May Day Holiday

Stuck in Traffic

Tuesday, May 1 is a day off for the HSC team.  I learned that it is also called International Worker's Day or May Day, and it is a national holiday in over 80 countries as a celebration of the international labor movement. (Hmm.) In other countries, workers and their labor unions take part in marches. In Bangalore, there were no people marching, only people sitting in traffic.  We had plans to meet some former members of the Recruiting team for lunch, and the roads were absolutely packed with cars, motor rickshaws, bicycles, buses, mopeds, motorcycles, horse-drawn carts and pedestrians.  We had lunch at an Indian restaurant called Samarkand, and the food was as good as the company.  Traditionally, you eat only with your hands, so I did, even though they offered us, as the foreigners, spoons.  We ate paneer (cheese), kebabs, biryani and chicken makhani - everything was very tasty and not extremely spicy.

The ants are hard to see but they are there

Speaking of traffic, while I was waiting for the attendant to clean my room after breakfast, I sat in the shade near the pool.  Small black moving figures caught my eye on a nearby tree so I looked closely and saw a trail of ants carrying food from the ground all the way up a palm tree.  One line of ants was going up and one was coming down.  There were many near misses as ants quickly scurried in a weaving erratic path without a real sense of order.  Upon observing this, I immediately thought, "This is exactly how traffic is in Bangalore!"

At 10:00pm, it started pouring extremely hard with strong thunderstorms for over an hour.  I quickly saved the documents on my laptop because even in good weather, power outages are common in Bangalore due to the power grid. At the office, suddenly all the power will go off for several seconds, and although we have only experienced it one time so far in the evening, we've been told that it occurs several times per day. The HSC team is so used to it that when the lights go off, they will briefly pause and then continue talking even while still in the dark.  When the power came back on, my colleague and I looked up at the ceiling because it sounded like an airplane engine when it is about to take off.