Things I Shall No Longer Take For Granted

• drinkable water


• beef


• toilet paper


• silverware


• napkins


• reliable electricity


• refrigerators


• microwaves


• bulk-size products


• the english language


• the ability to walk outside without being swarmed by mosquitoes


• changing seasons (i.e. winter)


• american tv


• pasteurized milk


• the concept of being on time


• the concept of being in a hurry


• edible fruit / vegetables


• driving on the right side of the road


• traffic rules


• freeways / highways


• mexican food


• having a room with more than 3 outlets


• being able to walk on grass


• a shower with reliable temperature and / or water pressure


• wireless internet

Long Overdue, I Know

sorry for the long interval between posts; we started our 'POST' project thingy about 2 weeks ago and that has been eating up almost all of my time and energy until recently. it is the Project on Organizational Standards in Training, or some other BS name like that ('what does POST stand for?' was a question in at least one of our daily tests last week, and i don't think a single person knew / knows what it actually is, still). basically, POST is a horribly organized (go figure) attempt at providing us with some 'hands-on' project time. the first 5 days were spent trying to fill out paperwork (more or less what we will be doing for the rest of our careers with this company . . . . Indians love their beaurocracy). now that we are finally done with the stupid paperwork phase, we can actually start coding the project. we spent one day getting ready, creating the skeletons and trying to integrate our project with some absolutely horrible, worthless software, as we were instructed to do. the 'integration' with this horrivle versioning software took almost 6 hours in itself, but now that we have it done, my group is expecting to finish our coding all on monday and have the majority of our remaining 3 days to relax and not go to work. hooray for being salaried!

anyway, i think i actually learned something this weekend. needing to do laundry, i have been wearing my ND Shirt (the green one from my junior year) all weekend . . . . for the second weekend since i got here.
the last time i wore it was the weekend Notre Dame played MSU.
both times i have worn this shirt since coming to india, we have lost; therefore, i think this Shirt is cursed.

from one of the past few weekends, i don't really remember which, i have posted pictures:
http://picasaweb.google.co.in/shadedaemon/ChamundiHill
we went to Chamundi Hill, which is basically a thousand or so steps up this hill to a temple / market area. more or less unremarkable, and the only reason to climb the stairs is just to say 'i climbed a thousand stairs, in the sun, with incredible humidity and 90 degree weather'.

i also remembered to post a quick little video i took with my camera when i went to the tibetan monastary:
http://picasaweb.google.co.in/shadedaemon/CoorgTrip (very last thing in the album).

"Weekend" Trip to Coorg: Life Goal Accomplished Before Breakfast!

good news, everyone!
this past weekend a bunch of us decided to wake up early and take a scenic trip to Coorg, which is apparently a town in india. we still don't know quite where it is, and we can't find it on Google Maps / Earth. anywho, we went, and it was almost fun.
oh yeah, by "weekend" i mean "sunday" because this stupid company made us work on saturday. something about mysore having too many holidays earlier in the year or some crap like that. it was mandatory.

so i celebrated my one day off by waking up at 5 am to catch the taxi to coorg. the first stop along the way was the Golden Temple, which is a Tibetan Buddhist Monastary. kind of a big deal, apparently. we made it there just after they opened up for visitors in the morning (7 am), and we got to see some of the morning prayers. it was pretty freaking sweet.

List Of Things To Do Before I Die:
#12 visit a Tibetan Buddhist Monastary - - - - - check!

after hanging around the monastary for a while, we crammed back into the taxi and went to a sketchy little diner thing for breakfast. i had a masala dosa, which is basically a giant deep-fried pancake thing with some really spicy onion-potato stuff inside of it. then we drove off to a little park thing, where we spent most of the rest of the day. not much to talk about there; they had rabbits, deer, and poisonous-looking spiders that were quite literally the size of my hand. think cosmo-sized . . . . there was also a gross, dirty-looking river and a whole lot of bamboo.

after the foresty-place we went to Abbi Falls, which is (surprise) a waterfall. yep, they have those over here in india, too. i got a couple of pictures of the waterfall before my camera battery died. good thing we did the monastary first, eh?

our final stop included a hotel in a small town for lunch and a "scenic hike" around the hill right next to the hotel. the view was nice, but nothing to write home about, so i won't.

here are those pictures: http://picasaweb.google.co.in/shadedaemon/CoorgTrip

well, it took me about 10 minutes to write this up. which means the shower should be getting warmed up soon, which in turn means its time for me to take my leave.

SCARY

as an american living inside this little westernized-bubble that is our campus, its sometimes easy to forget just where i really am. then something like this happens to remind me. while i feel as though i came well-prepared and with an open mind for the radically unknown, to say a lot of my experiences here are eye-opening is still probably an understatement.

don't worry, all the messy nastiness is happening up north, and i am way down south.

its still a little disconcerting, though.

check it out: you can see New Delhi (bombings) and Agra (Taj Mahal) up in central-north india.
way down south-central is Bengalore ('Bengaluru' - i am in Mysore, which is just southwest a couple of hours) and just east of that is Chennai (where i will be living come november).


View Larger Map

Quick Updates

1) i leave mysore at the very begining of november to move to chennai (where suresh tought in HEROES . . . . awesome). i will be there for my project cycle, which i have been told lasts both 2 and 4 months, so who knows what will really happen there.



2) i have a few awesome new t-shirts that i bought in mysore. lets just say that "indian fashion sense" is an oxymoron or contradiction of terms.



