What a day!

The plan for the day consists of a trip to Mysore, the next largest city after Bangalore in this state, with Nels, Pavol, and Rob. This began when I woke up at 5:00AM after far too little sleep. We managed to make our 6:30AM train with no major issues (though we did jam 4 people into the back of an auto-rickshaw that should only ever carry 3). Indian train stations are pretty crazy places. There are a *lot* of people, a lot of trash, and a *lot* of pushing when people start to load/unload the trains. Fortunately we took reserved seats in a 2^nd class sleeper car (there are something like 5 different possible categories of car to ride) and didn’t have to deal with any of that (we probably wouldn’t have been able to).

The trip to Mysore is about 140km and takes the express train 3 hours. There were no real difficulties with the train, and we took an auto-rickshaw (again with 4 people) from the train station to the Maharaja’s palace. Apparently Mysore used to be the capital of Karnataka, Bangalore is now the capital, so the palace of the ruling Maharaja was is located there. Unfortunately, the original palace burned down in the late 1800’s/early 1900’s and was rebuilt in the early 1900’s. It was a bit of a letdown that the palace was not authentically old, but it was still fantastic to tour through.

As I mentioned, we took an auto-rickshaw to the palace. Once there we actually had to walk around the grounds to a road near the north side in order to find ourselves some breakfast (there was no food served on the train. In fact, I slept most of the way). One of the first things I noticed about Mysore is that there are many more people trying to sell you things on the street and they are much more insistent. We became quite good at saying no by the end of the day.

There were basically no salesmen inside the palace grounds, which was really nice. We wondered around outside for a while, taking pictures, until we discovered some elephants in a distant corner of the grounds! These were black (Indian?) elephants, that I had never seen before. As we were taking some pictures, a man walked up and offered us pictures with the elephants! Nels and Rob were too chicken, but Pavol and I got a few pictures touching the elephants trunk! One thing led to another and we got to get up on its back and take a short ride! (Ha to Elaine! Now I’ve done that too! ^_^). It was really cool and Rob and Nels took a ton of pictures which I will try to get a hold of soon.

After we saw the elephants we went into the palace. We were not allowed to take in cameras or wear shoes, which is pretty standard fare for India. The whole place was spectacular, tons of marble (which seems to be pretty common here), intricate columns, woodwork, and paintings. There were several rooms that were particularly fantastic. There was a massive room that was topped by an octagonal pyramid of stained glass that was absolutely gorgeous, depicting peacocks and some other two-headed bird that looks like a phoenix and I would like to learn more about. There was also another room with a massive stained glass ceiling, in a shape that reminded me of a greenhouse, and doors which were beautiful wood inlaid with unbelievable intricate patterns done in ivory. Finally, there was a massive open “room” that was basically a front porch the size of a football field, but covered and intricately designed everywhere. The palace overall was gorgeous and I think that one of the most interesting things was noticing where European influences were coming out in the artwork (especially in some of the intricate woodwork done on the ceilings).

After the palace we grabbed some lunch and headed up to Chimundi hill. This was a 13km drive out of town, most of which was spent climbing up a massive hill. Once we got to the top we took a while to locate each other (since we had taken two rickshaws that turned out to have dramatically different speeds). We wondered around the top of the hill, took in some *breathtaking* views, looked at the temple there (but didn’t go in. The line was horrific and we weren’t really interested), and popped our head in a free museum that seemed mostly there to tell you what was bad about not being a good Hindu.

Now, the really cool part about the hill is that there is a 1000 step staircase that leads from the base of the hill up to the top. We decided to take the staircase down to the bottom, which was quite a hike! It was worth it though because we got some pretty sweet views on the way down and the trail was nice (if steep). Also, about 1/3 of the way down is a *gigantic* statue of a bull (I think it is supposed to be an incarnation of Shiva) which was neat.

Once we got to the bottom of the hill we decided to walk the rest of the way back to town! It was only 3 or 4 kilometers farther and the walk turned out to be really interesting as we got to see a whole bunch of different levels of Indian life (it really is true that abject poverty exists right next to incredible riches here). Once back in town we grabbed a quick dinner (we were a bit early for dinner still) and caught our train back to Bangalore at 6:00PM. We arrived back here at about 9:00PM, had a heartier dinner of Pizza Hut (which tasted SOOOOO good after a long day of walking, too much sun, and not enough to eat), and as soon as I finish writing this I am going to sleep *extremely* soundly for the rest of the night.

