfect lecture outlines. Sometimes, the lessons that matter the most are learned from just talking to people.  After having listened to the wisdom that Hassan shared with us, I feel very, very blessed to be apart of this Jan Term trip. Not only am I learning about how India does business, but I’m also learning that sometimes you can’t put a price on education, because what Hassan shared with us was priceless. I learned that there is so much information in the world that I have yet to learn, and in the words of Hassan, if we just learn to open our eyes and open our ears, we can learn a lot.