2 Weeks in Bangalore 8:22 AM

so as of yesterday we have been here for two weeks and it's been a super great learning experience for both me and robby.  work has been great.  my work team seems to like me and the work i do, the church members seem to be very helpful and very nice to us, and BYU seems to be trying thier best to take care of us.  with all that help and support i think it is very hard not to have a good day in india.  Bangalore is a very smart city.  people here are not like the africans that i am used to.  they are very driven and very ready to work and learn.  they try to do their best to live a good life.  another thing i see here is a large middle class.  when i was in africa i saw poverty and a rich upper class.  the middle class was lacking thus the absence of a working class and progression.  here in bangalore there is a well populated middle class that works very hard to get a living.  i dont think they are of the upper class because they are not super rich.  but they do have enough money to live a well decent life here.  my mentor, Jayakumar said that it is because this is really the first generation that is growing up in India with the freedom of working.  before this generation india was under rule from the british.  it seems to me that India's freedom has helped them out a lot and i see a lot of progression with this culture, and to me that is really cool.

anyways i promised all of you some pictures of the apartment so here you go, the first picture was the balconey of my room, yes it is huge.  this is my room, yes that is two singles trying to make a king size bed, and don't worry robby's room is downstairs, we're not tryiing to share beds:

this is my bathroom, i have my own bathroom and there is no shower curtain so it's a great way to wake up everymorning to an open shower.  that hose faucette thing on the left side of the toilet is a small like hose like gun thing that you squirt yourself with after you go to the bathroom,  we call it the indian bidet!:

this is our lovely forest of coconut trees that is growing right outside of my room:

this is coming down the stairs to the living room, and the flat screen TV that we havent even turnen on since the first weekend here:

this is pretty much our whole apartment right here:

and the kitchen:

Shivaganga 8:56 AM

saturday needed to be our rest day from a long week at work, and in india but instead we decided to try to sleep as long as possible, but i think we were both up by 10am.  so as soon as possible we made some quick decisions for the day plan and left the house.  we had decided to get on the bus and try to go to the railroad station to see if there were any day trips or quick overnights we could do.  unfortunately due to heavy traffic on the saturday we didnt get over there till like 2pm.  and i think we left around noonish.  i have decided that transit is the most frustrating thing in third world countries.  anyways all the trains had left for the day so we found a small tourism booth and asked the man in there what we could do for the day.  he said we could go to a place out of bangalore called shivaganga.  he mentioned some details but i dont remember any of them except for monkeys and mountains and i was sold.  so he sent us to the bus station to catch a bus:

the bus took us about 1 and a half to 2 hours to get to this small pit stop called d0bbosapete.  which sounded a lot like the bus pit but he said it wasn't, but when we got there i think title fit it well.  it was a small little town right on the major road.  out of this little town we took an auto to the base of this small mountain we saw from highway:

it is funny because when i saw the mountain i told the guy next to me that i loved mountains and i wish i could go hike one.  he asked me where i was headed and i told him dobbosapete and he pointed right at the mountain and said thats it.  boy was i excited! when  we got to the base of this mountain there was a small community there purely dedicated to the hindu religion.  it reminded me of like a small little indian mountain town.  it was a great atmosphere and robby and i jsut walked down the main street and everyone was looking at the white boys.  it really felt like we were in a place that hadnt seen a white man for awhile.  it was great.  the bottom was covered in white arches like this:

they were beautiful.  hiking this mountain was really cool.  there were monkeys:

and more temples along the way:

it seriously was so relaxing and very nice.  we stayed there for quite some time then when the sun was setting we left the paradise of shivaganga and went back to the dirty and crowded bangalore.  

Morning Time in Bangalore 5:39 AM

So I have done very well waking up in the morning here in Bangalore.  For those of you who know me, you know that that has always been a big task for me to accomplish.  I like my sleep, A LOT.  But here are some of the activities that we do in the morning that make it hard to sleep in.  

First of all we wake up at 6ish.  this is what i saw this morning when i woke up:

Yes thats right, THREE monkeys sitting on our porch.  Robby fed them some bananas and those little rascals didnt leave for at least thrity minutes waiting for us to give them another banana.  they kept looking through the windows and see our bananas then looking directly at us.  it was a great site to wake up to.  

once i was awake i took a shower and made breakfast, we left the apartment.  out the door, down the elevator 5 floors, and walk outside and you get this:

this is our compound and what it looks like on the inside.  it is like a big square ring where you get apartments that look out and then some that look in.  we look out and see trees and other buildings and im happy.  the inside is pretty but not as nice. we then walk out of the compound to our bustop which is right outside our compound and we have to be there by 8am, or else the bus driver gets mad (trust me, we know!):

And theres the bus.  its a great A/C bus:

There's about 10, maybe 15 people on it everymorning.  and this bus is a special HP bus that only picks up HP employees.  when we get to our work there are about 5-7 other buses also that come from all over to drop off HP employees.  i think our buses are some of the nicest.  

