HAPPY SANKRANTI

Hello everyone - today is a holiday here - not one where the office is closed but a national festival. They dress/decorate the cows and sheep - not sure if I'll see any of that on my way back from the office. The good thing is there was no traffic. Manojar got me here in record time :)

Sankranti means to go from one place to another place (to change direction). It also means one meets another. The time when the sun changes direction from one constellation (of the zodiac) to another is known as Sankranti.

Manojar offered to take me to his house to meet some of his family and see the festivities and if I had my camera and didn't have to get back to the hotel I would have taken him up on his offer. I figure after 5 months of him driving me around we'll practically be family anyway. He's very sweet and just a baby - only 23 years old. Julian - get your mind out of the gutter :)

Oh so I forgot to tell you all about my shopping experience. I'm not even sure there are words to describe it. The area was like New York on major steroids. People, motorbikes, cars, auto-rickshaws and continous non-stop honking. Talk about an assault on the senses. And it's like all the stores are the same - I was just looking for some inexpensive tops but it was all too much. I walked around for about an hour and then called Manojar and said get me out of here. I immediately went back to the hotel and headed directly to the pool where I happily sat reading my book for a couple of hours.

When I first joined GetThere and was working with Cisco there was an AX employee working on the account named Daksha. She's still with AX and she is living in Delhi but today she is here in Bangalore so I'm going to meet her for dinner. She's Indian so perhaps she can give me some tips on adjusting to all this insanity. Work has been pretty frustrating for me because I send the local contacts an introductory email (none of them put their phone number on their emails) - they send one back to me- nice to meet you - blah blah blah - and then I send one back trying to set up an appointment and I never hear back again. This is typical Indian behavior so I'm really trying very hard to just go with the flow and I'll give it some more time but I don't see how I'm going to be able to do my job if no one gets back to me. And today I'll just chalk up to the festival. At the very least I'm happy to have a familar face to have dinner with.

That's it for now. Thursday I'm going to work from the hotel. The Overseas Women's Club of Bangalore meets from 10-12 here in the hotel so I'll check it out. I think it's mostly expat wives but hey you never know who you're going to meet.

Just got back from dinner with Daksha - you can't imagine how happy I was to see a familiar face and also to get some good info about this place. She told me how you know it's a real pashmina (very important). Real pashmina fits through a ring. And she also showed me a couple of stores in the galleria attached to the hotel where I can do some shopping and get good quality items for a decent price. She also told me that the service apartment she stays in while she is here is pretty nice so I'm going to take a look at it. She said they have a gym, flat screen TVs, free internet and that's in area not as noisy as this one. The only drawback is it would be about much longer to my office. But then again seeing as it's free internet I would probably spend most of my time working from home rather than the office.

Anyway, signing off for now. I feel much better - was really starting to get down today.