First week in India
I still have a hard time believing that I am actually here — and still have the left over of some wierd kind of pneumonia thing that makes me cough like an emphysemic — but, yes, I have been in India one whole working week.
I got in at 9am Monday morning, after a 20 hour flight (including 5 hours sitting in Colombo airport) and, after a quick shower at the apartment and a walk around to get some perspective, went into work — a whole 2 minute walk. In fact the wierdest thing about that is that it is further to walk down the stairs at home and up at work than between the buildings.
I’m sure this will be a mixed blessing — in my experience the closer you live to work the later you are — and after a while having work so close might get a bit claustrophobic, but we’ll see.
The ThoughtWorks office has a real buzz, with some awesome developers and a real camaraderie (that does go out of the door when playing Age of Empires and Halo of course :-)
One thing that has struck me here is the number of vegetaians — as Owen put it, the tables are turned from the rest of the world, and when pizza is ordered the question becomes ‘Are there any meat eaters?’.
I haven’t had a chance to get out and see the city yet — only looking out the window of the office which has a fantastic view over the city. I don’t count the terrifying auto-rickshaw ride across the city the other day for cocktails. I made the mistake of getting in the same one as Mack, who has a well deserved reputatioon for attracting accidents. In fact we nearly went into the back of another auto-rickshaw because the driver was talking to his friend in the other lane.
When I say lane of course I don’t really mean lane. What I mean is the region to the side of where we happened to be. This same definition applies to all vehicles, so that there seem to be in the order of 20 lanes where in London you might only count 2.
Everyone who comes here has a story about the roads so I won’t bore you with more. Suffice it to say that London has nothing on Bangalore.