1 week of training down...

When I woke up on Tuesday I remembered that Tuesday is Malaria day. Time to take the malaria pill. It instantly reminded me of Goodmorning Vietnam. And the more I think about the movie, this place isn't much different. There are cars and trucks on the road along with people, bicycles, scooters, and animals.

There is another head movement that is very common in this country. It is a short, quick, rapid head shake (left, right, left, right). It is almost a subtle head shake. The best way to visualize it is to think back to Mike Tyson's Punchout on Nintendo. In the game there was one opponent that did the head shake. That must have been taken directly from this country.

I can't believe that IT jobs are coming here and theinfrastructure is so bad. Every day at 6am and 7am the power goes out in the hotel. It almost immediatley comes back on which I think means there must be a generator back up that it switches too. It is unbelievable. I have been in the shower and the lights just go out for a few minutes. Luckily the water is still hot.

The driving on the opposite side of the road I think has some other trickle down effects which have caused me slight issue. The main one being when you go to walk past somebody I think you go to your left instead of the right. I instinctly go to the right and consistently go the same way as the oncoming walkers. Not sure if it is just me or there is something to this. I guess I can check the theory out in England someday.

Communicating outside the classroom is very difficult. Our driver only understands what time it is we want to get picked up. We tried to explain to the driver to stop somewhere on the drive home from the office. He couldn't understand what we were asking. So he called over a countryman who speaks english and had him translate for us. Only he didn't get it either. He decided that when we said we were sick of eating at the hotel that we were looking for another hotel to eat at. The reason being that hotel doesn't mean a place where you stay in India. A hotel is a restaraunt. After that failure, I decided to eat my first peanut butter and jelly sandwich since I have been here. It was one of the best pb&j sandwiches i have had in recent times.

The following night we had somebody in the office explain what we wanted and it was successful. We went to the mariplex. It had a KFC, McDonalds, movietheater, Subway, bookstore and a few small shops. And a baskin robbins ice cream. I was going to get a cheeseburger from mcdonalds when it dawned on me they probably would not have one. I asked the server if they had burgers and he said I can choose anyone I want. Apparently McChicken sandwich is a burger here.

Well another long day is winding down and I will write more over the weekend as well as add a bunch of pictures for people to see.

One last thing, i had a group sing a song again. There was a group of about 10 that were late. I asked the group what punishment we should give and they all wanted them to sing a theme song from a movie. So the 10 latecomers sang some Hindi song. Very entertaining.