Last night out

The guys at the office dragged me out for a final happy hour / night on the town yesterday. It was a great way to cap off the year with some fun times all around. We went to this bar called Hint - nothing special, a typical European-looking bar. We were goofing around a lot and telling stories.

One of our guys, Gordon, went over to chat up a girl at a table in the corner. To help him out, I went over to talk to the younger girl (who turned out to be a sister). It turns out that Gordon's girl is a Bollywood actress! Nicolette Bird (see pics). So I finally met someone in Bollywood - I'm surprised that it took so long, but I can finally check it off my list.

I'm all packed up. Some things I wanted to keep had to go anyway (space limits), and I'm over the weight limits - bring on those extra baggage fees! But I guess I'm almost through here. It feels like I was living in the US just a minute ago, and that this year has passed so quickly. The move is going to be a huge shock... it just hasn't hit me yet.

The Taj Mahal

A few weeks ago I was scheduled for another business trip to Delhi. And I thought to myself, "Self, you really need to get yourself down to Agra. Who knows when you'll be in Delhi again?" This was probably my 10th or 15th trip to Delhi. Interestingly, it would be my last! So I was fortunate swing by Agra when I did.

What a journey. It's almost 5 hours each way by car over bad roads (frequent stopping for cows / kids / etc.). That's one of the interesting things about India; all of its sights are nearly inaccessible. I ended up missing my flight back to Bangalore that night. But on the bright side, it allowed me to catch up on some R&R in a hot bath at a 5-star hotel in Delhi.

The Taj is beautiful, sure. But I think the mystique from the story behind it. At a time when most Indian kings took 100 wives, the king who built the Taj took only one. And when she died, he built this memorial to her, and never looked at another woman. The building is completely symmetrical in every aspect, and the interior has tons of semi-precious jewels around the queen's grave. They're all set into the marble to form flowers and vines, it looks wonderful.

Because of its symmetry, the Taj photographs perfectly from every angle. Every picture I took came out like a postcard. It was really hard to pick which ones to post here.

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.