India Day 0, Part 1: No Sleep, No Foul (yet)

Hello and welcome to the day-by-day blog of T-Train overseas in India! I may not be able to update this blog every day, but I’ll definitely make posts for days I miss. Everything will be accounted for!

Now, for a little background: as many of you know, I started my first real job around mid-June. As part of training for the company, I spent two weeks at the Dolce Atlanta-Peachtree Hotel in Peachtree City, GA which is a old person’s home small town located 40 minutes south from the ATL airport in the middle of NOWHERE. The first week was spent trying to absorb the plethora of basic information about the company from how finances work to the global service lines to understanding the core values of the company. The second week was also about learning how to effectively present to clients, work in project teams, and lead a meeting. All the while, we get to know our fellow new hires through the experience. As monotonous as this may sound, we all got along really well and found ways to have fun despite the deserted location.

Following those two weeks, the company sent us to India for specific IT training related to our service lines as well as to understand the culture of our overseas coworkers of whom we’ll surely talk with a lot in future projects. Our total time in India is to be five weeks, and as of the time of writing of this post, we’ve already spent a full two days in India. However, as I mentioned prior, each post will be about a different day in India. Thus, I won’t get ahead of myself yet and just discuss the events of “Day 0, Part 1” for you here.

Note: I won’t post all of the pictures from each Day on here and will instead post specific ones that I want to talk about. All of the pictures can be found through my Facebook account though.

Day 0: Friday, June 29, 2012 – Sunday, July 1, 2012 [Part 1]

In order to get to India, my plane would have to travel 9-some hours from Atlanta, GA to Frankfurt, Germany, have a four-hour layover, and then travel another 8 hours into the Mumbai Airport. In addition to wondering how I’d entertain myself for these hours, I needed to keep track of the appropriate sleeping hours so that I’d be fresh out of jet lag for work on Monday as well as when to take my next Malarone pill for the day. I was not looking forward to this, but at least ATL was kinda nice.

In the food court. Waiting place of choice due to
close proximity of food and electricity.

I ended up sleeping for about 6 hours on the Frankfurt-bound flight, so combined with a full showing of Sherlock Holmes 2, I was pretty pleased. Considering there wasn’t any time to leave the airport, the time in Germany was shortly lived as well. Dad remembered to tell me that Germany had just lost to Italy in the Euro Cup, so I kept quiet around any angry faces I might have seen. 

See it and weep, Dad! They were the best part of being in Germany
for only 4 hours besides me staring blankly at the McD's front counter
after being asked if I wanted 'Gas' or 'No Gas' in my water!

The second flight included a 2 hour nap, reading on my Kindle, and the watching of We Bought a Zoo, a Bollywood film with “The Don”, and the last half of some drama with a bubbleheaded policewoman as the protagonist. Nothing to shout home about. 

Getting through the airport was pretty easy, and after a quick money exchange (with bills that are a lot easier to handle than American dollars, mind you), our group was soon met with warm and wet muggyness of Mumbai India at 2:00 in the morning. It was also raining and so people were miserable a bit, but it just reminded me of Japan so I was pleased.

The muggy entrance to the baggage terminal for the Mumbai airport

We were told to look for two specific qualities about our shuttle driver: (1) that he be holding a sign for our company and that (2) he know the name of the hotel that we were headed to. This is because a lot of Indians will rush at you and try to get this information out of you in order to make you think that they are your expected driver. And in the case that you follow them, you may or may not get to your desired location and will probably be overcharged for the drive.

My quaint, little room for the next 5 weeks

In any case, it took about another hour to get to our hotel, but we entered a slums-looking area almost immediately from leaving the airport. It’s definitely true that there’s no real segregation of slums from nicer areas in at least this part of Mumbai. However, unless there’s good reason, people don’t lollygag in between the two areas at all, so it’s strangely safe as long as you’re vigilant (almost typed ‘diligiant’, ambiguous/ambidextrous people :P).
    

...of the hotel gate.

Area immediately in front...

We pulled into the Hotel ibis Navi Mumbai (hotel had only opened a week ago!) around 3 am, but it’s a really nice, gated hotel so a quick run in the rain got us inside. There’s a metal detector before you can actually enter the lobby, so that was ease-fulfilling albeit a little annoying to have go through every time you want to enter the building. Before bed (at 7am Sunday morning :D), a lot of us got A La Carte dinner from the hotel, so I had a delicious Gosht Dum Biryani with Raita (at 6am :D). 

I’ll leave you interested in looking up the translations, and with this, I take my leave until my next post!

Shukri Yat!

~Train