Charlie Meatball

This will be quick because I want to get caught up so I can start posting more realtime.

Traffic is crazy in Hyderabad. Here’s a sample:

OK, you get a bit of the idea. But don’t forget you’re sharing the road with oxen:

An oxcart on the streets of Hyderabad

Horses:

Goats in herds:

Traffic, not even at it's most wild, in Hyderabad

or getting a ride on a moped:

and the occasional camel and wild dog (haven’t had my camera ready at the right moment yet). These can all be found on the way to Microsoft (though for full disclosure many of these were taken driving at other times). Also, less than a mile from Microsoft there are some people in absolutely abject poverty. I didn’t feel comfortable taking their pictures, but I snapped a photo of a dwelling, which gives you a sense of it:

Quite a trip to work.  Good thing I have the fearless Mohamed to help get me there safe:

Arrival!

(the end)

@carlosdavis I’m just now realizing the value of the gift you gave me. Good luck at sectionals tomorrow.

I’ve finally put stuff up on http://charliemeatball.com/! Yayyy!

OK, so this will be quick because I’m keeping my driver waiting and I want to get up and get going, but I have to write about my trip from the airport to my hotel.

Coming out of baggage claim at 1 AM is how many drivers are waiting for people even at this time - there must be a hundred.  I locate my driver in among all of them and we’re on our way.  He’s super-polite and pretty shy, and I think on the way to the car some guys make fun of him.  They say some stuff to him (oblivious to me being there and seemingly not about me - which was my first thought) and I ask later if they’re his friends and he says no.

Arriving in Hyderabad

He suggests a picture of the airport itself, since I’m taking pictures of other seemingly dumber things - good idea!  I’m overwhelmed already and we haven’t gotten to the good stuff.

Rajiv Gandhi International

On the way to the airport I get my first taste of a religious festival in India.  As we drive we pass big flatbed trucks lit up, decorated, and each carrying dozens of people - sometimes more than fifty - and each with a giant statue of Ganesha.  Turns out it’s the last day of the festival celebrating the birth of the elephant-headed god and the celebrations include these huge trucks.  We also pass a street festival that at 1:30 AM is jumping with music, revelers, and a 40-foot-tall statue of Ganesha.  Cool stuff!

One of the smaller trucks celebrating the festival of Ganesha (the only one I could get a picture of)

We arrive at the hotel, and it looks great - especially the bed.  Unfortunately the next hour is spent trying to get the wireless to work.  First in my room, then in another room, then in the hall, and ultimately I get it to work from my iPhone standing directly under the router just to send mail to folks telling them I got in safely.

is wondering if his driver is pissed that he’s posting and not coming down to breakfast.

Checking in at the airport I run into Kurt DelBene.  Kurt runs ODP which is basically the server-side of Microsoft’s Office group - SharePoint, PerformancePoint, etc. - and the group I’m here working with, Duet, is part of his org.  Turns out he’s on my flight and will be working from the IDC (India development center) next week.  I introduce myself, chat with him a bit as we’re being checked into the flights, and when his stuff is wrapped up (I’m checking on business class upgrades), he says he’ll see me on the flight.  Cool.

Oh yeah, while I was complaining, did I mention I’m on a twenty-plus hour economy flight (when anything longer than 8 hours is supposed to be business class by company policy)? And because I booked so late I’m on a middle seat?  At 6′2″, flying is never comfy, but a middle seat in economy?  Really?  I spend the first leg of the trip with a very large man’s elbow firmly planted in my rib.  9 hours of flying and I spend all of it trying to box-out my neighbor for the arm-rest and avoid glaring at him.

The one cool thing about the flight is that on the other side of me is a friend of a friend, Jean, who is nice and good to talk to.  Turns out she knows my friend Wolfe, and we talk a while about what a great guy he is, traveling, Seattle, politics, whatever.

