Delightful Bangalore

After a week of commuting for an hour to each way to travel eight kilometers (which, by the way is slower that it takes me to run the same distance), Symphony moved into their new headquarters just two blocks from our hotel.  There was a beautifully maintained sidewalk through and IT park that connected our hotel to the office.  However, on day one we learned that we were not allowed to access that road. Instead, we were required to walk along the dirt sidewalk along the main road. Unfortunately, the sidewalk was full of hazards… low hanging tree branches, multiple foot-wide ditches, and last but not least, bus and rickshaw drivers were relieving themselves at along the edge. of the walkway.  But that wasn't even the worst part of our commute.  The worst part was crossing a rather small road to get to the office entrance. The road was only two lanes, but crossing was like playing Frogger, but you were the frog.  Fortunately, I only really had two close calls where I was nearly hit, once by a motorcycle and once by a car.

During our last week in Bangalore, we only headed to the office 3 of 5 days.  Wednesday was a holiday (Ganesh’s birthday) so we took advantage of the day off to explore the highlights of Bangalore.  After going to the Iskon Temple, where Hare Krishna’s attempted to sell us a variety of goods and services, then to MG Road for shopping, and finally to Cubbon Park (imagine New York’s Central Park but smaller and less maintained), we came to realize that Bangalore is not really a city for tourists.  There are few tourist attraction, and those that exist are not really that interesting. We stopped for lunch at one of Lonely Planet’s top recommendations and had perhaps the worst fish and chips ever.  Rather than a strip of lightly battered fish, we receive two round patties that required a knife to cut through and had a few spots of dark brown, fishy bites that I had a hard time swallowing. 

The only real highlights were the people. It was really great to get to know everyone at the Symphony office as well as to catch up with my friend Nita from my Intuit days.  Nita and her husband, Ratnesh, took me out for a great dinner on Wednesday night at a restaurant best described as Indian meet Korean Barbeque.  And then on Friday they showed us where the Indian hipsters hang out.  It is at a karaoke bar called Opus.  I was fully planning to get on stage and belt one out since it was highly unlikely that I would ever see any of these people again. However, within 10 minutes of arriving we discovered that nearly everyone that went on stage, not only knew their lyrics cold (no one looked at the screen with the lyrics that was behind them), but most were really good singers.  And for those that weren’t good, the manager quickly lowered the volume on their mikes and he or other ringers would jump in as “back-up singers”.  Since I’m fully aware that I cannot sing to save my life, I wasn’t willing to embarrass myself by standing on stage with my mike turned down or off while the manager sang my song.