Posts filed under 'India'
Typically Heather and I dread heading outside of our gated community. The walls and the security guards protect us from “India” and this makes our lives easier. Whenever we venture out we tend to have an awful time: the traffic sucks, restaurant employees give awful service, it’s dirty, it’s hot, it smells.
But yesterday we had a good day. I will go so far to say it was our first good day in India in the ~6 weeks we’ve been here. We started out in the morning by going to the movie theater for the 10:40 showing of Harry Potter. This was actually an IronPort-sponsored event for the team. The theater is inside of a large mall but it is clean, has air conditioning and smells just like a theater back home. The popcorn doesn’t have any indian spices in it (I was honestly surprised to not see something like masala popcorn). The movie was good, though halfway through they stop the movie for intermission. Intermission? Since when do movies have intermissions?
Leaving the theater requires a trip down 4 flights of escalators. The mall is 5 or 6 stories tall and has a big open area in the middle. So when you’re on the 6th floor escalator you can look over the side and see people walking on the ground floor. Not entirely true. There’s a big net between the first and second floors so that if you fall off the escalator you probably don’t die. I wonder if they tested this? If you read the article I linked to you’ll know that some little kid actually did take a tumble and died and that’s why the net is in place. Thanks to all the controversy this started when you take the escalator down there are now security guards at the bottom of each escalator that blow their whistles at you if you get too close to the railing. I’m serious. That’s his job.
After this we went to a restaurant, shezan, between the theater and my office. Heather and I both ordered a cheeseburger. That’s right. A burger. Made from cow. It wasn’t the best burger I’ve ever had but it was beef and we didn’t die.
It was a good India day. The first of hopefully many to come.
July 27th, 2007
Ok, we’ve already lived here a month but I’m still considering this our welcome. A while back I killed a small roach in our kitchen. Charles told me about this roach chalk stuff that the roaches won’t cross. I found this at the store, it looks like sidewalk chalk but I get the feeling its not safe for children. Apparently it works. This one didn’t get far from one of my chalk lines before he rolled onto his back and started spewing whatever that fluid is. I took some pictures before taking him out of his misery and disposing of him.
July 22nd, 2007
Yesterday we stopped for lunch at a local pizza chain named Pizza Corner. We were excited to go here because Pizza Hut is getting old. We sat down for lunch and ordered a coke, a diet coke and a medium pepperoni pizza. 5 minutes later I got my coke. 5 minutes after that I asked a waiter where Heather’s diet coke was. “A diet coke?” “Yes.” “Ok, sir.” 5 minutes later I asked a different waiter “Can we have her diet coke, please?” “Sir, we don’t have diet coke.” Why did it take 3 waiters before one would tell us they didn’t have what we were ordering? After nearly 40 minutes I got fed up waiting for my pizza and went to manage the process myself. Our pizza came moments later. It was a small pepperoni pizza (recall that we ordered a medium). It can be terribly frustrating doing the most simple of things here.
July 22nd, 2007
When you come to India for ~2 weeks you’ll usually go through a short bit of culture shock. First you think it’s interesting. This is mostly because you’ve arrived very late at night and a lot of the city is sleeping. The next morning things are happy because you’re staying at one of the finest hotels in the world. Later that day you enter the city and it’s all down hill. You’ve gone from one of the finest hotels in the world to seeing some of the poorest people in the world. You just don’t know how to react. The traffic, the pollution, the fear of what you can and can’t eat. In my case my body just sort of shut down. We called it a day around 1:00PM and went back to the safe haven that is the hotel. This will be your low point of the trip, over the next few days you’ll become accustomed to these things and you’ll enjoy your trip. I’ve learned that this isn’t culture shock; when you actually -live- in India you get culture shock.
One of the most annoying things of Heather and I moving here has been getting a phone and subsequently DSL installed. As a foreigner to India you can’t actually get a phone line installed without having registered with the FRO (foreighner’s registration office, a division of the police). Thankfully my company had hired a relocation service to do this for me and the actual registration required ~30 minutes of my time, 6 passport-sized photos and a total of a few calendar days for the service to get all the paperwork in order. Once you get your FRO registration documents you can apply for a telephone line. The paperwork for this also requires a passport sized photo. That’s right, in order to get a telephone installed you must give someone a picture of yourself. Again my company hired a service to help get the phone installed. They proved to be worthless.
BSNL is the name of the phone company here, it’s a government run operation that subsidized the cost of the phone line installation in my complex in order to guarantee exclusive service to this community. Let me say that another way: The government came in and installed phone lines so that they could ensure they were the only company allowed to provide phone service.
When the relocation company submitted our paperwork for us they told us the phone would take 2-3 weeks. 2-3 WEEKS! And you thought it was awful in the US when the phone company says we’ll be there between 8:00AM and 12:00PM. These guys are giving us a 1 week range and no official way to check progress.