There’s always this awkward thing on planes where, no matter how much you like the person next to you - even if they’re your soulmate - at some point you want to stop talking and just watch the Chronicles of Narnia or do a sudoku or whatever.  That moment of “I’m now deciding to stop talking to you in order to watch a talking badger and a dwarf” is never easy to do.  Do you apologize?  Do you just put the headphones on?  And what happens when one of you puts the headphones on and the other one doesn’t realize it and starts talking?  Awk-warrrd!

Arrive in Frankfurt feeling sorry for myself and still glaring at the back of the dude’s head and his wife who was sitting *across the aisle from him*.  In Frankfurt I run into Dev, a product manager on the mobile team, who not only knows a couple of my friends (Melissa from work and Mark lacrosse) but has been to India before and takes me a bit under his wing as to what to expect both at work and around town.  It feels a lot safer having someone who’s been there before to talk to, and I realize again how scary it is on some level to be going halfway around the world and leaving behind everything familiar.

Of course the shock and the discomfort of the new are strongly tied to the excitement and the joy of discovery for me, so even just feeling scared starts to get me excited.  In the waiting area around the flight to Hyderabad, the mix has gone from 90-10 white on my last flight to 5-95 Indian.  I realize that’s the highest concentration of white folks I’m likely to see for a while!

This brings up an interesting subject insofar as Dev is from St. Louis and, so far as I can tell, is about as culturally American as I am.  Now he’s definitely Indian-American, but second generation, and compared to the other folks around us in the waiting area, it’s clear just how American we both are in the way we talk, act, dress, and even do things like make eye contact, use gestures, and sit.  At the same time, Dev looks like the other Indians there, and he helps me to realize how alien I will look the entire time I’m in India.  I think this is the first time I’ll be traveling for such a long time and feeling like “the other” for all of it.

Talking with Dev is great and we grab a snack in the airport before hopping back on the flight.  I’m nervous for the flight, but at least I have an aisle seat.  My fears are unfounded as I pass right out on the flight and wake three hours from Hyderabad.  My seat-mate is a very interesting and intelligent older Indian gentleman with whom I talk politics for a while.  I explain why, while I used to have tremendous respect for McCain it went away after he forgave Bush/Rove for their tactics against him in the 2000 GOP primaries.  When I pull out the New Yorker I have with me and start reading, I realize it says many of the same things I had been saying about the choice of Palin being very short-sighted and cynical, so I share it with my seat-mate, who takes a great deal of interest in it, laughing at how “radical” the view point it espouses is (I disagree, calling it definitely liberal, but only looking radical because it’s talking sensibly about topics in a way that’s hard to find given cable news programs in the right-ward lurch that is the result of Fox News - he agrees).  In the remaining flight he seemingly reads the whole magazine cover-to-cover, stopping at times to tell me how good he thinks the writing is, comparing it to British and Indian writing, and chatting about various subjects.  As we’re getting off the plane, he gives me his business card and tells me that I should give him a call and we should get dinner while I’m in town.  All-in-all the flight is great, and it’s nice that my first experience meeting an Indian on my trip is so positive and welcoming.

OK, so I’m here now, but it took something like 5 tries to get a departure date.

The first time we pushed back my departure date was because there were all kinds of legal hurdles around whether making my trip could be an extended business trip versus an actual transfer to MS India.  Because transferring meant I would have to officially leave my job, cash out my vacation, set up a new direct deposit, maybe a new bank account, and do about a hundred more things, really only a business trip made sense.  This was all agreed upon with everyone involved within the first week of planning this trip back in July.  Fast forward to one week before I leave and I’m still waiting on the official word one way or another, no one has told me whether it’s OK to get a visa (despite lots of emails) and I’ve only heard back on one out of every two or three mails I send.

Don’t get me wrong, the folks I’m working with really are doing their best.  It’s a combination of some of the people being higher-ups with the typical too much stuff going on - lots of it undoubtedly more important than me - and others just honestly not knowing what to tell me as legal wranglings and other discussions happen without their knowledge.  It’s just the end result was that I was in the dark for a lot of this time and unsure whether the trip would even happen at the time that I originally thought I would go.  It also made for a funny situation at work as folks kept asking me if it was on or off and I honestly couldn’t tell them.

