Instrument finally reaches Darjeeling

Much to my surprise, the equipment finally arrived at 10 pm on Saturday night.  The drivers insisted that we unload immediately but there was just no way we could haul 1000 lbs of equipment ourselves in the dark.  After convincing them to spend the night at Bose Institute, we were up at 7 am with a few extra sets of hands to cart everything up to the instrument room.  I have to admit I did not do much...In the blink of an eye, everything was there. I felt pretty nervous during this whole moving process, especially when I saw that my gas chromatograph (the core of my whole instrument) was removed off of the wooden pallet that it was strapped to and placed basically with no secure bottom inside the truck.  Fortunately, it looks ok......But it does seem, contrary to my belief, that everything has arrived intact, and nothing was lost in the process of being opened and closed by two different shipping companies and customs on both the US and Indian sides a total of three times.

The truck is here!  It was much smaller than I expected.  Don't know and don't want to know how it survived the steep slopes.

Moving equipment to the room.  Thanks to these guys for their help!

Unloaded!

Laura and I spent the rest of the day starting to set everything up.  We have only made a dent in everything that we need to get done in the next few days.  Good news - it turns on!  (Side note: I was very worried that nothing would be compatible with the unstable power and that it traveled all this way only to not turn on.)  Bad news - we spent a couple of hours trying to get the regulators for our gas lines to stop leaking.  Still no success.  And it is the most tedious, painstaking process.   Hopefully we can figure it out today!  All in all though, seeing this room put together when my equipment was en route (read: no one had any idea where it was because the drivers had switched off their phones) only 24 hours before, makes for a satisfying way to end the day.

Working on assembling the inlet line to the GC.

Regulators, ugh. 

Laura spent a good while climbing this ladder and hanging all of the gas lines on the ceiling so that they would be out of the way.  I'm happy with how things progressed on the first day.