Hello and Welcome to Sugar Mountain!

So the trip started the same way as always, the alarm trashed my dreams at 03:40. The Taxi arrived at 04:00, driven by the most talkative cab driver I ever met. Arriving at Arlanda was kind of a relief.
But I sure hope the family issues sortens it self out for the cabby.

I shared the flight to Frankfurt with the Argentinien DC team, I think I even satt next to one of the players. He looked like it at least, really good looking with long black hair and a big bag of tennis rackets. I managed to sleep and hour on the flight.

Arriving at Frankfurt my first task, after checking e-mails, was trying get a window seat for the flight to Bangalore. I had been seated in a middle seat and I was not looking forward to the long flight squeezed between two people. But I was out of luck since the Business Class was over booked, so they needed the good seats in Monkey Class (in other words the window seats) to move the Business people to. So I was stuck between, I hoped, two tiny frequent flyers who mostly would sleep.

Well I did not get two tiny frequent flyers, but two large versions of the same, one German and one American. The American guy worked for Cap Gemini in Pittsburgh as some sales guy going down to Bangalore with some customer to meet the teams in Bangalore and Mumbai. We had great talks regarding his experience working with skilled Indian developers and finance people, hockey, the Olympics and the massive amount of snow some parts of the world have received this winter.
The only thing I heard from the German guy was a “Hallo”.

The flight from Frankfurt was delayed with an hour due to that one of the engines didn’t start the normal way, so they had to start it manually. What?

Due to my “stuckness” in the middle, the amount of sleep I got was very limited.

I was a bit nervous about the my encounter with the Indian customs, but to my surprise all went very well.
After I had managed to get through the first Passport/Visa/Are-You-Carrying-Any-Deadly-Virus section of the customs, I took an extra minut or two, while waiting for the luggage, to see how the really experienced got through the last part of customs, the give-the-little-papper-to-customs-guy part.

My analysis was that one needs to walk really fast, ignore any form of queues, and look like you have done this hundreds of times before and simply give the little paper-thing to the customs guy and just keep on walking. So my strategy was clear, but everything was destroyed when I got my bag.
The thing was that I had planed to use the small bag we have at home, but just before the taxi came to take me to the airport I realized that the bag had no lock, so I quickly grabbed our big bag instead. What I had failed to notice, in the bad morning light, was that the Mark of Customs(the white cross feared by travelers of the air) was still shining bright on both the back and the front of the bag since my last visit to Bangalore.

So my plan to look confident failed badly! But I managed to place my laptop bag on top of one of the crosses and I passed through the last Customs defense successfully!

Ram was waiting for me outside the Airport to bring me to the hotell. But unfortunately he had managed to upset two people working on the parking lot, so before we could leave, we needed to talk to some parking lot manager so that Ram would not get a 6000 rupe fine. That’s my Ram! Well I guess it’s easy to upset people at 2AM.

After a bumpy and long drive into Bangalore Ram finally dropped me of at the hotel at 04:00. I checked in and to my surprise I had gotten a bigger room then the one I had reserved. Later I have found out that Prasad of Blue Star had called the hotel, urging them to upgrade me. He’s simply too kind!

Tuesday

The wakeup called at 07:40, and I managed to drag myself down to breakfast. After a while Ram came by to pick me up, and we, by gods grace, made our way to the office.

At the office it was great to meet the gang again, we chatted about stuff for an hour or so before everyone got into coding stuff.
An interesting fact is that Durgesh and Jayesh always sync the big things in life, they buy cars at the same time, buy apartments at the same time, and will have babys at the same time.. Really strange, but it seems to work for them. Great!

Work for me have mostly been looking and thinking about Excel/Numbers sheets, talking to Ram and having meetings with Blue Star people.

Besides that I have had my first real encounter with website blockers today. Places like Twitter.com, Facebook.com, Craigmod.com and translate.google.com have all been blocked for me a couple of time today. Rams calls someone, they fix it for a couple of hours, the blocking comes back, Ram calls…. yeah you get the picture.
It’s really really bad, I really noticed how dependent one is one access to the Internet.

At 8PM me and Ram left the office, Ram was a bit pissed of due to massive traffic, but we made it. If they had bounty on auto rickshaw here in Bangalore, Ram would be first in line to sing up.

I had dinner at the hotel and wrote this.
I’m really impressed by how smooth this trips is going, not stuck in customs, no stuck in elevators.. no nothing..Hope it lasts.