Tuesday, January 10, 2006
First Day
As I mentioned before, I was woken early on my first day by the construction going on outside my window. As a result, I stumbled out of my room around 10:00am, groggy but pretty excited to finally be here, and went looking for breakfast. Most of the expats stay in the same apartment complex and food is usually served in the same room in one of the larger apartments throughout the day by our designated team of chefs. It's actually just two guys but they are quite good and make a variety of cuisines - Italian, Thai, Chinese, and of course Indian. However, the breakfast is always the same, toast and an omelet, and you can get a fruit smoothy or some Indian tea, which I really enjoy. It's prepared with ginger and milk and some other stuff I'm not quite sure about. In any case, I had the first, though far from last, toast+omelet breakfast combinations of my stay, and headed to work. Although the office is pretty close, probably less than a mile, walking there is out of the question and we have drivers who take us there and back, as well as anywhere else we want to go, so I hopped in the car and went to work.
I got there close to lunch time, and was immediately greeted by a number of very friendly co-workers. Did I mention that people are exteremely friendly here? I also met the first expats, a married couple who both happened to actually speak Russian! One of them even learned it at the same U.S. Army base my father taught Russian back in 1991. Pretty amazing to travel across the globe to an exotic place like India and run into other Russian speakers. I was really tired but stayed at work until nearly 9:00pm fighting with a server install but finally took off and went back to the apartments. I hung out and met more expats and we watched some DVDs since local TV is pretty much limited to Bollywood type stuff with people dancing around and singing on every channel.
When I was ready to head to bed, one of the other guys suggested I crash in an empty room in one of the nicer apartments since I wasn't likely to get much sleep in the one I've been assigned. We called one of the girls who was staying in another room there and she didn't seem to mind so I collected some toiletries and a change of clothes and headed over to this other apartment. The whole experience felt very much like staying in a college dorm, stumbling around from one room to another, drinking lots of beer, meeting new people, sleeping in random places. It was a pretty fun experience I haven't had in a long time, the unstructured nature of the whole thing and the lack of normal social barriers.
At this stage it was pretty late and I've had a very long day with very little sleep so I was ready to finally get some rest. I was pleasantly suprised to find that the room in which I was crashing had curtains on the windows as well as a shower that was separated from the rest of the bathroom by a nice set of shower doors. I also borrowed some soap from the couple I mentioned earlier so I finally got to enjoy and a proper shower, with soap even! After that it was bed time and I slept like a baby until morning, with no construction or other unpleasantness interrupting my much-needed rest time.
I got there close to lunch time, and was immediately greeted by a number of very friendly co-workers. Did I mention that people are exteremely friendly here? I also met the first expats, a married couple who both happened to actually speak Russian! One of them even learned it at the same U.S. Army base my father taught Russian back in 1991. Pretty amazing to travel across the globe to an exotic place like India and run into other Russian speakers. I was really tired but stayed at work until nearly 9:00pm fighting with a server install but finally took off and went back to the apartments. I hung out and met more expats and we watched some DVDs since local TV is pretty much limited to Bollywood type stuff with people dancing around and singing on every channel.
When I was ready to head to bed, one of the other guys suggested I crash in an empty room in one of the nicer apartments since I wasn't likely to get much sleep in the one I've been assigned. We called one of the girls who was staying in another room there and she didn't seem to mind so I collected some toiletries and a change of clothes and headed over to this other apartment. The whole experience felt very much like staying in a college dorm, stumbling around from one room to another, drinking lots of beer, meeting new people, sleeping in random places. It was a pretty fun experience I haven't had in a long time, the unstructured nature of the whole thing and the lack of normal social barriers.
At this stage it was pretty late and I've had a very long day with very little sleep so I was ready to finally get some rest. I was pleasantly suprised to find that the room in which I was crashing had curtains on the windows as well as a shower that was separated from the rest of the bathroom by a nice set of shower doors. I also borrowed some soap from the couple I mentioned earlier so I finally got to enjoy and a proper shower, with soap even! After that it was bed time and I slept like a baby until morning, with no construction or other unpleasantness interrupting my much-needed rest time.