I just have one observation to make about people saying hi & taking pictures. Several time today Indian gentlemen came up to our group and asked for pictures with us. One time, when Pavol and I were waiting for the other two on top of the hill, I guy came up and just asked to take a picture of us! I guess Mysore is enough off the tourist track that white people aren’t so common! It was kind of neat being the object of that attention, especially since people were really friendly about it. Also, when we were coming down the 1000 step path, there were a lot of people that said hello to us. That was very often followed by the question “you from where?” always uttered identically. We never really stopped to chat with people (too much in defensive mode from the aggressive salesmen in the city), but I really wonder if that was people testing out the English they knew on real English speakers (as I have heard happens in China), or if it was something else. Is was interesting that when we mentioned we are from the US (or Pavol mentioned he is from Slovakia) they would immediately name the capital of the country! These were very odd conversations.

Happy Fathers Day Dad!

Cheers,

Jason

Quiz Night

Hey all,

If you recall, we left off my adventures at work yesterday as I was readying myself to leave for "Quiz Night" at a nearby bar called Opus. The party going to quiz night just ended up being Nels, Rob, and myself. Getting there was almost an adventure in and of itself as Nels "kind of" knew where we were going and had been told the bar is "impossible to miss." It turns out that it is only impossible to miss if you are looking at it from the correct direction, which we almost didn't do. It also looks quite sketchy and rundown from the outside, which was getting me pretty worried.

However, once we walked into the bar it was not longer sketchy or rundown at all. It was a very nice, stylish place with colored mood lights and excellent (if a little loud) music. Since Opus is also a restaurant we ordered ourselves dinner and some beer (Kingfisher, which is one of the two or three beers available here. A light and somewhat flavorless lager, it is still pretty good). Quiz night started at 9:30, and it was basically a Master of Ceremonies announcing questions that we quickly wrote on small pieces of paper an turned in. The guy was a bit of a character, especially when he was announcing answers. He would often go through the cards, announcing the things that people submitted that were *not* answers. It certainly jerked our chains a bit, but it when we didn't fall for his trick it was fun to watch the rest of the (very energetic) crowd fall for it.

There was a range of difficulty on the questions. There was a whole lot of American trivia so we did well on that, but we lost pretty badly on the "listen" section, which was a series of 5 questions where they would play a sound clip and ask something like "what TV show is this from" or "what is the name of the lead singer of the band that did this song". The hardest one of those was a song by Bono, where we were asked to give his original given name! We were allowed to "call a friend" with our cell phones, but we didn't end up having time to :-(. Some of the questions required some British type knowledge (like the traditional british meal that goes with a given traditional british drink). All in all, we did OK but not great and would really have needed a little more diversity in world perspective to do fantastic. However, this happens every Thursday and there are plans to go back (if not next week).

There was one other even that happened while we were at Opus. Rob was happily eating away at his meal, then suddenly he pulled back, his math started opening and closing like a goldfish, and he started clutching his chest! He also got all pale! I thought that he was going to die! He certainly looked like it! It turned out that he had eaten a *really* hot pepper in his food, and after suffering through the pain for a while (even the rice we had was temperature hot and he wasn't able to eat it :-( ) he recovered just fine to the point we were able to tease him about it ^_^.

Not all that much happened today. Basically just working, though I got to talk to Satya for a while about some fun stuff, met a vegan who has set up illegal radio stations (i.e. he has set up radio stations) in multiple major US cities, and did the boxing class again. I also made some progress on a problem that I've been avoiding because it didn't sound fun, but now that I have an idea I want to see if it works!

Thats all for now folks! I think we are going to go out to dinner, and hopefully I'll do something cool this weekend. I hope you all do too :-).

Cheers,
Jason

Boxing!!!

Hey all,

So, just a few things have happened in the last couple of days. I actually have a project to work on, at least for a little while, which is building a pseudorandom number generator. Cool and confusing, we shall see how it goes.

