Landed!

I'm in Bangalore India! The flight was over 24 hours to get here and thank goodness it was just two flights. Lufthansa is pretty nice and I watched three movies, two TV shows and slept a good portion of the time. The service doesn't compare with Singapore Air, but it was still nice. A huge chunk of frequent flier miles added to the list.

The airport was quite an experience (apparently a nice new one has been built but it wasn't open in time for us to go through it) and thank goodness we had a driver because on exiting the airport it was complete and utter insanity. Cars and traffic everywhere! The traffic here is insane. Here's a pic of our drive in to work today, no lanes really are used and apparently we were on a one way road but people were coming from the other direction for a while! There is absolutely no order and we've seen quite a few fender benders. People just bump into each other, back up and keep going. Tons of motorcycles and of course no one wearing helmets and auto rickshaws (I'll take a pic of this for a later post).

Since arriving we've been with a co-worker from the States who is from India which has made our transition so much easier. He essentially gets us everywhere and speaks to the drivers so we are just along for the ride, its fantastic! We had a little tour of the city Sunday and have done some shopping and started work in the office yesterday. Everyone is hospitable as always.

For breakfast there is this yummy Indian food called Dosa. Its like a crepe that is filled with curried potatoes and onion and it is just FANTASTIC. I tried it on suggestion from a co-worker who was here months ago and its so good.

I'll write more later. Here are a few pic's of our tour of Bangalore on Sunday. It reminds me a little of a city you'd see in Mexico or South America. The heat, the crazy driving, the extreme switch from nice new buildings to total poverty.

Karnataka Federal Building (Bangalore is the capital of the region/state of Karnataka).

A botanical garden we visited, Bangalore is known as the city of gardens (and the Silicon Valley of India).

Boys playing Cricket (the national past time) in the street. They loved talking to us and finding out we were from America. Very cute!