As times fly by...

wow time has flown by, so much has happend here in Delhi. I have now promised my friends at home to at least try to upload pictures more often, so that can follow my life a bit here.So hopefully this will be my key word to start blogging again.

A sunday trip to India Gate

Last Sunday I went a bit around in Delhi just enjoying a day off. I ended up at the park near India Gate, the weather was perfect, not too hot or humid with a bit of wind to cool it down. Here I sat until it got dark.
Here are a few pictures of from India Gate.

Because it was Sunday, there were a lot of people, just relaxing, having pick nicks, families with kids that were playing in the parks while their parents had tea near by. It was my first time to India Gate on a Sunday and at night, but when the weather gets really good around November I can see myself taking a book here and just sitting and relaxing, if I have no other plans :-)

My new wardrobe

As I mentioned in one of the Hyderabad posts, I was gifted some Indian suits from a coworker. It has talken some time but finally I got around to taking pictures of all of them. So here they are my new Indian suits.

I wear these suits from time to time, but not every day. But I like it, they are good for the hot Delhi weather, and I can blend in a little bit with the local girls. I will never blend in completely but sometimes it is good to blend a bit.
I am still learning how to deal with the skarfs/dupetta for the suits, I hope to become better at wearing them with time :-)

Negibourhood salesmen

The other day I found out that even the bit more posh place where I rent a room in south Delhi have a local vegetable salesman. These guys drive around with a load of different vegetables and yell, to make sure that people notice they are in front of their house.

Both pictures are taken from a distance, but I hope you can get the idea. He drives a bicycle that have been made with a big wooden table thing on the back where he keeps different vegetables and a weight. So that he can weigh the vegetables you want and calculate a price.

There are so many different of these salesmen, that sell everything from vegetables to plastic buckets. For me this is kind of a fascinating thin, because we do not have this kind of traveling salesmen at my place.
But on the other hand it is very smart, because it can safe you a trip to the market :-)

Hyderabad - week 2

Because my boss was not coming back until Monday I stayed with my colleague from Monday to Tuesday too, it was so nice not having to be at the guesthouse alone. Even though they have a good internet connection here, it would have been too boring. Tuesday after work I went back to the guesthouse and have been here since. Tomorrow afternoon I have a flight back "home" to Delhi. But one thing I am not looking forward to in Delhi is the weather it is still so hot there. Here in Hyderabad I just love the weather, it still get very hot during the day, but in mornings and evenings it is very pleasant also because there more or less are a bit of wind here all the time :-) I have not turned the Ac on once the almost 2 weeks I have been here, in Delhi I must admit that I need the AC to cool the room while I am sleeping, but I try to use it as little as possible, so I hopefully get use to the heat bit by bit.

Right now I am trying to find out how to bring all of my things back to Delhi, because I have 2 as much clothes now as when I came here, do to shopping and gifting of clothes. I just hope to manage, some how I have too.
I have really liked being in Hyderabad this time, hopefully next time I will do a little bit more sightseeing especially if I am staying over the weekend again.

Hyderabad - week 1

Sunday the 29 of May I was going to Hyderabad with work. I was going to stay there for the week, to get to know some of the people and get a better understanding of what the company does, since I only joined the 16 of May. The plan was to meet my boss after check in because I hate being late to flights so I decided to go early. I got my roommate to call me a taxi, he asked them to come within 10 min orso, and then we waited and waited some more after 30 min he decided to call them again. They thought he had said within 4 hours.... How that got mixed up we will never know. But after the second call the taxi came after 10 min and I went to the airport. I got checked in and all was fine, so I had a snack and started to walk to the gate when my boss called me and told me that there was no more seats on the flight, so we had 2 options. 1: I could go anyway and find the guesthouse myself and he would come in the morning or 2: I could get off the flight and we could go together next morning, I choose option 2. But this involved me going out of the Delhi airport without flying, so a king fisher employee meet me at the security check and helped me get out again. This involved a lot of stamps and him showing his identity card to the guards, but there were no issues at all. Then we went to the desk to get new tickets for Monday and ended up with a flight leaving Delhi at 9.20. So by the time we got to to Hyderabad, went by the guesthouse and dropped off our bags and got to the office it was lunch time.
Here is a few pictures of the guesthouse.

The pictures are my room the first week, the pool and the view from the rooftop restaurant.


The next few days I spend most of my time with 2 of the girls from the office that works with some of the things I am suppose to work with and my boss. Monday to Thursday we got to the office around 9.15 and left between 18.30 and 20.00. Some very long days for me that are not use to having a job. Thursday my boss told me that we would be staying for the coming week too, but that he would go back to Delhi for the weekend and a meeting with some government people Monday. So I would have to be alone in a city that I did not know from Friday to Monday evening. But on Thursday evening before leaving the office 1 of the 2 girls I had worked a lot with came and asked me if I would like to stay with her and her husband for the week, so I was not alone. I could not reply anything else than I would be more than happy to. :-)
So Friday after work her husband picked her, the 2 girl from the office and me up and we went home to their place, we had wonderful Italian food, because my colleagues husband work at one of the fancy hotel chains Italian restaurant. After dinner we watched a movie and in the middle the girls left, after some time they called me and asked if I would like to join them, of course I said yes. So they were actually cleaning my colleagues closet, she had some Indian clothes that no longer fitted her, so she wanted to know if I were also interested in getting some of them, and of course I were. So I ended up having a bag with 5 suits and 2 Kurtis :-)

Saturday was again a working day from 9.30 to 18, but Sunday was off, so it started out with me having the pleasure of seeing my colleague making Aloo Poori (Indian breakfast)

This is my favorite of the Indian breakfast meals so far. After that we went to Shilparamam http://www.shilparamam.org/index.html
a very charming place, where we walked a bit around and looked at the stores I ended up buying some new bangles. Se below.

Because we got there in the middle of the day it was really hot, so we continued to Inorbit mall to be cooled down and have lunch, here we did a bit of shopping too.
This was the end of a very god first week in Hyderabad for work.

A trip to the FRRO - day 2

Thursday I was told that I had to register in Noida. In the morning I were so lucky that my roommate that are working in Noida offered to drop me at the sector 15 metro station. Where I meet with 2 of my Indian friends, who know Noida much better than me, and had agreed to helping me find the ploice station where the Noida FRRO are in. From the metro station it took less than 10 min before we arrived at the police station. So we went in and found the right office, there were already foreigners waiting in the office. After a few miunts there came a man who was the guy that was recieving the applications. There were 2 others in line before me, the first lady needed some more papers from what I understood, and the second one were registrering late, which means  later than 14 days after arrival, so he was asked why he was registrering late, and was send away.
Then it was my turn, the man looked at all my papers, asked a few questions to my friend in hindi, then he asked me a few things. My friend was told by the man that I do not have to register until I come close to staying for 180 days. And if I leave the countrie I will have a new 180 days where I do not have to register when I come back to India. I left the office a bit confused, and called my boss to tell him what had happend. He immidatly said, oh then are here on the same conditions as me, the man in the office gave you the right message. So apparently I do not have to register for now anyway, but I do need to find out wat I should do if I end up staying more than 180 days without leaving the countrie. So maybe at some point there will be another series of FRRO posts. But I had read what the FRRO officer in Noida told me on one of the web pages, but I had also read something els, so I went to the FRRO office just in case. I will try and find out about this by talking to the AIESEC guys at IIT Delhi, I hope they know.