During the check in process, each Infosys trainee received a $25 gift card to be used at any time in the United States. The card only being valid in the U.S. comes into play later on.
After the dinner at the Hilton, I was feeling a bit tired. There was one final activity for the night and that was a night out in the Virginia Highlands. It a place with some restaurants and a bunch of bars. Most of us ended up at an Irish pub, where I ordered a Guinness. Later, a couple of us went to the Darkhorse Tavern where we ordered a sandwich and some cheese tater tots. The portions were pretty big, unlike some restaurants I know. The Atlanta trip concluded with a breakfast buffet the next morning. it would turn out to be the beginning of a grueling 30+ hour journey to India.
Atlanta to Mysore, India
The next day turned out to be the first of a long time of waiting, flying, and sitting to India. We arrived at the Atlanta airport at 1:30 P.M. Once we cleared customs we had about 3+ hours to waste until our 6:00 flight. Me and a couple of guys decided to buy 2 large pizzas with our leftover American Express cards for a total of $31.00 The pizza was New York style and one of the best I've ever tasted. The cheese, crust, and sauce were in perfect proportion and it was a good start to the upcoming flight.
The trip to Bangalore consisted of two-nine hour plane rides in Lufthansa Airlines, a German company. From reading their webpage, it sounded like a pretty good airline especially with the new "thin seat" technology that they touted would give economy class passengers more leg room. At the very least I expected that... and I didn't get it. At 6:00 pm I boarded flight 445 to Frankfurt, Germany, found my seat and sadly, I saw no TV monitor in front of me and no way to sit in my seat without my knees touching the seat in front of me. Another bad break was the passenger in front of me (a fellow Infoscian) that insisted on reclining even though my knee really had no where to go. O well, I let it go. It's only for 9 hours right?
Looking down at Frankfurt from the plane, I notice that the city has a lot of forest land with patches of houses carved into the trees. Some houses look very similar in shape and are packed closely toegther much like in California. When the plane landed, we basically had 3-4 hours to kill. Most of the time was spent shopping along the shops in the airport and marveling at how expensive everything was and realizing how far the dollar has fallen in the past several years. A MacBook Air cost 1699 Euros in Germany.... that's 2888 U.S. dollars!
The flight left Gernany at about 12:00 pm Germany time and touched down in Bangalore at about 12:00 AM Indian Time. The flight was also abotu 9 hours long. I spent a lot of the time on the plane sleeping surprisingly, but by that time I could have slept anywhere. I had been up for about 29 hours and I still had a shuttle ride to take to Mysore. The shuttle seemed to go pretty slow partly because the roads were a bit weird. It seems like the road is littered with random speed bumps, which would cause the bus to slow down alot. Near the middle, we made a stop at a random coffee shop for what was supposed to be 15 mins. 45 mins later, we started back on the road. Suring the shuttle ride, we saw some stray dogs running around the road. Along side the road would be some rundown buildings, some looked like stores, but of course since it was 2 in the morning, there were no people on the streets and none of the stores were open. Finally, at about 6:00 am, we made it to the gates of Mysore. We tried two times, but we finally made it! (The first gate we went to was not the main gate and we were rejected). At this time, I was awake for about 34 straight hours with a spotty 3-4 hours of sleep mixed in at various points. That's 34 hours without a shower, without brushing my teeth, and most concerning was without changing out my contacts. So instead of taking us to our rooms, Infosys treated us with a little breakfast after we all checked in. This would be the beginning of a day that I can only describe as crazy... but crazy fun too! Yea, the weekend would be like this: playing sports, meeting people, and getting used to Indian food. More to come later.
No comments:
Post a Comment