1 week into the waiting period I was fed up waiting. Not having internet at home is just completely unacceptable for my job. The company helping us with the phone wouldn’t do anything until 3 weeks expired; unacceptable. On one Monday evening a man called us from BSNL and said he would be there the next morning to install the phone. Holy crap! The phone is coming tomorrow! Heather waits all day. At 6:00PM the man comes to our house just to tell us he can’t install the phone today, he’ll come back tomorrow. His excuse: “they haven’t assigned a phone number for your account yet.” Turns out this was total BS: all of the houses here have pre-assigned phone numbers based on their address. Whatever, we wait. On Tuesday he doesn’t come. On Wednesday by the afternoon he hasn’t come. I dig and dig and eventually get his cellphone number. After a lot of trying he answers and he says he’ll come today. Ok. He’ll come today. He didn’t come that day. On Thursday I wasn’t believing anything. I called him and talked to him probably 4 times that day (Talking to him 4 times probably involved calling him 20 times because he usually just lets his phone ring until it stops ringing). Around 6:30 that night I called him and talked to him and asked “Are you coming?” “Yes, sir, I am coming.” “Are you sure? When are you coming?” “Yes, sir, I am coming, I’ll be there in 5 minutes.” Fine, where are you now?” “I’m at the clubhouse.” The clubhouse? The clubhouse! omg. He came. He walked out to the phone box outside our house and punched down all of the jacks in our house. That was it. I could have done this by myself.
At this point I began hassling him to give me internet today. No sir, 2-3 days I was continually told. I began offering bribes. Big money. 2,000 rupees ($50). This got him to call his friend, the broadband install man. “He will come tonight, 5 minutes.” Wow. $50 really speaks volumes here! Around 10 minutes later the guy showed up. He explained to me it would take 2-3 days. Yep. He came out to my house to tell me it will take a few more days.
My address book now has the phone number for various BSNL personnel. One time I was talking to a guy at the BSNL office when I offered 4,000 rupees ($100, you can live a month on $100 here) to have it installed that day. “Sir, Indians are not about the money, we are about the service.” I almost fell out of the chair I was sitting in. Not about the money? The service! What service?!
It ended up taking 10 more days with us calling these people every single day. “Are you coming today?” “Yes sir, I will come today, by 5:00″ “By 5:00 you’ll be here?” “Yes, sir, by 6:00 I’ll be there” (That’s not a typo).
Today we have internet, I’m using it now. It’s actually decent speed: 2Mb down, 512Kb up. The only problem is that I’m limited to 10GB per month except between the hours of 2:00AM and 8:00AM when it is unmetered. I’m not sure what’s more shocking: how long it took to get the damn thing installed or the fact that I’m paying $45/month for DSL that is pegged at 10GB. For $80 a month I can get 20GB/month. The only way to get unlimited is to step down to 256Kb/sec.
July 22nd, 2007
It’s been a long time since my last post. We travelled back to California, visited with some folks and then moved out to India. I went straight in to an interviewing frenzy and Heather worked on a bazillion logistical issues dealing with getting moved into our new place. But, she pulled it all off in record time. We’re living in our new place now and have met a bunch of our neighbors. The neighborhood is great, our house huge, pictures to come. Unfortunately we don’t have an internet connection yet and that’s the primary reason for no posts recently.
None of that is very wacky though.
The flight we take goes from SFO to FRAnkfurt to Bangalore (BLR). It lands at 11:55PM, India time. At this point you’ve been traveling for nearly 24 hours and are fairly well exhausted. BLR, an international airport, has two baggage carousels. These aren’t carousels like at SFO or any other airport I’ve ever flown to. They’re not big in the least. The length is maybe 20 yards and the width no more than 10. A 747, the big huge airplane we fly in on, is capable of delivering over 400 passengers. Imagine 1.5 checked bags per person (we had 5 total) that’s 600 bags that need to fit in an area that is only 60 yards long. Right. It’s a mess. Hundreds of people running around with luggage carts whacking you in the backs of your ankles all crowding around the luggage carousel hoping to catch a glimpse of a bag that looks like theirs so that they can ram you one more time before pushing you aside and reaching in just to realize, oh, that’s right, my bag is a different color.
A white-guy standing next to me (yes, white guys stand out) was kind of freaking out with the mess of people, luggage carts and his apparently missing bag. I asked him if he’d ever been to Bangalore before. He said no. I welcomed him to the city and told him to get used to it. It’s Bangalore in a nutshell: Millions of people all taking the shortest possible path to what they want with complete disregard for what the guy next to him is doing. Wait in line here and you’ll spend your whole life waiting.
June 25th, 2007
Here’s a picture of a flower I took while we were eating lunch here at the Park Hotel Residency. The blue in the background is the fancy pool they have here; it’s long and skinny, looks pretty but overall isn’t useful for anything other than swimming laps. I’m not sure what type of flower this is.
Here’s a picture leftover from our first apartment hunting day. It’s the view from the porch. Not bad really, but we weren’t terribly interested in living in a big huge apartment complex.
And here’s the view from one of the Cisco buildings here in town. It’s the 11th floor of the building. The best part about this building was that you needed a security badge to go anywhere, including back inside after visiting this balcony on the 11th floor of the building.
