Its Ground Hog Day! (But not here)

"It's ground hog day!" I proclaim to Sudesh and Rajiv after they come into my office. I can tell immediately that they have no idea what I am talking about and are humoring their slightly insane American guest. After a couple of minutes of explaining the holiday, they now think all Americans are slightly insane. Hard to disagree with that.



After a weekend of sight seeing, it's back to work today. Office hours are 9:30 to 6:30 generally, so I schedule my cab, grab some breakfast, and after 45 minutes of weaving through traffic (I no longer white knuckle the overhead handle), I arrive safely at 9:30 AM. Good day at the office today - a lot was accomplished. We hammered out the High Level Design, finalized our inital draft of the Roles and Permissions (and shared with the team), wrote up some documents for Sant, and got some outstanding stuff updated and posted to the Sharepoint site.


Had an excellent traditional Bangalore lunch at the office. See below:



(Yes, that's a Dominos box). This is the "Golden Gourmet" with corn, and barbecue chicken. You can have any kind of meat you want in Bangalore, so long as it's chicken. Breakfast features chicken sausage, chicken ham (I swear that's what its called) and several other various chicken dishes. I have seen pigs a few times in Bangalore, but evidently that is only to tease the foreigners. Cows, of course, are sacred here so red meat is not found.



After work tonight, I had dinner with Kris Niar, CEO of Bangalore India. He is a fascinating guy and we talked for a couple of hours as we dined on some real Indian food (chicken and fish dishes) that he recommended, with a couple of Fosters and whiskeys mixed in. I learned a lot of really interesting stuff about India and its culture tonight from Kris, including (but not nearly limited to) tea, cobras and snake charming.


Tea it Up


Orthodox tea consists of the two freshest leaves from a tea plant, dried in the sun and put whole into a tea pot to brew for three minutes or so. This is evidently the finest tea and cannot be purchased at a store or restaurant - you must get the leaves directly from a grower at a cost slightly more than gourmet coffee in the US. After Orthodox tea, there is Partial Orthodox which is the same as Orthodox, except the leaves may be broken and not whole. Lastly there is CTC (Cut, Twisted, Curled) which is the lowest form of tea (read Lipton) that comes in bags and is very strong.


Charming snake you got there, pal...


Evidently, cobras are relatively ubiquitous in these parts. Kris told me that his dog has killed several in the garden of his house. That pretty much ends any idea of ever living here, as my wife would rather lay in a bed of muddy salamanders than to be anywhere around snakes, much less deadly ones. They only come out at night when people are not around, but that will make no difference to her. I also learned that snake charming is a kind of trick - first, the snakes are defanged and not dangerous, and secondly, the charmer makes the snake weave by weaving back and forth himself. Snakes have extremely poor vision (it's sounds they are sensitive to), so the weaving charmer appears as moving blur of light that the snake is trying to see, so it follows the same pattern. Still - I would love to get a picture of a snake charmer doing this.


We lost power a couple of times at the office today, and twice this evening here at the hotel. Evidently not uncommon, but first time I have experienced since I have been here.


It's now 11:05 PM and I am late to bed, so... blog to you tomorrow!