Intro to India

Our travels began on a bad note and has only seemed to improve at a painfully slow pace with each day that we are here. First, the Air France/Delta/Northwest mess created all sorts of problems for us and three of us barely made it to the gate for our flight and with no seat assignments to boot. For whatever reason, the flight from Newark to Paris was brutally long. The airplane was freezing cold and cramped, the food terrible. I did watch a movie and managed to sleep -- the only one in the group to get a little rest.

The flight from Paris to Bangalore wasn't too much better. More bad food, movies, and uncomfortable sleep. But we made it to India in one piece and excited to get to campus and checked into our rooms in the guest house. Alas, it would be some time before we got to that point as:

1. There is a convoluted process when you arrive to get a heat-seaking gun pointed at your head to be sure you don't have swine flu (I mean, H1N1) and then passing through passport control. Of course none of this is very well marked, organized, or communicated so you just let all the Indians push in front of you until you realize you should be doing the same.
2. We all got through fever-free and then onto baggage claim, but guess whose bag didn't arrive? Yup, yours truly. They even had my name on a list saying it would be on the next flight and they would deliver it. Fine.
3. Well the whole lost luggage process seemed to take forever. I was passed along to three different people who never explained just exactly what was happening. Even funnier is that I was asked to complete a customer satisfaction survey for how they handled my lost luggage, but the woman answered all the questions for me and managed to check "Exceeds Expectations" for every single measure. Hmmm, I wanted to disagree but it was very late at this point and the group was waiting.

Luckily our bus driver was also waiting but of course he couldn't pull the bus up to the terminal so we had to drag all of our bags along the sidewalk out to the parking lot. Yup, that's how our company rolls. Here's a post-24-hours-of-travel-standing-in-front-of-our-bus shot:

The drive to campus took about an hour with no traffic. First impressions of Bangalore was that it reminded me a lot of Saigon. I couldn't pinpoint why, just a feeling that I got passing shacks and roadside shops to larger corporate looking buildings and the scale of the place felt a lot like the night we first arrived in Vietnam.

At the campus we arrived at the guest house and upon initial glance, it didn't look too bad. It actually looked almost resort-like. That impression would soon change when we discovered that:

1. The beds are basically a piece of plywood with a sheet on it. Back pain what?
2. The shower is inconsistent with regard to hot water. Some days it's ice cold, some days it's hot enough to take a decent shower, but mostly it's just lukewarm. If you're lucky, you get water pressure that is more than just a slow drip drip drip out of the faucet.
3. There are no clocks, so if you didn't bring an alarm...well, you better find one!
4. There is 1 international phone down in the lobby and the handset doesn't work so you have to talk to your loved ones via speakerphone with the guest house attendant attentatively listening in on your conversation.
5. There is no internet access anywhere...not in the room, no wifi around campus, nada. Actually that's not true. You can access the intranet worksite, but that's it. Goodbye world, I'll see you in 5 weeks!
6. The canteen food tastes like vomit. Even the locals agree.

But it is not all doom and gloom. We still have each other to commiserate with and we do have cable television which includes HBO, CNN, and 2 or 3 other English language programming channels. It's also crazy cheap here so "going out big" hardly makes a dent. Next up, our first full day in Bangalore.