Somehow John accidentally got left outside after we finished touring the balcony. As is slightly evident by this photo, he couldn’t get back inside 
Here’s some Bangalore traffic. Check out the baby riding on the third motorcycle. The fifth guy back in the vest and bowtie is looking pretty sharp.
This is by far my most favorite “dangerous thing to do on a motorcycle.” Riding side saddle on a motorcycle without a helmet in Bangalore traffic! I don’t quite understand how anyone could think this is a good idea. Between the traffic that causes rapid stops and lane changes and the giant speedbumps that are scattered throughout the roads with less traffic how is this perceived as a good idea? As one person has already pointed out to me: you do whatcha gotta do.
This is a photo of a hole in the sidewalk. If you were just walking down the sidewalk in the dark you’d probably fall into this hole a good 4 feet before reaching the bottom. At this point you’d sure have some sort of a pulled muscle and a bruised leg. Yikes.
April 24th, 2007
Today we spent our second entire day here in India. The first day was mostly a blur, today slightly more memorable. I don’t have any wacky stories to talk about today. This country (or at least this city) is so wacky I’m mostly speechless. The driving is insane and I can’t believe we haven’t seen an accident yet. There are cows almost everywhere, just like you’ve heard. Today we even saw a pair of camels! My Ukrainian pals were sure that Monkeys and Snakes ruled the city but I have yet to see any. My eyes are open
Today we managed to look at 15 potential places to live. I’ve got a few pictures of our day to share.
Here’s a somewhat typical street in suburban bangalore. This was somewhere near the district named “Defense Colony.” We looked at an apartment on this street but didn’t like it; it was dark and had some hippies living in it right now. Who knows what kind of crap they’d leave in there.
This is the view from the porch of our #1 choice from today. In this neighborhood with the weather how it is right now (warm and humid) it reminds me a bit of florida. The house is actually still being built and its quite nice. I didn’t take too many pictures of it but we’re going to visit it again next week.
This is the view from the porch of a different apartment that we didn’t like all that much. This picture kind of gives you a taste for a few things Indian. I really need to start taking pictures of the streets to show you what it’s really like outside of these plush communities we’ve been looking to live in.
I have a few other boring pictures to share but I’ll spare you for now. My hours of prepaid internet are down to seconds here in the hotel and so I’ll post what I have so far rather than buy anymore time today.
April 19th, 2007
We boarded our flight to India at around 9:00AM this morning in L’viv. We were let on the plane after a large group of special needs children boarded. I mumbled to Heather that when I registered this domain name, wackytravels.com, I hadn’t ever imagined travels this wacky.
In general all of the children on the plane were well behaved. I had an aisle seat on the left side of the plane. To my right and one row back was a young girl from the aforementioned group, in the aisle seat. Maybe 10 seconds after our wheels left the ground I heard coughing. No, it was choking. Then I heard, yes, she was throwing up. Luckily she brought her own bag, the little barf bag in the seat back in front of her probably wouldn’t have held this in. Around 5 minutes after we finished our in-flight meal. Yep. And the second the pilot began putting down the flaps to land; you guessed it. This poor little girl vomitted 3 times in one 2 hour airplane ride.
Our transfer through Frankfurt was without incident. We were packed into cattle class on our Lufthansa flight and didn’t really enjoy any of it.
We arrived in India and found that the baggage claim area was roughly large enough to fit the luggage from a small, single-engine Cessna. We flew in on a 747. But. Our bags flew with us! Wahoo! This is mostly due to my insistence that the Ukraine airport people make sure our bags were checked through to Bangalore. They wanted us to go pull them out of the baggage claim in Frankfurt and then re-check them in for our second leg of the flight.
Our driver from the park hotel met us where he should have and we began cruising to the hotel. I thought driving was bad in Ukraine. Here are a few of the lessons I learned for driving in Bangalore:
- Keep one thumb on the horn at all times, use it without regard for anything
- Motorcycles that have two riders, the passenger usually without a helmet and sandal-clad feet flailing inches above the ground do not have any right of way. Honk to get them to pull closer to the shoulder so you can pass.
- The dotted white line that is used to separate lanes… is actually used to help you guide your vehicle down the road. Position the center of the vehicle over this line and honk at anyone not doing the same.
- Feel free to substitute your high beams for the horn at any time
April 17th, 2007
We leave tomorrow morning for the second part of my expat journey. First we spend 2 hours on the flight to Frankfurt. If our plane lands on time we’ll have an hour to go through security, twice, on our switch from terminal 2 to terminal 1. Then we board a plane for our 8 hour journey to Bangalore, India. While here we’ll be visiting the city a little bit, searching for apartments slightly more and I’ll be interviewing engineering candidates for IronPort Bangalore the most.
On April 29th we return to Ukraine to live out the remaining ~24 days we have here. I think I can safely say that we’ll both miss this place; it’s awesome people and memorable scenery are hard not to love. This picture here is of Ivan and his wife; awesome people.
April 16th, 2007
Next Posts
