Warren in India

Where's Warren?
I'm here. In Bangalore, of course. I haven't updated in a while partially out of laziness, but mostly out of a whole lot of ordinary happenings filling my days and nights. As I have settled in and gotten somewhat accustomed to things that had previously baffled me, I have found it difficult to report on the everyday.

If memory serves, we left our protagonist with the monkeys outside of Mysore. Let's take a few steps back from there and go into a little more detail about that trip, shall we? We were scheduled to board the tour bus outside of the office at about 6 AM on a Saturday morning last month. The first wrench in our plans was that the bus showed up about an hour late. The second was that there weren't enough seats on the bus for everyone. I was ready to bow out of the trip -- abundant legroom was not a feature of the motor coach -- when arrangements were made for a hired car as compensation for the tour company's mistake. So I rode in the car to and from Mysore without a single leg cramp, which was relatively nice.

For context, I should say that this trip was my first (and only, to date) trip outside of Bangalore since arriving. There were a few logistical problems in meeting up with the hired car, but the first leg of our trip was otherwise uneventful -- I dozed in the back seat as we cruised through the Indian countryside.

Our first stop was a roadside vegetarian restaurant, where we were to eat breakfast. It was a good thing that I'd eaten before leaving, because there was exactly one item in the buffet that we were presented that I could safely eat. (For those not "in the know," I am allergic to lentils and other legumes, which are used across Indian cuisine -- especially in this part of India -- without much reserve whatsoever. Merely looking for them is not enough, as they can be hidden, ground up and added to flour etc. Depending on which legume and how much, eating them could be anything from somewhat annoying to fatal. I don't ever intend to progress much beyond the theoretical on this matter.) So I didn't have much breakfast...and I also felt quite a bit out of place, moreso than I had previously in my time here. I'll come back to this point in due time.

The total drive to Mysore took about three hours, largely due to about 80% of the road being under construction. It's only about 90 miles between Mysore and Bangalore. (It took us four hours to get back.)

We in the car had gotten separated from the bus, so our driver decided to take us to a temple on the outskirts of town. We eventually realized that we needed to catch up to the bus, but before that, the three of us (Shane, Joe, and I) ventured out of the car and were immediately surrounded by a swarm of men trying to sell us various baubles and fake sandalwood trinkets. We had to get in the car and leave for them to leave us alone. They didn't seem to understand "no," but I suspect that they'd have understood "yes" quite easily.

The first planned stop in Mysore was a memorial that a local sultan had built to commemorate his defeat of the British troops who had been occupying the area. The sultan later met his death at the hands of the future Duke of Wellington (you know, the fella who defeated Napoleon). The building wasn't that impressive, but the grounds were large and quite nice.

We then moved on to the main attraction (for me, anyway) of Mysore, the palace. I was actually quite disappointed with the palace. Not because the building wasn't nice (it was), but because it was designed and built by the British to replace a palace that was "accidentally" burned down during a battle. The palace that now stands was finished in 1912, so it certainly wasn't the example of pre-industrial Indian architecture, design and construction that I was expecting. Ah well.

After the palace, we had lunch at a hotel on the way to the temple where we saw the monkeys. The temple was basically a 30-foot statue of a bull. It was cool, but not as cool as the monkeys.

Since the classroom portion of bootcamp ended a few weeks back, I've been on a few internal projects. The first one was a tool to help ThoughtWorks track its internal resources. After a day (which isn't really enough time to do anything or to fairly say I'd truly been on the project -- I think they intended to put me on a smaller team from the start), I was moved to an internal sales tool. After some discussions with the sales force in Chicago, we moved the project to the back burner and started yet another...and after a few days on that one, I moved back to the original one that I was on for a day at the start. (The reason for this is that they are eyeing at least one developer to leave here for a project in Salt Lake City, and the manager of the team wanted someone who would be almost guaranteed to be here for the four weeks that the project would be running.) The project has been going pretty well, though the team is slowly shrinking as people are sent back to their home countries for various reasons. I'm still waiting to hear which billable project (if any) will be my first, so I'm in a bit of limbo.

Anyway, back to the food thing: it didn't take me long to realize just how much of the food around here is chock full o' lentils. The catered lunches during the first week of bootcamp were my first clue. My second clue was finding out after the fact that two seemingly-safe culinary staples, dosa and idly, were made with ground lentils. Oops. That explained why I had a bit of difficulty swallowing my anti-malaria medicine later that day. A Benadryl cleared that up, though I do count myself lucky, even though I did have my Epi-Pen with me at the time.

The third and most significant time was the trip to Mysore. It truly hit me just how much I'd come to rely on Pizza Hut and TGI Friday's. (Yes, the waitstaff at Friday's does wear "flair." No, I'm not proud of how much I've eaten at these two establishments over here.) This realization really put a damper on my interest in venturing outside of Bangalore -- let alone the area immediately around the office -- since I'd have to watch every bite of food for Warrensbane, possibly unable to ask for guidance from whomever was serving me -- not my idea of a good time by any means, and certainly not a good way to spend my free time. Though I do not complain and have politely explained when I had to turn down an invitation to a restaurant or the offer of a morsel, it's really been the foremost reason that I made it known that staying through June was not my first choice. So we'll see if and when I can get on a billable project back home.

That's about it for now. Adios, amoebas.

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