ryan kennedy’s blog

The Ryan Kennedy road show has officially touched down in Bangalore, India. It was a long trip, but not too bad. I was expecting worse.

The plane ride from San Francisco to London was an hour shorter than originally scheduled. According to the captain we had a nice 200mph tailwind pushing us along. That was nice, getting off the plane earlier. Unfortunately, that just meant our layover in London was an extra hour. I couldn’t help wondering what on earth I was doing in an airport when London was nearby waiting. I’ll have to go back and stay a while next time.

The plane to Bangalore boarded late, but I think the pilot made up for it in the air because we didn’t get in late. I managed to sleep on that leg of the flight which positioned me well for being awake today. I got about 5-6 hours sleep on the plane and we arrived in the morning…so it was almost as if I’d had a night’s sleep when I arrived. Hopefully that will mean that I won’t have much difficulty adjusting to the time change (it’s a 13.5 hour difference).

Let me just say, the Bangalore luggage experience leaves much to be desired. There isn’t much conveyor space, so when the 777 lands loaded with baggage, there isn’t much room on the conveyors to hold luggage. So it frequently results in a traffic jam of sorts where luggage collides at choke points, preventing anything from getting through. Then, the area where the passengers congregate is probably 80% consumed by stupid hand carts for carrying out baggage. There’s no room to maneuver. The room is hot and humid from the collective body heat of everyone makes it a really unbearable place to stand for too long. I think it took an hour for all of the luggage to be offloaded. To top it off, they “misplaced” one of the luggage crates and didn’t get it there until well after all the other baggage had been claimed. We thought the luggage was lost and people were starting to fill out forms to get it delivered to them when it was found, but then they called and said they had located the crate.

The ride from the airport was exciting. The New York taxi drivers haven’t got anything on these guys. I’ve never heard more excessive use of the horn anywhere else. If you’re a pedestrian, scooter rider or autorichshaw operator, watch yourself. The drivers are very aggressive and won’t hesitate to show you how close they can get. It’s really quite impressive, but if the New York cab drivers make you uncomfortable…then this place won’t do wonders for you.

What I’ve seen of Bangalore so far is a pretty new experience to me. Many parts of town I saw appeared to be pretty old and in disrepair. Along one street we saw cattle on the sidewalk including one area where it appeared the cattle were being milked alongside the road. That’s just something you don’t really see much of in the US. Additionally, the air has a distinctive odor to it. At first I thought I was just inhaling a bunch of airline fumes at the airport. But when I got out of the car at our hotel I decided that it wasn’t just the airport that smelled that way. I know that pollution is a problem here, so I’m guessing that’s mostly what the smell is. It’s also loud as hell here. All of the street and construction noise reminds me of being in New York.

Anyway, I’m eager to go check things out a little bit. Find out where the Yahoo! office is and all. I’ve started up a flickr photostream so you can check out all the photos I post. I’ve got a couple of them up right now.

I’ll continue posting more here, so stay tuned.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 11th, 2006 at 7:53 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.