3) this place is incredibly dull and boring, and its a major hassle to get out and visit anywhere for the weekend. hopefully moving to chennai will solve part of this problem, because the city actually has its own airport and we will no longer have to drive for 3+ hours on top of our flight to get anywhere in the country.



4) most of the people i have grown really close to are leaving this sunday to finish their training in hydrabad. many of them will not be living in seattle, which means there is a good chance i will not see them again, or at least won't see them for a really, really long time. that sucks.


5) i have not yet been able to watch any football games, which seems to be working out well. apparently notre dame wins games when i don't watch. still, i don't like having a football season that i can't watch.


6) training is an absolute joke so far. i spent 4 years actually learning this stuff, and now i am getting a watered-down version of what i already know spoon-fed to me by people who don't know how to teach americans. i have gotten A's on all my tests so far without even exerting myself, and am possibly the only person who got 100% on the project we did.

Rituals: Workdays

sorry for the lack of posts over the past two weeks. not much of note has happened recently, what with training and getting more adjusted now that the shock has worn off. since the days are just kind of mushing together over here, i figured i'd walk you all through a rough outline of my daily schedule here.

wake up some time between 7 and 8, wait for the water to get hot so i can shower (if i am lucky / early enough to get any hot water). spend a few minutes getting ready for class, including drying my hair (yay for my 240-volt hair dryer), staring at my wardrobe trying to figure out whether or not i need to wear a tie for whichever day it currently is (and whether or not it matches whichever shirt i happen to grab first), and making sure my ipod is well-hidden. i walk over to the training building, which is conveniently just across the road from our hostel (and i usually get yelled at for walking across the grass to the pathway instead of walking the extra 50 feet down to and back from where it meets the road). swipe my security card to open the door, let the guard dig through my backpack looking for who knows what (my deck of cards have already been confiscated once), and head over to my classroom.

from about 9 till 12~12:30 we have someone lecture us on topics which most of us have been taking real clases on for 4+ years. add horrible powerpoint slides, worser engrish, and incomprehensible accents. if you understand the attention span of the typical college kid, you can maybe start to see how difficult it is to pay attention to / care about anything that the instructors are trying to say to us (seriously, we had a conversation with our most recent instructor about the differences between "can't" and "shouldn't", which are completely interchangable in indian-english).

to be fair, we usually get some small break around 10 ~ 10:30, which most of us use to get coffee / coke / the recently-discovered, incredibly, heavenly, delicious chocolate croissants that are offered at the 24-hour snack stand just outside of the GEC (opposite side of the building from our hostel). it's taken about a month, but i think the security guards have finally realized that we can bring our drinks into the building now (it's absolutely allowed, we have had many discussions with HR and finally had to start writing down the names and ID numbers of the security guards who still refused to let us in, which has solved the problem nicely so far).

anyway, lunch whenever our instructor decides to let us go, which can be any time from 11:30 (only once, and it was awesome) till about 1 (which leaves us less than an hour to get to the food court, stand in line forever, stand in another line for even longer, eat, and get back . . . . gross).

after lunch is either time to do assignments or more lecture, depending on the instructor, material, etc. assignment-time is supposed to be from 2 - 6, which more or less rounds out our work day, but i have yet to have an assignment that takes me until after 4 to finish, at the absolute latest (and there were only 2 that took me that long, all the others i have been finishing before 3). i no longer bother to start the assignments in the morning, because then i have nothing to do from 2 - 4:30, which we were told is the absolute earliest we are allowed to clock out and leave for the day. its difficult enough to fill that time as it is; i only brought 4 novels from home and am down to my last 2 already.

anyway, i usually head over to the long-cycle (slower track) classroom and help my friends in there who don't understand whatever computer-programming concepts they are currently learning. after that we try to play a game of ultimate frisbee if the weather is nice (which it occasionally is) and then dinner as soon as the food courts open, which is 7:30. after dinner is anything from playing uno until security yells at us (cards=gambling=illegal, no exceptions, arguments, or explanations entertained), playing starcraft / warcraft via internal LAN, smash bros, mafia, or some other form of winding down.

rinse and repeat throughout the week.

Weekend in Bangalore

so, despite the first 3+ hour (each direction) trip to bangalore, i decided to give it a second shot. one of the guys here, Vishal, has family living in bangalore. we stayed in the guest-cabins at his uncle's house, and it was pretty awesome. we left friday evening and bade the trek to bangalore in time for dinner (9:00, which is approaching the end of dinner time by indian standards). we spent saturday in the city, doing a little shopping (you have no idea how hard it is to find a) bow-ties, b) suit-vests, and c) american board games in india). being able to have alcohol (incredibly strict enforcement of the dry campus rule) was nice, but by far the best part of the trip was being able to eat an actual meal that left me feeling full afterwords.

in true american fashion, we ate dinner at the Hard Rock Cafe.

i had a bacon cheeseburger ('bacon', 'cheese', and 'burger' are not food in india) and a pomegranate margarita. both good. i also bought a t-shirt, since i most definitely did not bring enough informal clothes to india.

basically, it was a lot of relaxing and getting away from indian beaurocracy. there are a few pictures up (http://picasaweb.google.com/shadedaemon/IndiaAugust2008) and i am trying to get some pictures from my photo-maniac friends who came with us.


also, i found out that i am now a part of the Manufacturing Business unit, which means i will be working on post-training projects in either Chennai or Bangalore, and i will be "based in" Seattle when i return to the U.S.
fine print: being "based in" an area doesn't actually mean anything, so far as we can tell, because i have yet to find a trainee from last year who actually has spent more than a week or two living in the area out of which he is "based".