Other than the really cool thing that happened yesterday was a boxing class! Thats right, one of the bosses here named Kentaro teaches a boxing class on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I finally remembered to bring workout clothes to the office yesterday and I had a whole lot of fun! We just learned the stance, a few blocks/dodges, then learned and practiced punches (the classic 1-2, left jab and right...jab?) the rest of the time. I was happy because I seemed to be doing pretty well and it was *very* good exercise. I was breathing hard and pouring sweat by the time we were done, and that just feels fantastic after sitting in front of a computer in the office all day for a few weeks. Also, all the muscles in my left leg were *completely* exhausted, because you basically do a lunge forward with your left leg every time you punch! One last cool thing about the class: it is on the roof of the building I work in, so not only do we get to be outside and exercising but we have a fantastic view over Bangalore at the same time! ^_^

It took *forever* to get home last night. For some reason the roads and cabs were busy and we didn't get a cab out of the office until something like 9:30PM! :-(. Once we got home the power was out, so we just hung out on the roof where moonlight and light pollution from the city let us see. Once the power came back on we discovered we have "internet" in our apartment. Essentially there is a cell phone (which is limited to just one tower, so we can't move it around) that is plugged into a base that has a power/recharge plug and a USB cable. I think that we can possibly plug into the USB cable and get internet through that. However, none of our computers would recognize the device, so no internet >:-(. I'm even more pissed because we could have installed this thing ourselves in about 10 seconds (plug it into the wall) if they had just given it to us a week ago. And we *still* don't have internet because we can't get the damn thing working. This is just really really frustrating. :-(

The good news from last night was the I finished "Watership Down" which is a really good book, and Elaine was able to call me on my cell phone! Anyone can call me (with a calling card) by calling +(91)9916677560 (I think the 91 is the Indian country code. Double check that if the number doesn't work).

Today just has been further work on the pseudorandom number generator and not much else. However, a few people from work are going to go to a bar later tonight and participate in something called "Quiz Night." I think it is basically a trivia competition, so we will see how it!

Thats all for now! Cheers,
Jason

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

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

The day that work stood still

Today has been interesting. I think I am starting to get over my jet lag. Instead of waking up at 4AM like usual, I slept in till 8:15AM! Keep in mind that I usually leave for work at 8:30, so I set a speed record getting ready. I was just fortunate that there was enough hot water left in the heater from yesterday that water was slightly above freezing. Nels and I got out of the door just after 8:30, ready to make it to work early, and then it took us about half an hour to catch an auto-rickshaw :-P. What finally worked was having one of us take each side of the street so that we could flag down rickshaws going both directions. I swear that we had to ask 30 drivers before we could find one that would take us where we wanted to go.

In the whole day of work I really didn’t manage to get much done. I did get to talk to Elaine (YAY! ^_^) for a little while though. I then spent about 4 hours in presentations (that had been scheduled for 2 hours). We finally got the cell phone guy to the come to the office today, so I have a SIM card that should enable my phone for use in India (BONUS: I get free incoming calls, so anyone with a calling card can call my Indian number. I will post that when I get back to the office and can find it). Unfortunately, my cell phone is from Cingular, so it is locked and can only use the SIM card it came with :-P. I need to go find a sketchy cell phone dealer in a market and pay a few hundred rupees to get my phone unlocked before I can use the SIM card and get the phone working :’-(.

Tonight all of the people in my group (Cryptography, Security, and Algorithms – also known as CSA or, more frequently, Crypto) all went out to dinner at a restaurant called “Ebony.” The restaurant is on the top story of a 13 story building in the middle of the MG road-Brigade road of Bangalore (which is one of the major “places to be” here). Since there were 12 people in our group we weren’t able to sit outside, but I did get a few pictures (that will hopefully turn out, given that it was so dark). I had a great time. I got to chat with people in my group about all sorts of things, sit back and listen to them chatting, had _DELICIOUS_ Indian food (the best I’ve had yet), and Microsoft picked up the bill ^_^. One of the post doc researchers in my group did is PhD work in a university in France (they kept on making fun of him for being so European), and there was another guy I was talking to who just had a fantastic list of favorite movies (basically the list of movies that I really should see someday) like Casablanca, Schindler’s List, The Pianist, and others. I hadn’t heard of “Joy Ride” or “The Bicycle” before, but I want to see them now. Basically, it was a great time.

