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I hope I'm counting the days right -- they're all starting to blend together.
I may not have another post tonight. The head of our local office here is taking us out to dinner to Fusion 9, a restaurant near the hotel. Pretty cool that I could find a blog review of the place.
It's a photorama! I took these picture throughout the day.
As I think I mentioned before, Hi-Tec city sits on an elevated rocky spot. Today we entered it through the "back way" in order to avoid traffic. This involves climbing a long windy hill, and as we climbed, we encountered about 2 dozen buffalo, slowly walking to the top of the hill to reach some vegetation across the road from the newly constructed office buildings. These things stand nearly 5 feet tall, with horns and leathery skin.
The first picture shows one of them walking in the direction of one of the ubiquitous taxis.
Here's their destination -- with more examples of those large rocks sitting upon one another. Ummmmm----grass!
Hyderabad is full of very small cars, even smaller three wheeled taxis which you just saw, and motorcycles that are ridden even in the rain. The cars are made by the likes of Honda, Toyota, Suzuki, and others, but the models sold have what must be very small engines (1.0-1.3 liters) and even smaller bodies. Here's an example of a common Suzuki in the parking lot. Note how small the tires are.
One of the large boulders was incorporated into the landscaping next to the building, by creating a fountain that flows over the top. It creates a great setting, where folks hang out during lunch, breaks, etc.
And finally, I mentioned the beautiful sky a post or two ago. Here's a fine example as the clouds built up before a late afternoon rain shower.
End of photos -- refer all inquires from Life Magazine to peter@whocanreallysay.com.
It's Monday morning, about 7:45 AM. Hope everyone remembered to turn the clocks back over the weekend. I'm now 10.5 hours ahead of EST -- for the time zone impaired just add 1.5 hours to whatever time I note, then swap AM for PM, to translate the times. So it's 9:15 PM back east (or is that forward, west?).
It rained here again yesterday, on and off, and sometimes quite hard. The cloud cover is quite different from what I'm used to however -- yes, it's mostly gray but it's not a uniform blanket. You can see all sorts of tall clouds towering amongst the generally gray sky, with small spots of blue occasionally peeking through. The hotel grounds are small and at one point during a break in the rain I took a walk around, grabbing this shot of the pool when the sun was shining.
Ten minutes later it started raining again.
It's back to the office today. The daily routine during the week goes something like this. We eat breakfast at the hotel starting around 8:00-8:15, and leave for the office at 8:45. If traffic is good we get there by 9, if not by 9:15. We work until 6:00 with an hour for lunch, then come back to the hotel after dark in even worse traffic. The restaurant we usually eat at begins serving around 7:30 but sometimes we don't sit down until 8:30 or later, which makes for a late meal. So during the week the most exciting thing we do is drive back and forth to the office through the city, which is an amazing patchwork of the new, the old, and the ugly, rich and poor living right next to each other in a way you just don't see in the US.
More on the new, old, etc. this week, I hope.
I have less to report today than I might. We awoke this morning (Saturday) to a steady rainfall, something that isn't expected much at this time of year or so I'm told. I felt tired still and because of the weather and the fact that I have yet one more full weekend here I decided to forgo the sightseeing and shopping we'd planned. I rested some, read some, ate some, drank some, and will do all of the above some more before the day is done.
Also caught most of the final World Series game this morning -- all I can say is that if Jeff Weaver had pitched for the Yankees as he did for the Cardinals the Yanks would've stood a great chance of winning the WS a few years back. Instead, he gets to join the Kenny Rogers "Can Pitch Anywhere But NY Club". Well.
Anyway, it's a good thing I get to rest since the days are very tiring, standing up in front of a group of people talking for most of 8 hours. So I'll leave you with a few more pictures. Our office here is located in an area known as Hi-Tec City, a part of Hyderabad that's undergone tremendous construction in the last 5-6 or so years to house the software, call centers, and back office operations of foreign companies. The immediate setting is a raised and rocky outcrop, and by rocky I supposed I mean not so much strewn with rocks as with boulders -- huge boulders, sometimes naturally stacked one on top of the other. You can see something of what I mean in the next photo, showing modern office buildings in the backround on the left, older buildings in the backround to the right, and large boulders in the foreground, including one that has been shaved flat by the landscape architects. The view is from a narrow balcony.
Here's another view that overlaps the first, with a better view of the foreground.
With any luck this will be the last post about how much sleep I got last night. For the first time I mostly slept through the night. Yeah, I woke up a few times but got back to sleep quickly. The cold lingers but it's manageable.
24 hour internet connectivity costs something like $15 a day and I'm thinking of cutting that back over the weekend. There's too much else to do, and since I'm feeling better now I expect I'll be out and about over the weekend. So I may not log in tonight or Saturday, or if tonight, not on Sunday, or whatever. An hour is a little less than $5 so I may do that just to check email.
