I’m back! Back on this blog, and better yet, back in India.
For the wise-guys who keep asking if I’m ever coming back from India, based on the lack of closure from my previous trip, I guess I should bring you up to date. My last blog entry was in August 2006, and I returned to Canada a couple of weeks later, about a week or so after the liquid bomb scare at Heathrow. Since I returned through Heathrow, the trip back was a bit nerve-wracking, as I only had two hours to make my connection, and the security lineups were making the news due to their length. Luckily the British Airways flight from Bangalore was on time, because I needed every second of that two hours to get to the Air Canada gate in the other terminal. Unluckily, it was impossible to get a drink of water at the Air Canada gate, or even on the plane until an hour into the flight. On the British Airways flight out of Bangalore, since people couldn’t bring water on board, the crew started handing out water bottles as soon as we boarded. On Air Canada, “No sir, we can’t give you water on the ground, you’ll have to wait.” An hour into the flight we were grudgingly granted a small glass of water, and then waited another hour for the attendant to come around again with the possibility of a second drink.
This time, not wanting to die of thirst over the Atlantic, I decided to try Air France. They don’t fly out of Ottawa, but they do provide a handy shuttle bus service to Dorval in Montreal. That worked quite well, and the connection at Charles De Gaulle in Paris was also smooth. We were late getting out of Paris to Bangalore, due to the unusual amount of snow falling in Paris that day, but in spite of that, the flight was only half an hour late getting into Bangalore. The plane was only half full, which was nice for being able to stretch out, and the service on Air France was as good as on British Airways.
Bangalore’s new airport is quite a change from the old one. The international terminal at the old HAL was full of rubble and looked like it had last been maintained sometime before the Wright brothers first flew. The new BLR airport, on the other hand, is modern and clean… a much more pleasant arrival experience. Baggage still takes quite a while to dribble out of the plane to the conveyor belts though.
I was again amazed at how easy it is to find the right driver out of the sea of drivers (hundreds?) waiting outside the terminal in the middle of the night. The only drawback of the new airport is that it’s a long way out of the city, but the road there is very good. I finally got to the hotel at 3am, about 27 hours after leaving Ottawa.
Yes, it’s a hotel this time. The company I’m visiting closed its guest house due to the poor economy. That’s too bad, because the guest house was great, much like being at home if I had a cook, driver, and laundry person at home, but this hotel seems to be OK too. It’s small, with around 40 rooms, and an attached restaurant. The restaurant is always empty when I’m there, so I get the constant attention of the restaurant captain, and the hotel manager, and the waiting staff. I surprised them the first morning, when they asked me if I’d like an omelette, I said no, how about some dosas, pickle, and curd? So, this week I’ve been having a variety of South Indian breakfast foods, vada, puri, dosa, and various soups, curries, and chutneys.
That picture was taken about 5 hours after I arrived in India, and I went into the office shortly after. I couldn’t sleep anyway, due to jet lag, so after resting for a couple of hours, and having breakfast, I walked over to the office first thing in the morning. It was a busy week, with 11-12 hour days, sorting through the initial startup issues with the new teams I’m training. I should explain that I’m training a contracting company’s engineers in the use and troubleshooting of my company’s software products so that they can develop and test them here in India. My trip in 2006 was the startup trip; this time I’m just adding another couple of products to the mix.
The food’s been great, as I expected. Lunch has been at various restaurants and the company cafeteria, all buffet-style affairs, and all delicious. I’ve found it all surprisingly mild in terms of spicy-hotness levels, unlike my first trip where every meal was a sinus-clearing experience. Knowing what I was in for, and wanting to avoid the shock to my digestive tract that was a major feature of the first weekend of my last trip, I had been acclimating myself the last couple of months with increasingly large doses of an unbelievably hot Vietnamese chili-in-oil sauce. It seems to have worked.
