I arrived this morning, feeling hung over without ever drinking anything. Total fly time to India was just under 20 hours. I got just under 3 hours of sleep the entire time. So when I landed I had slept 3 hours of the last 34. The plane was delayed at three separate points along the way: taking off from Paris after refueling, landing in Mumbai, and taking off from Mumbai. The last three or four hours we flew through a monsoon filled with heavy sheets of rain and lightning bolts. Thank goodness for two foot thick synthetic plastic and metal walls, because if I could have heard the thunder I might have been scared (and I don’t want to ruin my track record)..
The most eventful part of the flight was a tie between two things. The first was the four year old Indian boy traveling with his nice old grandmother. He kept kicking the back of my seat and being generally loud. My noise canceling headphones canceled his noise, but repeated baleful glares of death at the child and his grandma did nothing to belay the repeated kicking over the course of three hours. The second event was when, during the Mumbai landing, our plane did a fishtail move that had my stomach and liver exchanging places. My life didn’t exactly flash before my eyes, but many movie memories with large exploding trains and planes did. The runway was slick, but I still think something else was going on up in the front of the plane to make that happen.
Once here customs was an exercise in pure patience. There were four lines with four separate checkers. Each line had about a hundred people in it and none of them looked to be moving. An hour and a half later I walked through the first checkpoint expecting to just grab my luggage and go…nope. I still had to wait about fifteen minutes before my bags came out. Wow! The Bangalore airport security is the model of inefficiency.
As we left the terminal I remember two things in particular. The first was the walkway leading out being lined with taxi drivers and chauffeurs trying to get my business. The walkway was lined with railings on either side, but you could hardly see the railings because there were so many people lining the rails. The second thing that caught my eye was a slightly overweight Caucasian woman (white people stick out like sore thumbs here) arguing with a security guard at the door to the terminal. Apparently no one can enter the terminal through the exit door, but people were standing as close to it as possible. I guess this white lady got a little too close according to the security guard because he was steadily pushing her back. In reality she wasn’t any closer than anyone else but she was maybe more agitated in her waiting, as I saw her almost jumping up and down shortly before the security guard confronted her.
We found our bus driver about halfway down the main walkway. He lead us to a middle age looking bus that just barely fit all of us with our stuff (there were 14 of us). The bus came equipped with a hydraulic door that didn’t work (the 2 bus attendants had to force it closed), a slight moldy smell (that could have been the general India smell though), and mosquitoes ready to eat.
The trip to the Wipro campus took about forty minutes. The sights along the way could only be described as “third world country meets modern accoutrements.” There were shanties on either side of the street, run down looking stores, and many businesses that looked modern in every way. The building style is concrete and tall; many high rise buildings dot the area. At one point in the trip, we got behind a garbage truck carrying wet organic materials that smelled like a decaying road kill carcass. We could see the rotting leaves hanging over the side of the truck, and the smell…oh the horror!
Upon arriving we were ushered through security relatively quickly, and shown to the guest house—where we will be staying for the next six weeks. The guest house looks much like a hotel with open air walkways instead of indoor hallways. The structure is a square with the corners and center courtyard all open to the elements. The room has ceramic tile floors and a muted brown and maroon color scheme. The bed is probably harder than the ceramic floor, but there’s no way to tell short of a stress test. The bathroom has a shower, but no bathtub associated with it. So, when I took a cold shower this morning (no hot water up here on the first above ground floor…yet) the water just got all over since it had no tub to keep it in place. The bathroom DOES have toilet paper though, and believe me—much happiness ensued when I found that out.
One last interesting note about the room that I should mention is the electricity situation. The key to the room came attached to a plastic keychain with the room number on it. When I first got into the room the electricity didn’t work no matter how many switches I flipped. Finally, I saw a small plastic thermostat looking thing next to the door with a slot in it. It turns out that you have to insert your plastic keychain into the slot to get the room’s electricity running. Also, you can’t lock your door from the outside without the key, so it’s a pretty nice system they got going. It makes it nearly impossible to lock yourself out by accident.
After I got my room (and figured out how to turn on the electricity), I decided to walk around the campus. I will take pictures of the area so you can see what I’m talking about here. The area enclosed by the fences is called the Wipro Campus and it consists of about 10 buildings in all. The area is very well landscaped and the buildings are nice and new. It essentially looks like a semi-tropical college campus with large buildings dedicated to all sorts of different things. In this case the buildings are Offshore Development Centers for various accounts that Wipro handles. Our guest house building is the only one that is used for living space. The central building holds administrative offices, the food court, some shopping places, and the gym. All in all the area is nice.
That cannot be said for the area directly beyond the fences though. There is a shantytown not 30 feet from the outside fence of this campus. By shantytown I mean people living in houses made of cement brick and sheet metal roofs. The shantytown starts at the edge of the street across from the fence and goes on for a long distance. It’s a very stark contrast to what can be seen on Campus here.
After exploring and then unpacking some, my group and I went into Bangalore proper via the Wipro Shuttle bus. The trip took about an hour because of Sunday traffic. The city reminded me so much of Panama that I waxed nostalgic and talked with Nisha about my mission the whole way there. We walked around what passes for the “downtown” shopping district here in Bangalore. I found out that things really are cheaper here too. It was amusing to see things that sell for much more in the states sell for a third or even a fourth of the price here. Not everything is that much cheaper, but clothes and food fall into those categories.
After exchanging money and picking up a few things (like the new Harry Potter book), we went in search of a sit down restaurant. We spent about 40 minutes walking around and all we could find was Subway, KFC, and McDonalds. It was sad to think that we flew twelve thousand miles only to eat American fast food. Finally, as we were about to give up, we found an Indian buffet style restaurant on the roof of a shopping mall. The place was called the “Canopy” and served a variety of Indian food. The food was good, but I was disappointed because none of it was too spicy for me. The rest of the group was complaining after a few bites about how spicy it was, but to me none of the food was that spicy. Instead it tasted good, and well prepared but not too hot.
After that late lunch the guys all headed back while the girls went looking for a place to get their nails done. Back here at the guest house I turned the air condition on and laid down for a few minutes…which turned into a five hour nap. Now I’m wide awake and officially jet lagged, because I can’t sleep even though I need to be up for work in 6 hours.
I’ll leave it at that for now. First impression: this place is crazy.
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