First day at the resort

Hey all,

It has been a fantastic couple of days! This Sunday and Monday were the annual Microsoft Research India retreat. This meant that the whole lab went to a spa/hotel about an hour outside of Bangalore and stayed there for two nights. This place is the nicest hotel I have ever stayed in. The room was huge, elegant, and just amazingly nice. And I had it to myself! The guy assigned to be my roommate never showed up, so I had this *humongous* room for two all to myself ^_^. It was fantastically luxurious and I enjoyed it a lot. The rest of the resort was just as nice. There were so many things I did that it is hard to figure out where to start!

On the first day the buses left relatively early in the morning (and Tracy, the other intern from Harvey Mudd, arrived at 4 that morning and got to come on the retreat. The first thing we did after putting down our bags was start a game of Ultimate Frisbee. One of the Brazilian interns, Teofil, had managed to rustle up a slightly crappy but useable frisbee. We had an 8v8v8 game: two teams of 8 were playing while one other team of 8 waited and rotated in at the point. Most of the people had never played before. Despite all of this, the game worked fairly well and was a ton of fun ^_^.

After frisbee I played ping pong (though they call it “table tennis” here) for a while. There is a different standard of goodness for ping pong here. An Indian who claims to be “terrible” at ping pong generally means that he can’t quite get all the different types of spin to work on the ball all of the time. I, on the other hand, actually am rather terrible, though I had fun nonetheless.

In the early afternoon we started a “puzzle hunt.” This is essentially a massive scavenger hunt where you start with a bunch of clues, each of which is a puzzle that you must solve. Solving this puzzle leads you to a location, which gives you a further puzzle to solve. For example, one of the clues was titled “Connecting People” and had a picture of a green rectangle with some numbers and an astrix on it. “Connecting People” was a hint for Nokia. Based on this we had to guess that we were supposed to enter the numbers into our phones with the T9 autocompletion dictionary on. This gave us the name of a street, which we had to find. On the back of the sign was the key we were looking for. Another puzzle was a bunch of pieces cut out of paper with numbers on them. The hint was “Line the pieces up and reflect on the background.” We had to line up the pieces in order, then arrange them so that the space between the papers formed letters (the background). This formed a word, which was on a sign somewhere in the resort. This sign has a piece of paper with “1234” on the back. We then had to take the letters formed by the first 4 pieces of paper and that was the key. Now, there were 12 of these puzzles. Every time you solved a puzzle you got another clue to the “meta-puzzle,” and once you solved the meta-puzzle you won. There were 12 groups of 5 people playing this game, and we were playing for hours. It was pretty intense and fairly fun. I took quite a few breaks because it was so frustrating, and my group didn’t do too well, but I enjoyed myself.

After the puzzle hunt I played water polo in the pool, which was fortunately shallow enough to wade in. This time we played with about 30 people. It was fantastic. Afterwards the event was “Dancing, Drinking, and Dinner,” which another intern aptly changed to “Booze, Booze, Booze, and Dancing.” I ended up having a couple of drinks, having a *delicious* dinner, and dancing for several hours. Indian hip-hop is great to dance to and its nice to hear new songs. All in all, it was a fantastic day.

Cheers,
Jason