Blogging from Bangalore

Well here I am in Bangalore, India on my residency for my GMU "TECHMAN" program. For 170 rupees I get one hour of Internet time (that's about $3.50).

We left Dulles Airport Sunday around noon and arrived in Japan 13 hours later. We had a three hour layover and boarded our seven hour flight for Bangkok Thailand. The last two hours of that leg of the trip were the worst.

By the time we got our luggage and took buses to the hotel it was past midnight local time. We had been traveling for 24 hours straight!

We flew on All Nippon Airways and the service was excellent. Every seat had its own television set so we could watch movies. I alternated between reading, watching movies, getting up and walking around to stretch my legs, talking to my classmates, and taking catnaps. Even so it was grueling.

Bangkok international Airport is beautiful and has stores in it rivaling Tyson's corner galleria, complete with stores selling $400 silk ties. Yes, that's 400 US dollars! Good thing I had already picked out a Father's Day present for for my dad :)

Monday morning we made an excursion to The Grand Palace which was quite impressive. I hope to post some pictures later. Monday evening we all regreted having to fly again-- our itinerary calls for four days in Bangalore before coming back to Bangkok. However most of us simply wanted to stay in Bangkok. It was less than three hours flying time though, which was a walk in the park compared to what we had been through yesterday.

It's quite a contrast to Bangalore. It was crowded, filthy, and chaotic. The traffic here makes the Beltway looks like child's play. It's every man for himself-dog eat dog. Literally. There are scrawny, ferrel dogs everywhere, alongside the "holy" cows.

In Bangalore we will hear several lecturers and make site visits to some of the large IT companies here. This morning speaker talked about many of the infrastructure challenges faced by the growth in Bangalore. In the afternoon we visited the Jack Welch Research Center (GE).

As I am writing this blog the power went out-only for less than 10 seconds, but it shows that this really is a Third World country... despite the high tech companies abject poverty is never far away.

Still our hotel is quite nice so we can't complain. Tonight is my first night to really just relax and hopefully will be my first full eight hours of sleep. Anyway I will try to post an update as soon as I can.