I'm not sure what we'll do tomorrow -- probably some sight seeing under the expert guidance of our driver, and some shopping. I brought two books and haven't cracked them yet, and some DVD's to watch if I feel like that. I'm hoping to get a whole bunch more pics to post as well.
Thirty minutes to breakfast so I have to get ready. One of the interesting things about the breakfast buffet is the wide variety of choices including vegetables, fresh fruit, and freshly made juices -- and I do mean fresh. The other day I ordered tomato juice and damn if they didn't have Jack Lalane in the back throwing fresh tomatoes into a Juicer. What a novel concept -- tomato juice that actually tastes like a tomato!
I'm feeling much better and had another productive day at the office. The training is going very well and I can hardly take much credit, since the "trainees" are well along in the subject already.
So tonight I'll talk about food, and particularly tonight's dinner -- Tandori Lobster. There's an outdoor restaurant at the hotel on the shores of a small lake. It's speciality is kabobs and local Hyderabad cuisine. I ate alone as my travelling companions chose to shop. The menu was one of those things where you're not quite sure what to order as you're not quite sure what anything is. A friend had suggested I have tandori chicken while I'm here so I figured tandori lobster was familiar enough. It was oustanding.
I don't know the source of the lobster but it wasn't coastal Maine. It had a narrow body with no apparent claws, had been split in two, then cleaned and grilled. Very spicey, but not overwhelmingly so. Absolutely delicious. The evening was warm with a breeze and the restaurant sits underneath tall palms. All in all it's a great setting, the atmosphere completed by combined western/Indian music playing in the background -- think the (original) Pink Panther soundtrack with Indian music replacing the European influences of Mancini's score. A swell time was had by all me.
The lake has a lit fountain in the middle to complement the scene. Here's a picture.
Oh, and did I mention the meal cost somewhere around $25, with tip?
There isn't much to add at the moment. I didn't sleep very well last night, and from 3:00 to 6:00 AM I tossed and turned, getting very little sleep at all. I don't know if it's the cold or jet lag that's at work, or the fact that I slept so much during the day. In any case, my voice feels much better and I don't feel so drained this morning.
So I'll be in the office today, moving things along. Fortunately the supervisor of the group I'm training was off yesterday for the celebration of the last day of Ramadan. (The office is a mix of Muslims and Hindus, and Hyderabad is well known as a densely populated city where both religions co-exist quite well). Yesterday I was going to speak to some other employees on different matters and I'll get to that now in a few days at the latest, after my core group has completed the introductory training phase and begun to work on their own.
I slept more than four hours today so far. Woke up and felt a bit more rested, and slightly less foggy, yet still with a headache and little energy. But I missed lunch, served through 3:00, so I've been snacking on the fruit provided in each room by the hotel -- a small banana and an orange. Both are high in vitamin C, so I'll be cured shortly. I received a call from our local office, offering to arrange medical care if need be. I don't have a fever though and I politely declined (see -- the politeness thing is working on me already). It's good to know I can fall back on that if I had to.
I'll eat dinner in the hotel tonight -- I felt so rotten last night I took dinner in the room, a Tenderloin Burger. A friend who's been to India warned me that you may well find menu items that sound familiar but which won't taste quite the same, and he has a point. But it was fine nonetheless.
Without much more to say, I'll share two more pictures -- one of the lake overlooked by the hotel "coffee shop" taken a few days ago. Well, if what they have here is a coffee shop I can't imagine what a full restaurant would look like. It's really quite nice.
Next is a view of the fruit plate in the room, accompanied by a properly sized bottle of Kingfisher beer, as fine a product of India as any, if you don't count say, the spices and precious gems. This was taken a few days ago -- today the plate contained an orange, banana and apple.
So here I am, almost 9,000 miles from home, reduced to posting poorly composed still lifes. Don't fret -- it really hasn't been that bad (the trip, not my photography).
I didn't get the hoped for 9 or so hours of sleep last night. I woke up around 2:30 AM with a brutal cough and congestion. Unlike the night before I decided staying in bed was the best thing and I slept on and off through the rest of the night. This morning my voice is very rough and deep, I'm still congested and my head is ready for Halloween, cobwebs and all.
Fortunately for me today was scheduled to be light at work so I decided the best thing would be to rest my voice and everything else. I joined my travelling companions at breakfast but that experience reinforced my ultimate decision to stay put at the hotel. Upon returning to the room I found it had already been attended to and re-stocked, including a notable touch of India decorating my bed.
The concierge has set me up with a cold remedy, Coldarin, made locally under license from Johnson & Johnson.
So today I'm hotel bound and with any luck, in 2 minutes I'll feel much better and head out to the pool. Or the bed.
By the way, just a quick note -- in case you're trying to relate, the time and date stamps on these posts are local US time, not India time.
The jet lag hit me like a ton of bricks this morning, say around 10 or 11, and I've been conscious on borrowed time ever since. I'm amazed I'm still awake at 10:30 now but that will end in a few minutes after I wrap this up and my head gets within about 3 feet of the pillow.
