My Trip to India - Day One
As you may know I currently work for Perk.com, which has offices in Austin, Texas and Bengaluru, India (Bangalore), and I was given the opportunity to fly out to Bangalore to see our offices in India. While I've been to Mexico and the Grand Cayman Islands when I was younger, I have never traveled over-seas before, so needless to say I am very excited. I left Austin around 6:45pm on March 1st, and landed in Heathrow, London for a four to five hour layover, before taking off again for Bangalore.
After 23 total hours of flying, my coworkers and I finally made it. Sadly, we had a long customs and immigrations line to go through, plus an hour long drive from the airport to the hotel. Thankfully we arrived in the early morning, and as we left the airport it started raining which kept the weather nice and cool.
This hotel. Is. Amazing! Nice room with a very comfortable bed, almost too comfortable when you're trying to stay awake to adjust to the new timezone, and the buffet in the hotel lobby made for an amazing breakfast, mind you this was my sixth meal during all this flying; for those of you that know me and how much I usually eat, I apologize for the heart attack.
Once we finished eating and checking in, it was time to go to the office to meet everyone and try to get some work done. More driving, and yet another experience with the highly entertaining traffic in India. Have you ever seen five lanes of traffic crammed into three lanes? I have, and while that sounds horrifying, I couldn't help but laugh. Indians do this everyday, yet Austinites can barely get through downtown Austin and I-35 without getting into at least 5 wrecks, and blocking two intersections. Once we got to the office, I finally had a chance to put faces to the names of everyone I've talked to in India over HipChat, though admittedly I am horrible with names, so might take me a few days of this trip to memorize everyone.
After getting setup, which I just realized I am missing a picture of our base camp.. will have to fix that tomorrow, we walked to a café named Barista down the road to get some coffee for my coworkers, tea for me. We all needed a slight caffeine boost after such a long flight, and the lack of sleep. Thankfully I wasn't that sleepy during the day, and only started to feel the crash once we left the office to relax before dinner.
While iMessaging friends on office and hotel wifi, I was told numerous times to stay away from meat... so I couldn't help bu laugh when I found out all of us from the Austin office were going out to eat at a place called Barbeque Nation, a place with tons of meat. Dinner was nice though, albeit a tad spicy, and now I am sitting in my hotel room at 2am local time, getting ready for bed once I finish writing this. I'm super excited about this trip, and very grateful for the opportunity to be here. The fact it generates some blog content is pretty nice too!
