The movie theater experience

A friend recommended that I should read The Martian. Last Friday, I was feeling pretty lethargic after hearing about the Umpqua Community College shooting, so I downloaded the book and started reading. (Friday was an Indian holiday, so the office was closed and I could just stay home and read.) I really enjoyed the book and ended up finishing it before going to bed that night.

Then, last night, I went to a mall in town to see the movie. (I also checked out a grocery store in the mall and discovered that they were selling A&W Root Beer--Victory!!!) It's definitely a different experience than seeing a movie in a US theater. First off, there are no previews for movies. There are about ten minutes of commercials before the movie (things like jewelry, cologne, undershirts, leggings and rice). Then, during the movie they dubbed all of the f-bombs (Matt Damon swears quite a bit during the movie). Also, the movie had an intermission. This was not actually built into the reel, they just seemed to pick a moment about halfway through the movie and stop it so that people could buy concessions and so that they could play more ads (even though the movie was in English without subtitles, nearly all of the ads were in Hindi).

The most annoying part, however, was the assigned seating. This made it easy to get good seats by buying tickets early. However, there were people walking in 10 or 20 minutes after the movie started, shining the flashlights on their phones all over the theater to try to find their seats. That was rather distracting. Still, the movie had good picture quality (we watched it in 3D) and definitely good audio (aside from when the dialogue track was cut-off momentarily so that we couldn't hear Matt Damon swearing). And the ticket was about 300 rupees ($4.50), so that's a pretty good deal.

Long day in the field

Yesterday I woke up at 5:30am and left for the office at 5:45. I got to the office by 6:30 and we started our trip to our field office in the city of Anthiyur. It's important to leave Bangalore early so you don't get stuck in city traffic.

We stopped on the road for breakfast and with that 30 minute stop and made it to Anthiyur right at 11am. I got a two-hour nap on the trip. In Anthiyur, I met with managers from each of Essmart's field offices. It was great to meet most of the team, since most of my work outside of Bangalore has been at the Krishnagiri field office.

The view from the office in Krishnagiri (it's up a flight of stairs, so it mostly looks at electrical wires)

The team had a 3 hour meeting, most of which was in Tamil, so I wasn't really sure what was going on. (My Tamil is coming along slowly, but they mix some English into the conversation, so I knew what was being discussed at points.) Still, I thought it was better to remain attentive than to pull out my laptop and work, so I listened and watched who had the most input and who seemed most likely to disagree with various points.

After that, we went out to get lunch before heading back to Bangalore. It was about 2pm. My colleague from Bangalore couldn't start his car, so we pushed it until he was able to throw it into gear, and was able to run it to the restaurant. While we ordered, he called a mechanic, who said that he was on his way. We finished our lunch and waited for the mechanic (I read during that time).

Waiting to sort out car trouble

After three hours, the mechanic showed up, and said that there was a problem with the alternator. Our colleague concluded that he couldn't drive the car, so he helped us get to the city of Erode. From there, we got a bus to the city of Salem. Our bus left Salem at around 8:30 and didn't reach Bangalore until 12:30am. Then we had to get an auto-rickshaw (they insisted that we pay double the meter price at that hour of night) and didn't get home until 1am. Hopefully next time transport will be a little less complicated.

I don't take many selfies

But I was pretty proud of the one that I took today.

That's me doing a headstand. I can do pretty good headstands (I recently stayed on my head for five straight minutes). I had to use the wall to balance myself while I took the picture, but still. I thought that it was pretty cool.

I did not get mugged today

Today I was traveling to one of our field offices for a trial that we are working on. Unfortunately, I live on the north side of the city, and the buses drop me off in the southern portion. It's a one hour ride in an auto-rickshaw, after three hours on the bus coming back, so today I decided to only take the auto-rickshaw halfway, and grab dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant. They didn't start serving until 7pm (it was a little past 6, so I went to a nearby Starbucks to have a hot chocolate).

I left the Vietnamese restaurant at 7:45, so it was reasonably dark, but still plenty of people on the streets, so I felt comfortable walking the last three miles home. It was 8:20 when I reached the railway crossing at Baiyapanahalli. It was only my second time walking this route, but I knew where I was going, so I walked at a deliberate pace. However, it's pretty dark near the railroad crossing. After I was across the railroad tracks, three teenage boys approached me and told me that I was walking the wrong direction. I told them that I knew where I was going. They tried to get me to take a "shortcut" which looked pretty sketchy, so I shrugged them off.

Then one of them grabbed my bag, another one reached into my pocket and a third one demanded my mobile phone. I've been mugged before, and this did not seem like a dangerous situation. Just some kids who wanted to be bullies. I shoved them off of me and kept walking (I knew that it was better lit and more crowded about 100 meters ahead). They didn't follow me.

I had another 30 minutes before I got home, so I got to stew in my anger for a little bit while I remained on high alert. But as I walked, people were nothing but friendly. Although I'm sure that I was scowling, plenty of people offered me kind smiles and greetings as I walked along. I passed a police station and thought about asking them to talk to those kids, but I didn't expect that they would do anything about it, so I left it alone. I just decided to shrug it off and avoid that area after sunset.

Not sure what was happening today

Here's the view from the balcony in our office:

So, sculptures being driven the wrong way on the highway with people walking in front to clear a path. I don't know what's going on, but I thought it was worth sharing.

I ate something that I shouldn't have

So I got food poisoning this weekend. I spent the weekend getting caught up on The Economist, watching movies and spending quality time in the bathroom. Starting at about 3am on Saturday morning, I was going to the toilet every 1-2 hours, and I threw up at 5am (I was glad I had eaten peanut butter and jelly for dinner--an Indian curry probably would have been even more unpleasant coming back up). I was also dealing with some stomach cramps.

This felt worse than most episodes of food poisoning, but I talked to a doctor who told me to give it 24-48 hours, and sure enough, by Sunday evening, I was back to normal. I was glad that it's easy to get gatorade here and mostly subsisted on that and bananas.

I'm not totally sure where the food poisoning came from. I've been eating lots of concord grapes (80 rupees per kg makes it easy to eat lots of them), and it's possible that I missed a spot when washing the most recent batch (I'm usually pretty careful, but it's a hard surface to wash). I'm also planning to avoid the restaurant up the street where I got mushroom fried rice the day before. It was pretty good, and I've eaten there a few times before and not gotten sick. Still, there's plenty of dinner options in the area.

Most importantly, I was getting stomach bugs nearly every month when I lived in Tanzania, so I'm pretty happy that this has only happened once in nearly two months.

Visiting Krishnagiri

We are starting a new trial at our field office in Krishnagiri. The city is in Tamil Nadu, but it's only 90 km from Bangalore. Still, traffic determines whether that's a 2.5 hour bus ride or a 4 hour bus ride (the bus moves pretty quickly, it's just that it makes a handful of stops along the way). I took the bus out there yesterday morning to meet with our researcher and also to talk to the sales team. This was my first time taking the bus during the day in India.

The trip went well and I'm excited about the trial. We got caught in some pretty heavy rainstorms in the afternoon, but after a break in the rain, we went back to the bus station. We got on a bus that was nearly full, which meant that it was about to leave. Unfortunately, that also meant that we got the seats that no one else wanted. I ended up in a seat where the rain was dripping in. It didn't rain during the middle hour of the ride which was nice. But by the time we reached Bangalore, I was happy to be off the bus. Unfortunately, it was still raining pretty heavily and we were on the south part of the city about 10 miles away from where I live. We couldn't find an available taxi or auto-rickshaw, so we just decided to grab dinner. After an hour, my co-workers husband drove down to pick us up, which was a huge relief.