Another great video of our trip to Hampi by Bart Boonstra!
Hi there! Been a while! We’ve been on a trip to Hampi, a 9 hour drive from Bangalore up north. Wonderful landscapes, people and finally some fresh air :-) This post will be short, I need to take care of a couple of things before I return to the Netherlands this Thursday. My flight will depart at 7:45am from Bangalore Airport and it will arrive at Schiphol, Amsterdam at approximately 6:20pm. It will be a pretty long day..
PS. Unfortunately my Flickr account has reached its quota, so I’ll be posting the last photos when I get back.
Yesterday I had a really bad hangover. So I decided to stay near our hotel finishing up some posts, editing a couple of photos, checking my email, reading the news and taking a walk at Lalbagh Botanical Garden, which is located near our hotel. At this park a lot of people and a variety of animals enjoy the shadows of trees, clean air (lesser smog) and silence. Some photos!
No cars: what a delight..
Sleepy dog
Palmtree
Once again credits go out to Bart Boonstra!
Hi all! Its been a while but unfortunately there was little time to use my laptop in our hotelroom because past week we had a very tight schedule. So I’ll go through past days real quick and show you some photos!
Thursday November 6
We drove for one hour to get to the Biological Zoo which is situated at the border of Bangalore. For €2 we had a ticket for the zoo and a safari ride! The safari ride was pretty boring, the captive animals were ofcourse just like humans very dull at 40 degrees Celsius.
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Cow & garbage
Friday November 7
Friday we had our first appointment at the R&D centre of HUL (Hindustan Unilever Limited). We had a brief introduction about the core business and afterwards about the development cycle of their new products. Each year a dozen of patents are claimed by this company, extreme!
Currently HUL is working on a waterpurifier which runs without any powersource. Since a lot of the Indian population does not have direct access to clean drinkingwater this is one heck of a great product! This device will approximitly cost $30 without filters. The filters have to be replaced every 1500 litres and will cost about $5. Affordable drinkingwater for all!
HUL interior, got to love this
At the end of the day we had an appointment with Rutger from Nexus Novus at a luxurious hotel. Two years ago he moved from the Netherlands to India to set up a business based in Bangalore. He told us a variety of things about entrepreneurship in foreign countries: helpful tips&tricks! Afterwards we went to a club called Kosmo where we drank a couple of beers and moved our hips from right to left!
Chat&drinks
Buddha at Kosmo
Saturday November 8
This day we got out of bed pretty early because we had to make a long bus drive, at least that’s what they said. ;-) We arrived 40 minutes to early at Wipro, a company which has its corebusiness primarily in IT. This company is a big player on the global IT market. Today Wipro has 93.000 employees!
Wipro Technologies is the No 1 provider of integrated business, technology and process solutions on a global delivery platform.
The campus is a great place to work and relax. In terms of work Wipro has many intern trainingcourses in the different fields of expertises. Relaxing can be achieved by practicing tennis, basketball, cricket or having a dip in the swimming pool.
By night we went to a James Bond party at a bar in one of the most luxurious hotels in the region. There we were with 6 of us having a drink next to the swimming pool. :-P
Sunday November 9
OCC (Open Coffee Club) is a session where fresh entrepreneurs (starters) come and have a chat with each other: solving problems, having feedback on their products, networking etc. In my opinion this was one of the most interesting sessions we had so far because this showed us how people are starting their businesses in Bangalore.
At OCC I met with Pranav Bhasin, who has set up a social networking website called Lifeblob. Lifeblob plots your life on a horizontal timescale by using third party data from other social networking websites. See my Lifeblob timescale:
In the evening there was a small surprise for us: … Karaokebar!!!
Bart Boonstra created a very nice first impression of our stay in Bangalore. You’d better watch it!
Everyday we’re getting more and more acclimatized to the city. Roads seem familiar when we are traveling from place to place. However, the city and citizens still amaze me every single second: it is so incredibly diverse.
Yesterday we had a meeting with all the students and our teacher at the conferenceroom of one of the hotels. The topic was about the book we will be writing in the course of this program. The book has the workingtitle: “Howto successfully outsource to India”. More will follow as we gather information from companies we will visit in the upcoming days.
Conferenceroom: 'The Last Supper'-style
Yesterday we moved to a new hotel like I mentioned in one of my previous posts. Cheaper, bigger, better food etc..
Bart is chilling in our new and improved room
In the evening we enjoyed dinner on the roof of a 13-story building. The view on top was absolutly fabulous! This restaurant & lounge bar is the typcial place for expats and upperclass citizens to have a drink or a damn delicious meal. We were with 8 people and had to pay 5500 rupies all together, which is about like €90.. mad!
13th floor exterior
13th floor interior
13th floor roofview
I’m running a bit behind schedule updating this blog, but it will work out!
As promised something about yesterdayevening! :-)
We went to one of the main shopping streets to have dinner. After 15 minutes of bargaining with the rickshawdriver we had a pretty wild ride to this area of the city. Roads do have lanes, but in this city no one cares. Just keep honking..
Rickshawcruisin'
Our meal was served on bananaleaves and tasted great! I had panbaked lamb with a dozen of green peppers for starters. I also needed a litre beer to cope with the taste.
Lamb and peppers
At 23:00 bars, restaurants and clubs close, so we had nothing else to do than heading back to the hotel..
The streets
The streets
In front of the hotel
Again a day to acclimatise in this huge city. We started having breakfast in the hotel. They even serve spicy food at this time of the day. Tea is served with milk and about 5 sugarcubes. Nice ways to start the day!
First we went to Forum mall, which looks almost identical to shopping malls we know. McDonalds, Nike, Reebok, Tommy Hillfiger, Adidas, you name it.
Forum mall
Having lunch at Forum mall, nice..
After visiting Forum mall, we went to a Hare Krishna temple. The chanting went on and on..
Hare Krishna temple
I tried to post this yesterday, but unfortunately internet was down in our hotel. Today we moved to another hotel where the rooms are a lot bigger, the bathroom is more clean and the price is much cheaper.
Tonight I’ll probably post a roundup of yesterday’s evening and today!
The first day of my stay is a bit shitty. Today I used the bathroom more than I do at home in one week time. It’s like a giant brown fall which is activated from time to time. It’s called tourista and it feels great!
However the shitty start, we had a wonderful time exploring the blocks in the vicinity of our hotel.
Frogger
Buses, cars, mopeds, bicycles and pedestrians, everything moves in one direction. If someone goes out of the proper direction, honking is the way to let someone know. Trust me, our cabdriver held his hand on the horn the whole way and honked every 10 seconds, just in case.
Playing a game in the streets: I rocked, they wanted me on their team!
Too bad I can’t recall the name of this game but I’ll try to give you an explanation: It’s like playing pool except you use checker pieces. In each corner of the board is a hole. With a flick of your finger, on a special piece, you must hit one of your own coloured pieces and pocket it in one of the four holes. The game is played 2 vs 2. Everyone was cheering and laughing in ways it made me forget my tourista: brilliant!
Nightlife in front of the hotel
Cheers!