For additional perspectives on our trip be sure to keep up with Alex's blog at http://topdownviews.blogspot.com
After driving for 20 minutes or so we turned into a complex called Magarpatta City, which is a city of its own, and found a massive complex where many large buildings housed people working for International companies such as John Deere, Avaya, EDS, etc … Finally, we arrived at tower number 5 and were greeted by Sarang and Vipul, two members of our team.
After passing several security checks we settled into a conference room which would become our home for the week. Since we were anxious to meet the team Sarang took us to their seating area and we were warmly greeted. It was nice to finally put a face to a name and to meet some of the people that I had been working with for almost a year now. We informed the team that we’d be hosting a few team meetings during the week as well as wanting to take each one of them to lunch individually.
On Monday Vipul Tiwari was nominated to be the first to join us for lunch. I’m quite sure the restaurant we went to was not of his choosing because we had lunch at a Domino’s Pizza. Alex and I each had a spicy chicken personal pizza and as far as I’m concerned it met the standards of being spicy, Indian food. We enjoyed our conversation and then headed back to the office after lunch.
On Tuesday we had lunch with Karunakar Konne and ate at a restaurant located immediately next to our hotel called Rajdhani. This was certainly a more traditional Indian meal than our pizza the previous day. As a matter of fact the style was once again Thali but unlike our meal on Sunday it featured dishes from a different region of India. Seeing as this was another all-you-can-eat meal we lost track of how much we consumed and before we knew it we were full. Okay, so I saved a little room for dessert and I tried a small dish of cake-like balls which were soaked in a sweet sauce much like a rum-cake.
On Wednesday we had lunch with Sriram Vempati and ate at a restaurant which served meals similar to what he’d find in his home town of Guntar, which is relatively close to Hyderabad. The name of the place was The Hyderabad House and served meals which you would find from that region of the country. Alex and I both ordered a dish called Biryani, which is a family of primarily South Asian rice dishes made with spices, basmati rice and meat/vegetables. We had the choice of chicken, lamb or mutton and agreed that chicken was the way to go. The meal was very tasty and among my favorites from the trip so far. I had tried a version of Chicken Biryani at the hotel but this version was much tastier.
After lunch the ride back to the office was most interesting. The traffic on the road was much heavier than it had been on any previous day and we ran into the first grid-lock which we had encountered. At one particular intersection the traffic was not moving for several minutes but apparently the truck driver behind us didn’t care and rammed into the back end of the car. Our mild-mannered driver named Mukesh quickly sprang out of his car to confront he driver of the truck. I’m not sure what the result of the conversation was but you could tell that Mukesh was not happy. As we discovered later it appears that Mukesh might be personally responsible for damage to his company car if he can’t get the truck-driver to pay for the repairs. Alex and I both thought that it was ironic that just the previous day we discussed the topic of auto insurance and the lack of banged up vehicles on the roads here in India.
Wednesday evening was designated for a team outing and the destination of choice was a bowling alley and game center. On the way to the outing Sarang thought that it would be fun if Alex and I join him in an auto-rickshaw instead of the usual transportation method. Sometime during the trip I had a feeling that I was in a Peter Seller's movie because we vacated a perfectly good car to get into a rickety, cramped auto-rickshaw. At one point during the drive we were following the cab which we had just vacated because our driver was meeting us at the bowling alley for the return trip home. Alex and I could only laugh when I saw our old comfortable car in front of us. Don't get me wrong because we did enjoy the experience but it just seemed surreal to be following our own cab driver. In addition to the current team members our former Team Lead, Krithika Krishnan, was able to join in the fun. Since we were a small group we were able to occupy just one lane at the bowling alley and that made the event more enjoyable. We quickly discovered that none of us were good bowlers but somehow Sarang managed to keep the ball in the lane more than the rest of us and was the ultimate victor. His prize was a box of popcorn and the right to proclaim himself champion of a bowling-impaired team. In spite of the low scores we still managed to have many laughs and a good time.
After bowling we went upstairs to an adjacent restaurant and had a large meal. I was not very hungry because I munched on the many snacks they served while we bowled. One thing that I've noticed about my experience in India is that I've never encountered a shortage of food at any of the restaurants that I've been to.
On Thursday we ate lunch with the team's Social Coordinator, Paromita Chakroborty, whom we discovered helped all of the guys plan where to take us for lunch on the days when it was their turn. Originally we were going to go to one of Paromita's favorite restaurants but due to time restrictions because of an upcoming conference call we stayed closer to the office. We settled on a Chinese restaurant and had a delightful meal and some good conversation. This time we had an uneventful drive back to the office.
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