I’m currently very content. We just got back to the apartment at 11:30, so I am full and happy after the dinner. As I’m writing this up I’m listening to “Baby Bash,” “The Bad Touch,” and “Hallelujah.” Life could get better, but in very few ways.

G’night all,

Jason

Day 4

Well, I’ve already said that I woke up far too early this morning and that I spent a while taking pictures (some of which have now been posted on facebook [LINKS?]). Breakfast came a little after 8, and consisted mostly of fruit: a bunch of miniature bananas that were quite tasty (that’s right, I actually ate bananas!) and a huge, football shaped fruit with a sweet and squishy pink inside. Nels and I managed to get out the door by about 8:30, actually caught an auto-rickshaw, and made it to work by 9 (which is the first time that has happened, despite trying to do so for the last several days).

The day mostly consisted of me reading a bunch of papers and trying to figure out what I will be working on for the next 10 weeks. My mentor is still in the states and a little hard to get a hold of (especially with the 12 hour time difference), so I’m really hoping that I’m not off on a complete tangent with all this reading I’m doing.

There were a few fun things that happened. I signed up for my Citibank account so that I will actually get paid (the guy was supposed to get to the office at 10:30, which is when Revi and I went down to meet him, and didn’t show till 11:15. I’m really just starting to expect such tardiness in general…).

I don’t remember if I’ve mentioned it here, but I left a set of clothes at my original apartment and have been trying to get them back for the last couple of days. To this end the guy who manages all of this stuff grabbed me in the middle of the day and sent me off in a taxi, with the nominal goal of recovering my clothing. First, the taxi driver drove me to a different apartment complex than the one I originally stayed in (after I asked the manager if he had been told the correct one) and the people there brought out clothes for me to look at, then when I told them that I hadn’t been to that place before and none of the clothes were mine they threw out a few not-so-polite-sounding things in either Hindi or Karna (the state Bangalore is in is Karnataka, and I believe the local language is called Karna). Next, the taxi driver took me to Land Mark, which was the correct apartment where I originally stayed, but it turned out that there was nobody there! Finally, we returned to the office, unsuccessful, and I ran into the manager and one of his helpers when I came inside. They had apparently been updated on what had happened, and told me that somehow my clothes had gotten wet again (how they new this, or how they knew where my clothes were I don’t know) and they needed to be dried. I’m supposed to get the clothes tomorrow morning sometime. We shall see… On the plus side, I got to take a break for work to be chauffeured around the city and enjoy the view from the car.

Finally, I had a really nice lunch where I met several new people, including a pair of people from Brazil (one of whom plays Ultimate! Unfortunately I didn’t bring any disks… :-( ), and had a fun chat. Apparently India has its own version of “The Office,” more than one version of “Dancing with the Stars,” and all sorts of other reality TV shows (i.e. “Indian Idol”). I was also invited by Lucia (one of the Brazilians) to join them and a bunch of other people the weekend after next to go to Hampi, which is a holy city that is about an 8 hour train ride from Bangalore. The plan is to take the train overnight starting on Friday, stay the weekend, and come back Monday morning. I think that 11 people are coming on the trip and it sounds like its going to be a whole lot of fun.

Miracles upon miracles, we actually got a taxi away from work at a reasonable time today! We saw a coworker who lives near us leaving (meaning that she had a taxi) and we all dropped what we were doing and ran after her. This is why I did not manage to send out more emails or thins like that today. I was just getting to that as we left. However, this did leave us more time tonight at home, so Nels and I took a little tour around the neighborhood. We chatted and saw all the little tiny shops along the main street near our apartment, and actually got some exercise for the first time in a while. All in all a fun day. Oh, and we don’t have internet yet tonight because, “Someone fell and broke his leg.” That is really the excuse that we were given. It may be true, but if we get an excuse like that tomorrow I’ll start to doubt it… I hope I do have internet tomorrow and get a chance to get in touch with you all!

Cheers,

Jason

P.S. I’ve also learned that my surge protector doesn’t really appreciate 240V, 50 Hz electricity. I also learned where the breakers in my apartment are…