Warren in India

Arrival
Well, I'm here. After a bit of a rocky start, I'm mostly adjusted to being here. Our training starts this morning -- It will run Monday through Friday, from 9-6 with breaks for tea and lunch.

The experience of getting here was possibly the worst travel experience of my life. I was unable to get a spot in an overhead bin for my bag on the Chicago-Frankfurt flight, which meant that my large carry-on bag had to go under the seat in front of me. I had very little leg room and was able to get only a few catnaps in. Still, it was "only" about nine hours, so it wasn't totally awful.

The real confusion started after we landed in Frankfurt. Three fellow ThoughtWorkers were on that flight with me, and we had all assumed that we were on the same flight from Frankfurt to Bangalore. But since our flight was about 45 minutes late getting into Frankfurt, we didn't have much time to check our tickets to verify this. All I knew was that I didn't have a boarding pass yet and that everyone else did. To get a boarding pass, I needed to go to the Transfer Desk, which was in a different direction from where the other three were going. While I was standing in line for this, I figured out that I was on a completely different flight from the others -- they were on Lufthansa, I was on Air India. When I finally made it to the front of the line, the woman at the desk told me that I needed to go to the gate to get my boarding pass. Thankfully, my second flight was delayed as well. Otherwise, I would have missed it.

I had a lot more room on this flight -- I managed to get my bag into an overhead bin -- but I still was unable to get more than about 90 minutes total of sleep. We had a stopover in Mumbai (Bombay) and were once again late in both getting in and taking off for Bangalore. My flight touched down in Bangalore at about 5:30 AM local time, two-and-a-half hours late and nearly 24 hours after I boarded in Chicago.

Immigration was a breeze; baggage claim and customs were not. Immediately, they pulled me aside and x-rayed my carry-on bag. Yes, I have two laptops. Yes, I will come see you again after I get my bags. (We flew in on a half-full 747, and the one baggage carousel was smaller than I remember the carousel at tiny Windsor Airport being.) Forty-five minutes later, I had my bags and was talking to the customs officer.

Originally, the coordinator of the program here had told me that I would have to pay a tariff if I brought my own laptop in addition to my work laptop. Later, after doing a bit of research, she told me that there was a new regulation that exempted Bangalore from this restriction, and that I wouldn't have to pay. The officers I spoke to claimed to know nothing about this, despite my repeated insistences and refusals to pay. (Somehow, I think the tattered rule book that they showed me was not totally up-to-date.) After realizing that they wouldn't budge, I gave a conservative estimate of the value of my own laptop and went and bought enough rupees to cover the tariff.

When I returned to talk to the officer, rupees in-pocket, he told me that if I didn't need a receipt, he would accept a gratuity of 50% of the stated tariff in lieu of full payment. I needed the receipt to give to our CFO here in order to try and get the tariff that I should not have been charged back, however. So I paid the full amount and went on my way.

I'll get into more detail on the accomodations (nice) and people (nicer still) here sometime soon; now, I have to start getting ready for class! As I said, the journey here was awful, but I'm here, safe, sound, and mostly over the jet lag. Things have been 1000% better since I stepped out of the airport, and I'm really quite excited to get started with the formal sessions!

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