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!

Jan 30 - First Day in the Office

I woke feeling relatively good at 7:30, showered (making sure not to get water in my mouth), brushed my teeth (bottled water), got dressed and went to breakfast. My car is scheduled to pick me up at 10 to take me to the office.

The grounds of the hotel are very pretty and tropical. There is a court yard with a huge tiki bar in the center (with moat no less) and a swimming pool. You pass through this court yard to get to the breakfast.

For breakfast I had an omelet to order with cheese and veggies. I figure since it is cooked, the veggies and cheese should be safe (I hope so). I also asked for a bottle of water (I had to pay 180 INR, about $3.50 so I will bring my own from now on). I also had Poori Bhajji, which is like fried bread with thick vegetable soup poured on it, and was very, very good.

The drive to the office is one I will never forget for a myriad of reasons. The traffic was horrendous. Gridlock is everywhere and motorcycles and pedestrians shoot through between cars. Cars come from all directions into the intersections at once, no one stopping. There are simply no rules of the road here except "Don't die, don't hit cows". Only when my hand was almost numb did I realize I had a death grip on the overhead handle. It literally took an effort to uncurl my fingers from it. The only thing that slows traffic are speed bumps. These are not like speed bumps in the US. Imagine a telephone pole partly buried in the road and you have a good idea of what these are like. I am told that most of these are home made by the people who live near by to keep traffic down and slow on the roads in their area. I can see that some look professional, and some look very home made, and all scrape the bottoms of the cars that go over them even at slow speeds.

The other part I will not forget was what I saw along the way - my first daylight view of India outside of the hotel. We have all seen the pictures of poverty on TV for missionaries soliciting money for Africa, etc. They are hard to look at and used to joke about Sally Strothers, at 350 lbs., talking about starving people and that she could feed a village with what she ate. There is nothing funny about poverty, period. I got to see it up close and personal and it's stunning. What we call poverty in the US is not even close to what they have here, by a long shot. I am not going to keep harping on this, but I would not be honest in this blog if I did not mention it here. I did not take pictures out of respect for the people - how crass would it be for a "rich" westerner tourist to take picture of these poor people that others might find "interesting". Enough - it's said, and it's burned in my memory, and I will not keep dwelling on it here.

Visit to Bangalore - Read Me First

For those who are keeping score at home, I am in India on business from 1/26/09 to 2/11/09. The purpose of my trip is to meet with the Indian development team, during the design phase, for the project I am working on and to make sure the designs and architecture are aligned properly with the concepts that the customer (and I) have.

I felt it appropriate to keep a blog of my trip so that you, keeping score at home, can have an up-to-date.

I am cheating a little here and retro-blogging my pre-trip and first day or so, since I did not get a chance to set up the blog before I left. I want to record my information quickly before my initial impressions are lost. So, scorekeepers, let's begin...