Another day at the resort and a return to work

The second day at the resort I played even more sports than on the first! After having a fantastic breakfast I played ping pong with 3 other interns for a couple of hours. I can already tell I’m getting better ^_^. After ping pong I played cricket!!! It really doesn’t take too much to begin to understand all the weird lingo like “wickets” and “overs,” and I actually had a pretty good time playing. I may try to watch a little bit of cricket on TV while I’m here, just to get a little more of an idea for the game. There is also a cricket sports game for the XBox that is advertised all over! Something you would never see in the US. Anyway, despite having fun playing cricket my impression of the game is that it is even more boring than baseball :-P. There is a LOT of waiting that you have to do. That said, I must reiterate that I had fun and want to see a little more of the game.

After cricket was more waterpolo, this time with a smaller group. However, I paid the price for playing all of these sports outside. I got fairly badly sunburned and could already feel the effects of it in the middle of the day! I ended up spending a good part of the afternoon sitting in my room and reading, which was still *really* nice. When I came out of my room people seemed to be just hanging around, and I ended up sitting and chatting with a whole bunch of different people (including Anandan, who runs the lab) for several hours. This is the sort of thing that I have always really loved ^_^.

We again had the “Dancing, Drinking, and Dinner” though I refrained from doing much dancing or drinking as I wasn’t really feeling it. However, opening up the evening was a “fashion show” put on by all the managers and higher-ups where they strutted their stuff to the tune of “I’m too sexy for my shirt.” It was awesome. Its great to be working for people with so much energy and enthusiasm.

As I mentioned, I didn’t really dance or drink. This meant that I hung out outside and chatted more. Eventually this led to a whole bunch of people, many of them my higher up bosses, wandering off, sitting down on some grass, and just singing. It was really impressive to see how many different songs people know and how they aren’t really that embarrassed about singing. They just kept going and going, apparently till 2 in the morning! It was very interesting and beautiful to listen to, and it makes me realize that Indian culture is much more in tune and comfortable musically than American culture. Even on the bus coming to the resort, a whole bunch of interns started singing, which led to a singing game between the two halves of the bus! One half would sing part of a song, then the next half had to sing a song that started with the letter the previous song ended with! It was incredible how fast they could come up with songs and roar them out!

That is about the end of the story for the weekend. We packed up our stuff and came back to work this morning, and nothing really eventful happened at work. On the way back on the bus I chatted with Revi, who has a *ton* of interesting stories. She has done a lot of crazy things in her life. The most interesting thing that I learned was a little tidbit about Indian culture: apparently the shoulders and upper arms are the really sexy body part in Indian culture (I don’t know if this also applies to men, but it applies for women). Indians would find a tank top scandalous because it exposes the shoulders and upper arms, and not really be bothered that it was showing cleavage. Lots of interesting things!

Cheers,

Jason