To make matters worse, I've had a nasty post-nasal drip (what's a pre-nasal drip?) that's working it's black magic on my throat and voice. Of course, since I'm here to train people that means I get to stand in front of up to a dozen or more rapt faces waiting eagerly for my next pearl of wisdom, talking all day long. All too often the pearls are preceded by a cough and postceded (if there's no pre-nasal drip does that mean there's no postceding?) by a sniffle. Before the trip I was innoculated against, among other things, Dengue Hemorraghic Fever. The common cold, though, is invicible and all too often available in airline cabins, especially when the passengers represent 6 of the 7 continents of the world. Well maybe South America slipped by so make it 5, but sheez!
So it was a tough day but rewarding. My co-workers and new friends in India are smart and eager, limited though they are by their lack of first hand knowledge of our company's business. When I'm done, if I'm successful, many of those limitations will be less of a barrier -- only time and experience on their part will truly erode them.
So I'm off to a good start, although I wish the day had been as sublime as the breakfast, served at the hotel only a precious few hours before Father Sleep started pulling the covers up over my eyes. The view from the main restaurant was tranquil and peaceful this morning, the foliage appearing jungle like to my North American eyes. At the time I thought it was an omen of good things to come at the office, and though the office was indeed good, it was in fact only a signal that I needed about 100 more hours of sleep. Nine of them start right now.
Megan McArdle, a much more experienced international traveller than I, is suffering jet lag too. It's 4:41 AM here in Hyderabad and I've been up for almost an hour. At this point maybe I'll just forget trying to sleep and hope they show Tuesday Morning Monday Night Football on ESPN, which has a 6:00 AM start here.
Anyway, I'm travelling with three companions from our Ireland office and we all had dinner tonight in the hotel. If lunch and dinner yesterday count for anything and I think they do, I'm going to enjoy eating here. It's not too difficult to avoid the spicey stuff if that's not to your taste (I don't mind spicey myself). Last night I had lamb and it was very nicely done. I had a very nice soup too, although I have no idea what it was. We had pleasant conversation to the point that I forgot I had my soup sitting at my side. I imagine I'll run into something that tastes awful at some point but so far, so good.
I've a view to the west from my window and saw a very nice sunset tonight. The pic below doesn't do it much justice I'm afraid. It's been a while since I put a pic in a post so I'm not sure how this will work.
UPDATE: Here's the sunrise this morning at 7:00 AM. There's no actual sun in the picture. Rather, it's the same view as I the photo above.
India has a new blogger. Me. I'm typing from my hotel room on the sixth floor of the Taj Banjar hotel in Hyderabad. I guess this gives me something to blog about, an ample excuse to break the ennui that resulted in my long hiatus.
I'm here on a training assignment for work -- I'm doing the training. I haven't blogged about my job before and don't intend to start now so don't expect much on that front. Suffice it to say that the firm I work for is expanding its operation here and being the indispensable sort that I am, well, here I am! But I figured this is as good a way as any to keep friends back home informed.
I flew from the US to Frankfurt Germany on Lufthansa, and then on from there to Hyderabad. I left the US at 6:00 PM on Saturday and arrived 22 hours later in India. It's about 8 hours to Frankfurt and another 8 to Hyderabad, give or take. My 3 hour layover in Frankfurt turned into a 5.5 hour layover due to "technical problems" which meant, I think, "Peter drank all the beer on the first flight and we had to order more for the second". Nice thing was that the beer was free on the plane.
Another nice thing was that Lufthansa was offering free Wi-Fi on the plane, which allowed me to use my Powerbook G4 (that I bought during my time not blogging) with an iSight camera to video conference with my housemates while on the flight. Outrageous, and very very cool! Had I been in business class I could have plugged in the laptop and continued the connection for the entire trip. Unfortunately I was travelling steerage coach and using the camera drains the battery quickly.
Hyderabad is 9.5 hours ahead of eastern daylight time in the US -- I finally got to sleep at 4:30 AM local time this morning and got a solid 7 hours in. I'm tired today but will last well into the evening and with any luck I'll be fit and ready to go tomorrow morning when The Peter Show starts.
The hotel room isn't large but is nicely appointed -- hard wood floors, comfortable furniture -- it could use more electrical outlets. The hotel staff is relentlessly polite -- Indians have a manner that lends itself to politeness and I imagine spending enough time here would rub off on one who is probably not nearly polite enough. That would be me.
Today it's hot but not sufferingly so -- probably around 90 degrees and certainly humid, but it doesn't have the feel of a muggy July day in the northeastern US. This is the "cool" season so I'd hate to be here when it's probably brutally hot by my experience.
I don't know how often I'll post here but I hope to have something every day or so. I hate saying even that, because a day or so from now I'll be saying what I said last March -- what the hell should I write about today?
So I'll wrap this up as I watch a replay of Game Two of the World Series on ESPN in my room. Who won? DON'T TELL ME!