Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Day 2 - Kaladkarin Invades India

Time for breakfast heaven again! After all the spicy stuff, I almost fell to my knees when I spotted some Chinese dumpling in the buffet table. God, I swear, it was the best chicken dumpling EVER. After a few minutes, we braced the traffic again to the Surya Park office. Erwin So would have fit right in with the drivers in India; the buses were the ones being bullied in the road.

At the training room, my connection was still crappy and I couldn't get emails or access anything online. I never thought I would be one for homesickness; I must admit I miss my teammates, my sister, my niece, our dance classes, the office pantry, everything. I even stopped to watch our SWAT video just to crack a smile. :p

The pace of our lecture was actually too fast, I found myself grasping with concepts flying over my head. From what I got from my seatmate Anirudha, I realized I was in the midst of experienced developers. After our class, we chatted with one of our classmates and found out that she was a solution architect. An actual solution architect (i.e. a myth in the Manila office)! She has 11 years of industry experience -- I have a lot of catching up to do.

Definitely the highlight of our day was when Dinesh, our cab driver, took us to a shop named Silk Udyog tucked away in one of the streets of S.R. Nagar (or as we fondly refer to it, the 'sari-sari' store). Shelves decked with colorful saris bidded us in. Woven saris. Painted saris. Saris with elaborate embroidery. Saris with shiny stones. The store-owners made us sit in front of a platform and even offered us coffeee & tea, as they laid out silks one by one in front of us. To say that they have a wide range of selection is an understatement; you just have to tell your price range, and they'll show you the best value for your money. We saw saris from 300-5000 and there's really one to suit each fashionista out there. To cap it all off, they were selling the saris, clothes and scarves in factory prices. I was in clothes shopping heaven!

After spending a full hour in the shop, we got back to the hotel with our loot. The shopping nirvana set us into such a high, that we didn't mind that we had to spend the whole night catching up in the lab work for the training. After the Nth lab exercise was completed, I finally realized that my mind was just a huge lumped mess and it was time to call it a day.

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