That is a morning in Bangalore.  sights to see, animals to play with, food to eat, and buses to catch.  all that within 2.5 hours.  we usually make it to work around 8:30 and have about a half an hour to check our emails and facebook before we have to start work at 9am.  so if i sleep in i miss out on a lot of things.  plus who would want to live in India and sleep all day.  

Not Me

A: is home B: is work

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Bangalore Storms 5:51 AM

So i know you all probably want a good introduction post to Bangalore before i do this but right now all i have are pictures of this crazy storm that came in and blew really hard on sunday night.  storms like these used to come into africa and they were crazy looking.  i tried to capture them well but the crazy thing is that there are no mountains around here, so a storm cloud with wind can whip across the earth pretty quickly.  what i like the most is when you see the cloud from far off because all it looks like is a huge black death cloud coming at you.  sort of how i pictured the last section of the Lord of the Rings trilogy where Sauron releases all his armies and they are preceeded by a blackness.  these storms look like that and then about 30 seconds to a minute before they hit you will feel a cold wind come and then all of the sudden it is raining, and storming, and lightning everywhere.  it is great!!  these pictures were taken from our apartment.  and don't worry there will be more pictures of the apartment also.

my Workplace 6:43 AM

ok so im sorry that i have not updated in the last couple of days. i have been very busy with adapting and getting things ready for today, which was my first day of work. for those of you who don't know im working at Hewlett Packard for the summer in Bangalore, India. I'm working in the Imaging and Printing Department working on the firmware for the inkjet line of printers that HP has.  

today was my first day and i pretty much went through orientation all day and did a little researching on how the system works here. im very excited. i have a corporate email address and i feel like quite the business man. i'm working on the 6th floor in an HP building that is 9 levels high which for bangalore is quite high and i have an almost window office which is quite good if i stand up the window is less than fifteen feet from me. today there was a thunderstorm that blew by and i didnt get wet. it was great. 

im living in a service apartment which is very nice. the features include three bedrooms, three baths, a kitchen with a fridge, microwave, something like a george foreman grill, a two burner stove, and a washer machine. the living room includes a flat screen television, and a surround system and soon to be wireless internet i hope. i am currently at the office. i am staying after a little to post this and check me emails because it is fast and free and the power does not go off here like in other places of this city. i hope to get some pictures up tomorrow after work so please be sure and check back soon.

Paris in 24 Hours 3:53 PM

i started out on tuesday flying ealry in the morning to atlanta.  There i met up with my intern partner robby parker.  he had already been outside the airport to travel around.  to my surprise Atlanta reminded me of Africa for one very plain detail.  all the residents i saw there working on positions in the airport were black.  i got onto the plane to go to paris and i was seated by two business looking men.  one was a native of Delhi, India and the other was on his way to Lagos, Nigeria working in the oil fields.  i was very excited for my position and i started conversing with each of them but after about an hour of talking with them and realizing that the plane hadnt even left yet i was questioning things.  i was listening to the concerned french pilot speak to his flight attendants and hearing that there was a problem with the fuel, i started to become concerned.  they had to evacuate everyone off the plane and we had to wait in the terminal to load back onto the flight.  well eventually our flight took off and was about a little over two hours late getting into paris.  so naturally most of the people with connecting flights had problems, including us.But this is when the fun started.  we talked to an agent in Paris and she gave us a free dinner and a free breakfast and a free nights stay at a local hotel called Campanile, which is located very close to the airport.  so we left the airport and got on the hotel shuttle and showed up here.  we got a little food and walked around the area before the shuttle came back to pick us up for the metro station.  these are some of the sights we saw:

we then came back to the hotel to catch our shuttle and our adventure of paris continued in the downtown district.  we saw sacre coeur after battling a thunderstorm:

after sacre coeur we continued and found some of the best looking views ever.  c'etait tout magnifique.

Cimbing in Rock Canyon 7:57 PM

so me and my roommates being bored and living in provo without really having a place to live decided to go rock climbing all day on monday. we took off to Rock Canyon which is a local canyon that is very close to BYU campus and went climbing. these are some of the pictures. i happened to forget my shoes so i belayed all day. the day was full of some intense and dangerous moments but all of us came out of the day, healthy and a better understanding of what the end of the rope looks like.