The Wadi Rum desert

I drove off into the desert with my hotel's check-in guy and his buddy. It was a little intimidating to drive off into the middle of nowhere in the Middle East with two strangers. But hey, it paid off. The desert is marked by its complete absence of... well, everything. Nothing living, no movement, no sound, no water. And it's dry. I think there are times in Atlanta that are more hot because of the high humidity, but here you also have to be careful to drink a lot of water.

Brief note on the absence of posts / communication from my side! The internet at my apartment has broken. Since it would take more than a month to get the phone company to fix something, and I had a month left (now a couple weeks), I've had to do without internet. Welcome to India. I will try to squeeze a few posts in before leaving via posts from work.

Book USA

I have a terrible memory. You would think this would hamstring me in life, but I have a work-around. I make myself little post-it notes about everything. If I ever forget your birthday / loan / whatever, it means that a post-it note either got thrown away too early, or went through the wash, or one of a million other things.

This evening's post-it says, "Book USA." Wild! I left the US in very early October (my initial "check things out" trip, which you may also remember, was in mid September). I am probably about six weeks from heading back to America.

Am I looking forward to it? Yes. Am I sad about leaving? I can't even begin think about that right now. All I can think about are the things I want to accomplish in my professional life before I go. There are so many things on the verge of happening, and I'm anxious to just tip them a little more and make them become a reality. I will be really disappointed if this year ends up like this: "India ALMOST achieved XYZ great thing, but after Josh left, it just kind of lost momentum."

Petra, Jordan - the Treasury

You're walking through the Siq, and you can only see maybe 20 feet in front of you because of all the twists and turns. You come around a corner, and bam! Even if you know the treasury is coming up, this view will stop you in your tracks. My first reaction was, "how did it sneak up on me?" It appears so suddenly. Duly note: this picture is almost identical to the first scene of Petra in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

Breathtaking. I wish I had a person in this picture so it would capture the scale. This thing is enormous; it's on a much larger scale than the Parthenon, for example. To think that this was completely forgotten by the outside world until the 1800's! Very similar to how it's portrayed in the Indiana Jones movie, the location was kept a secret and protected by the Bedouin nomads.

This is just the beginning of Petra, however. Petra goes on for 4-5 miles of caves and the like. But most tourists - on packaged bus tours - only see the the Treasury and go no further. They miss a lot! I hired a donkey guide and we set off into the city.

Petra, Jordan - the Siq

The Siq is a mile-long canyon that leads to Petra. It fills with water during flash floods in the rainy season, and so it has been slowly worn away over time into very interesting shapes. At some places it is only wide enough for a couple people to pass through. This provides a natural defense for the city (it would be difficult to march an army through).

Along the sides of the Siq you can see grooves cut into the wall, and in some places, the remainder of terracotta pipes. How old are these pipes? Petra was founded in 300 BC and largely abandoned around 400 AD. So they're surprisingly old to just be sitting around! But that's everything in Petra - it's an unprotected site. Something else you should notice in my pictures - where are all the people, crowding around to see stuff? They aren't there. In the morning when I was walking through Petra, it was me, four backpackers, and the Bedouins who live there.

The pipes hint to a key part of Petra's history. Back in the BC's, the Bedouin nomads realized that they could build cisterns to catch rainwater, and then funnel those cisterns into a common, enormous cistern through the pipes. This centralized water in the desert allowed civilization to flourish, but also became a marketable commodity. As trade caravans passed through the desert, they would stop to buy some water for the journey, and to trade their goods. And thus Petra became a center for business and trade routes.

Funny moment

Roopa was just cooking up lunch for me, and it was spicy. The chilli kind of gets into the air when she's cooking up something hot. She and I were sneezing simultaneously - her in the kitchen and me in my bedroom, but the timing was almost exact, every time. When she walked into my room with the food, she was giggling and I was chuckling (interrupted by coughs / sneezes). I said, "I'm guessing it's spicy?" And she said, "Sir, you like spicy!" Good times.

After-office Wii night

After work, a bunch of us headed over to Suresh's house to play his new Wii. Most of the Bangalore management had never played video games, let alone a Wii. Hilarity ensued. These guys would take full-body swings. But the best moments, quite possibly, came from Wii boxing.

They blew up Bangalore!

In case you haven't heard, there were seven small explosions in Bangalore today. Two people are dead, and 20 are injured, though these numbers are certainly 100% falsified (the government will keep the real, higher number out of the papers, to avoid scaring the MNC presence). I am safe and completely unharmed. But standing on my porch this evening, I was subject to a fascinating cacophony of sounds - the wail of fire trucks clashing against the Muslim call to prayer from mosques across the city. Although this is a Hindu city, it has a large Muslim population.

Terrorism has certainly worked its magic here. The majority of the day at work was spent watching the news roll in. The first three timed bombs went off just before 2pm, and afterwards, everyone was focused with rapt attention. The fourth and fifth bombs went off almost simultaneously. The sixth and seventh bombs went off some hours later, leaving everyone to imagine - is this the end, or just the beginning? When will the bombs end? Everyone is afraid - not terrified, given that only 22 people were directly hurt, but it's on everyone's mind. The phone lines were jammed all day, so some people are just checking in their families around now. And that's the point of terrorism really - not to hurt everyone, but to affect a large population. Check that box - even I've canceled my evening plans and will camp out at home. Is that a rational response? Are they really likely to bomb a bar? The probability is infinitely small, yet somehow large enough for me to have zero interest in venturing out.

I feel pretty safe in Bangalore and always have, but bombings are scary. You can't "out think" an explosion like you could a potential mugger, and it's hard to anticipate where the next bomb might be planted. Two of the bombs were within a couple miles of my office. One of them went off near where we had a department team lunch yesterday. This will certainly be on my mind for a while. In any case, I don't want anyone to worry about me - I'm ok, I'm safe, no sweat.