Around three days before I was originally supposed to leave I got word that it was a go for being a business trip and that I should get a visa.  This was on Wednesday the 27th of August.  Working with the visa office, they said they might be able to get my visa processed in time to leave the next weekend (I think I was supposed to leave on Sunday the 7th, but it’s starting to blur together).  When the visa wasn’t available by Friday afternoon, we pushed my date back to the following Tuesday, the 9th.  OK, no biggie, visas take some time, I wasn’t too worried.  Sure, I get weird looks from folks when I show up at work on Monday, but I answer their comments about “aren’t you supposed to be in India?” with jokes about it being part of the experience to have to be flexible.

As the week goes on I have a hard time hearing about both my ticket arrangements and the visa, and when I do hear, it’s bad news: my passport with my visa haven’t been released by the Indian consulate at the end of the day on Monday,  which means I won’t have them in time for my flight Tuesday.  Time to push back again, this time to Friday to give myself some buffer and because there’s no point in showing up at work Friday afternoon versus Monday.

But then on Tuesday morning, I get word at about 8:30 AM - af full 6 hours before my flight had been scheduled to depart, that my passport with visa has shown up, ready to go in Redmond and I can pick it up at any time.  Rescheduling had been a big pain in the butt, but I was OK with it, because there wasn’t anything to be done about it.  But now I’m ticked off - the visa office had given me bad information and it cost me a week of work on an already shortened trip (my trip was originally supposed to be 8 weeks and I have a fixed end date and a lot to do).  I send angry mails to folks, but there’s nothing to be done since I’m not packed and ready (I thought I had another three days) and even if I was, there’s no guarantee I can scramble and get my ticket back.  So, OK, I’m leaving Friday now.  I sheepishly head back into work on Tuesday to a lot of “weren’t you supposed to be gone?  again?” and I send mail telling everyone we’ve pushed my trip back (again).

So at least I have visa in hand and now a flight booked for Friday.  What can possibly go wrong?

Thursday night I get email: my flight was re-booked because they didn’t hear back from me and weren’t sure I had my visa.  A number of 1 AM and 2 AM calls can’t get me back on the Friday flight (with a bonus day of rest in order to recover from the travel and get my bearings), so now I’m leaving on Saturday.  Worse, I’ll arrive at 1 AM the night before/morning of the first day I’m supposed to go to work. I could take one day to rest up and recover at that point, but now I’m ridiculously anxious to get to work, so that doesn’t sound like a good thing either. I look back through my mail and, sure enough, there’s the mail that says I have my visa, and am ready to go, sent Tuesday morning, my time (and no emails after that asking about my visa status prior to the re-booking).  Grr.

I had been planning to take Friday off, since I would be flying in the afternoon, and I was up until 2:30 in the morning waiting to hear back on re-booking to Friday, but Sarah and I are burned out on farewell events - we have had two or three farewell dinners either actually executed or scheduled - so I decide to just go into work.  The questions now are “I thought we had gotten rid of you, are you even going?”

Bleah!  Looking back, I should have booked my own tickets (the travel office in India was incredibly difficult to reach directly) and put in for my visa immediately when I had a tentative start date (the visas are reasonably flexible, I’ve found out).  Not the way to start the trip, and not terribly confidence inspiring.  Thankfully, it’s been all uphill since <knock on wood>.

I’ve been remiss in posting and I have so many great topics to write about, it’s ridiculous.  The combination of spotty internet, jet lag, lots of work, and a bit of a tummy thing that I’m going to try to ride out have meant posting time has been low, but here’s what I (really) plan to write up in the next 48 hours:

1. Trip planning the x-cultural way

2. The trip itself

3. Arriving in India

4. My commute

5. Eating adventures so far

6. Sideways head-bobbles

OK, that’s a lot, so I’m going to get right to it (I swear!).

ahh, early morning typos

Worken by Dehli belly at 5:30 AM, but got to book a flight to Goa and say hi to Tim (hi Tim).