Tyler's trip to India

 After a week in India I'm happy to be home sleeping in my own bed.  However, I had a really great trip (even the 26 hours of flying to get there & 30 hours to return home) and am so grateful that I went. I went with several of the managers in our finance organization to visit our teams in India and several other folks who had flown in from several countries in Asia.

I stayed at the historic Taj West End Hotel in Bangalore (built in 1887) which was very nice although a little far from the office with traffic.  Each morning I had an Indian breakfast which usually consisted of a Dosa (Indian rice pancake with various chutneys). The service was excellent and we were treated like royalty. The staff went out of their way to ensure we had an excellent visit which we did.

Getting to the office was usually an hour and 15 minutes each way. Fortunately, we had a driver each day who would take us to the office, wait around all day, take us to dinner, wait some more, then take us back to our hotel late in the evening. The good thing about it was I got to see some of the city that I probably wouldn't have been able to have seen otherwise. Traffic is very chaotic and a complete mess, but amazingly it moves. Honking your horn is readily accepted for virtually any situation as road rage is not a worry there. Everyone honks their horn constantly to let the person in front of you know you are there, the person on the side of you know you don't approve of his driving, the motorcycle next to you that you are moving over, the rickshaw that you are passing him, or for any other possible reason you might see fit. It's almost a constant white noise of honking. To give you a sense of the chaos, the question of the week was when our driver asked one day "how many cars fit on a four lane highway in America?"

Traffic is slow-moving & very congested. Everyone and everything shares the roads including buses, trucks, cars, rickshaws, motorcycles, mopeds, bikes, pedestrians, farmers toting their goods on carts, horse-drawn carriages, and even cows, goats.

 These rickshaws are everyone and it's fun to see the kids getting transported to school in them. I saw one rickshaw that was stuffed full of seven little kids!

A couple funny things happened while we were there like my driver never showed up for two of the days, we had commented one day how amazing it was there are so few car accidents. The next morning my colleague and I were rear-ended by another car. One day when we were leaving the office one car took several people back to the hotel. We soon realized there were 9 of us that needed to fit into a 6 seat van! 

My team in India is great! I'm so glad I went because I was able to meet several members of the team and gain a greater appreciation for the people of India. We had excellent dinners each night in five star hotels where we ate excellent Indian food and enjoyed great company! On Thursday afternoon, we went to an animal park where we took an old bus around the park to view animals. My favorite were the tigers that were the biggest and most beautiful I've ever seen. They were right up next to our bus.

 Traveling internationally is always something I enjoy as it gives me better perspective of other cultures, foods, languages, history, etc., also gives me a great appreciation for our country and the blessings I enjoy.