Monday 2-25-13
Monday morning I’m up pretty early, and head to breakfast. It’s a buffet style breakfast, and it’s pretty good. They had a chick pee dish that was spicy and very good, some rosemary potatoes that were also very good. The scrambled eggs were made fresh, but were a little runny for my tastes. I sat out on the lawn under a porch…it felt very colonial.
I went back to the room and packed up my stuff, and the cleaning crew came in. So I just left to wait for the car at the lobby. Here’s an interesting thing, my key to my room has a chip or something in it and I use it to slide into a slot in the wall to turn the power on in the room. Walked out without that key! I’s a small hike to the lobby and I don’t want to leave and miss the car, so the front desk arranged to have my key for me when I got back.
Speaking of drivers, I was waiting in the lobby and I saw several people that looked like drivers come in, but nobody was looking for me. I scrambled on the phone with Vamsi to see what was going on and finally we realized, the guy was sitting outside the whole time waiting for me to come out!
I finally get to the office and meet everyone, then I start setting up my PC and I’ve left my power cord at home…I’m stunned. I spent forever packing and making sure I had everything and I leave the power supply at home. Luckily Meenak let me use his to get my battery charged up, but I’ll have to arrange for something in Chennai.
Now that I have power, I try and get logged on and the IBM network works fine, but I can’t get on to AT&T no matter how I try (I won’t bore you with the details of the crazy way we have to do things in India, but suffice to say, it’s crazy, and it’s not because of India). The funny thing is, I was able to get connected for a few minutes, but then it stopped working. Ok, you are probably already bored to tears with work stories.
For lunch we went to a food court (due to my delays most people had already eaten) and I got me some KFC. It was very good…they put something spicy on the chicken…makes it better, I wish they did that at home. The canned diet coke tastes different here…I’m not sure why, but it’s not horrible. Bottled water is so far my favorite drink. :)
Oh, I forgot to mention, when the driver tried to drop me off there was a lot of confusion. Apparently the bombings in Hyderabad had all the security ramped up and we couldn’t figure out where to drop me off. Meenak and Vamsi to the rescue as they came out to get me. We figured out that the driver will have to drop me off and pick me up on the street in front of the building.
That night, I was pretty tired, but still had some work to do so as soon as I got in the room, I ordered up some room service and got to work. I had a burger and fries. The burger was a ground tenderloin. It was good, I think they put cinnamon or cumin or saffron or something in it because it had that kind of different taste. It wasn’t bad, just different.
Oh and I had this waiting on my couch for me:
Finally saw my first elephant. :)