Dinner with Friends

For all you guys out there no laughing.  We had just completed our first week in India and one of our colleagues Lalitha was going back home to Hyderabad. So they do what we do back home and that is celebrate success with dinner.  If you are looking at the picture above from left to right.  Vishal is a trainer, Lalitha is also a trainer, Christine from the US is a trainer, Abhishek a Team Leader and me. 

Dinner with these folks was pretty interesting.  Nitin the person you see on the left and not in the picture above is the big boss at the table.  Other than Christine and I everyone at that table reports to him.  We sat down at 7:00 to eat supper and we ordered appetizers.  We drank all kinds of stuff, non-alcoholic, from raw mango juice with cumin to yogurt drinks with papaya.  It was a very interesting culinary experience.  About 7:45 we ordered our main course.  Everything was good I will do a culinary right up a little later.  At 9:00 we sent what we had not eaten back to the kitchen to be reheated.  Yep they do that here.   Then we ate some more.  About 10:00 I could not eat another bite.  I did not do a good job of pacing at the main course.  So then we ordered desert.   Ice cream, it was also pretty good.  The flavor any guesses...rose petal.

The guy in the middle in the blue shirt is a believer, his name is Vishal.  I will be going to church with Vishal on Sunday. Talk to you soon.

Dreaming my weekend away

Well ask me about my first weekend in India.  I did not realize how tired I really was.  I came back to the hotel on Friday night about 11:00 and went to bed at midnight.  I woke up at 8:00 or 20:00 if you are using the 24 hour clock.  I slept for 20 hours.  Needless to say I was a little surprised to see my Saturday came and went largely unnoticed.  I watched ESPN’s College Gameday being broadcast from Athens, GA which is home to my beloved Bulldogs.  If I want to watch the game I will need to go back to bed just four hours after getting up.  So with that good night and I will write again in tomorrow.

Working like a Dawg

I am not much of a mall person and never have been.  I mean I have been to a mall in the US, but this week I went to a mall that rivals any I have ever seen.  The mall is 5 stories high and a kilometer long.  For those of you not familiar with the metric system that is .74565 miles.  So for all you ladies out there that is a total of 3.7283 miles of shopping pleasure.  And for you guys out there that is the reason God gave us football. 

Things here are going well.  This week I am working the first shift, India Standard time is 9.5 hours ahead of Eastern Daylight Savings Time.  I am not sleeping much as my internal clock is a little messed up right now.  Don’t worry as soon as I get adjusted I will have to flip my nights and days again this coming Monday.  I should run now so I can get some sleep.  I will write more later.

Paris the Nickel Tour

I wish I could tell you what this is but to be honest I have no idea.  It is a cool looking building though.

This is a park near the Eifle Tour.

This is the Paris Metro.  Strap on your combat boots, make sure you have a map, and know enough French to ask for directions and where is the bathroom.

India, the Dawg has arrived!!

I made it. Got in late last night and could not stay awake to see anything much less do anything. There is a 9 1/2 hour difference between home and here. I am still getting settled in so I won't have much to say over the next couple of days. I am majorly jet lagged and have only traveled from the hotel to the site (work site). I am staying at the Trident Gurgaon. The hotel is very nice and I can't believe how nice everyone is.

 

I will tell you my one stories of the day. Indian traffic; lets just say with 15,000,000 in the Delhi area and no traffic lights, stop signs, or organization to traffic flow it is mass chaos. Just imagine the following... a car, a bus, a dog, a cow, a bicycle, and lets say 10,000 people. Now put all these on a single lane road the length of a city block. There are two directions of traffic on this road and you are not allowed to stop for anything, well maybe they will stop for the cow. That is what driving in India is like. Totally nuts.

More to come when I finally get out of the hotel and explore a little.

Why did we just pass my Metro stop?

I spent the day in Paris taking in the sights. I was told by a friend of mine that Paris was a walking city, my first thought was ok, like Boston. I mean the entire Freedom Trail is only 5 miles, a bit of a hike I know but doable. You can see pretty much everything in Boston on that 5 mile trek. I thought it would be the same for Paris. Not so, I think it was 5 miles from Notre Dame to the Eiffel Tour!!! Things got a lot better once I learned how to use the Metro. Boy you talk about a different experience, I ain’t in Atlanta, New York or Boston any more. Our transit system is pretty easy to understand. There is a line that is colored and it has stops indicated on it. Makes sense so far? The Paris Metro map looks the same as ours, but did you know that certain trains on the blue line don’t stop at every stop on the blue line? Some of the time you ride right past your stop leaving you to wonder how in the world am I going to get back where I came from. I am on the blue line and the map says it stops here but it didn’t. Well that will be because their Metro is a lot like calculus. Yes there is a blue line, and yes it has stops on it, but the trains also have numbers on them. This number is important because it will let you know where the train will stop on the blue line. CRAZY!!! It’s all François to me.

Now that I have that off my chest… what a cool place!!! I will refer to my 10 hours in the city of Paris as a vision trip. Now that I have seen it, I know what I want to see. I will be taking the family in the not so near future. I wanted to take a couple of pictures from the top of the Eiffel Tower to post on the blog, but I was not about to take the poor man’s way to the top. I wanted to ride the lift, “elevator” for some who are asking what is a lift? The wait in line for the lift was 3.5 hours, and I was told it would take about 1.5 hours to climb the stairs to the top. After my 5 mile trek from Norte Dame to the Eiffel Tower, I was not about to climb stairs to the top of that thing. Next time I am going to the top.

Because I don’t have internet access you will get this post about the same time you get one about my first day in India. I am currently flying over the Black Sea, which is on the northern boarder of Turkey. The way the crow flies it is about 2,267 miles from New Delhi.

What do I Pack?

T minus 42 hours and counting and I have yet to pack a bag.  Even worse I don't yet own the bag I will be taking.  Lucky for me I have a wife that is willing to go shopping on my behalf.  I would write more but there is no time, got to get packing.