Bangalore - day two
Yesterday we went and did some shopping down on Commercial Street and MG Road. Shopping on Commercial Street is…interesting. The place is packed to the gills with people, cars and shops. We went into several stores. It’s interesting to note some differences between a couple of them. Some of the stores would leave you to shop, occasionally asking if you needed any help. Others would mob you once you got in asking how many of these you wanted and whether or not you wanted to also get some of those and maybe a couple of other things. It was annoying, really…but just part of the experience, I guess. I’m sure I had “tourist” tattooed on my head, so the shop owners figured I’d be willing to part with money. The shops are inexpensive, however. Shirts can be had for a couple bucks. Wood carved trinkets likewise.
Today was my first official work day in Bangalore. The Yahoo! office on MG Road is nice. I appreciated that they have air conditioning because the humidity and I don’t particularly agree down here. The humidity isn’t real bad, but it’s definitely noticeable. I got to meet the mail engineering team, which was cool. I see email from these guys and now I can put a face to the name. I also enjoyed the free lunch, although I must say, I’m pretty sure I’m not going to need Indian food for a while after this trip. Don’t get me wrong, I love the food. But I’ve probably had more Indian food in the past 2 days than I’ve had in the 10 years prior to that.
After the day’s meetings, we went out for dinner with Grishma, one of our designers. We were going to hit up a nice Thai restaurant, but it turns out that place wasn’t open on Mondays. Instead we went for, you guessed it, Indian. The place we went was pretty good. Nice kebabs with fish, chicken and lamb. We followed that up with some naan and two other vegetable dishes, the names of which completely escape me (yes, already).
We walked back to the hotel after that. I managed to snap a little video of the traffic on MG Road (this was probably around 9pm, maybe slightly later). I was trying to embed that video in this post, but WordPress is being a bitch and keeps stripping out my tag. So instead I’ll just have to link you to the video. If you listen to it, you’ll get a little taste of how much the horn gets used here.
