The end of the traineeship

 

 

On Monday night we went to Little Italy in Banjara Hills to have a farewell dinner. It was also a farewell for Fatima, who is leaving next week after her Goa holiday. The food was great as always and we had fun. The autorikshaws in Hyderabad were on strike yesterday, apparently demanding a two Rupee raise in the starting price, which caused some stress about the transportation of all the 15+ people to the site. At the end we managed to get everybody there and back.

Getting fired, trip to Marallapuram, getting ready for next year

First things first, I kind of got fired from my job yesterday. Fortunately, I was given the permission to come back if I wanted to, so I am back at the office again. Writing my blog, that is. The reason for letting me go was the report I wrote about the company and the traineeships here. The bosses saw it as a disastrous report that contained no constructive feedback. All the trainees read it before I sent it to my boss and they said it is accurate and there should not be any reason not to send it forward.

Trip to Mysore, work, three Hyd weeks left

A lot has happened since I last wrote about Mumbai and the situation at work. The most notable change is that I have a girlfriend now. It has made me extremely happy and now time just flies by here in
Hyderabad 🙂

Pictures from Mumbai online + work

I managed to get the pictures from Mumbai into the gallery. I can not get the videos there because that would require I use certain software to first make my video files smaller and for that I need Pike’s laptop. Pike is coming back from Sri Lanka, although I just read an email from here saying that the return trip has gone exactly as planned. But anyway, she is coming back tomorrow.

Mumbai

Phew… I have loads to write about this time. So many things have been happening. I’ll start with the weekend in Mumbai. I went there with Tobias and Yusuf. The train ride took about 15 hours. We arrived in Mumbai on Saturday morning at about 5.30. Since there is not much you could do that early we just started walking from the station towards the city. We did a walking tour that is recommended by a famous traveling guide book. The trip should take minimum three hours but we completed it in about two because you could not really go inside any of the sights so early in the morning. Well, fortunately one of the biggest sights in Mumbai is the city and its architecture, which can easily be admired without entering the buildings.

Trip to Vizag

Last weekend I did a trip to Vizag (Visakhapatnam), on the coast of the state of Andhra Pradesh, by the Bay of Bengal. I went there with Tobias, Magda, Eduardo, Yusuf and Stephie. We arrived in Vizag on Saturday morning at about six and started immediately organising the connection to Araku valley, which is supposed to be a picturesque valley about 140 kilometers from the city. We got the train tickets and also booked two cottages in Jungle Bells, a really nice bungalow type hotel close to Araku valley, in the midst of the jungle. I started feeling really bad all of a sudden. I was sweating like a horse and I was terribly tired. I asked Eduardo and Yusuf to take care of the rest of the reservation process and went to be sick in the bathroom. I was so dizzy that I was not walking straight anymore. Luckily this sudden attack of nausea disappeared fast and I was able to get on the train with the others.

Work is better now. Homesickness

Work is better again, which makes me really glad. I am still under a lot of pressure since I’m both planning our project and trying to lead a team at the same time. So I have a team before there is really something to give them to do… that is tough. The project has now taken its hopefully final form and I was able to start doing more planning today. My project manager’s idea was that my team members should do most of the planning themselves but I think that is very hard to do since they are so inexperienced. I want to learn planning and design so I will do that (with a lot of help from Tobias) and my team can learn interpreting diagrams and programming. My team was actually taken apart, but only geographically. They thought Yusuf and Stephie were just a bit too loud together so they have ordered them to sit separately, in different rooms, from now on. Too bad for the sake of team dynamics.

Getting over a viral fever

Phew… it has been a difficult week so far. I came down with a viral fever on Sunday night and I have spent the last two days in bed. I’ll still stay home today and not go to work until tomorrow if I feel OK this evening. I did not have any fever anymore this morning, but I had almost 39 yesterday morning. Pike took me to hospital on Monday evening when my flatmates told me that my face was badly swollen. The doctor prescribed four different pills and said the fever should go away in four to five days. I’m just glad that I did’t get any of those fever diseases that the country is suffering from.

Bangalore

Last weekend I went to Bangalore with Toby. Bangalore is about 600 kilometers south of Hyderabad. It too, just like Hyderabad, is riding the IT wave, and is doing that even better than Hyderabad. The city is said to be one of the most progressive ones in India and I can agree with that statement 100%. The center of the city, being the MG Road area along with Brigade road and Church street, is filled with restaurants, shops and cafeterias. That does not sound like anything special for a person living in the Western part of the world, but for a person living in Hyderabad it is quite a big deal. Shops and other places for consuming Rupees are concentrated in a relatively small area and they are easy to get to because there are sidewalks everywhere.

Back from holiday, difficult times at work

I’m back from our holiday in Thailand and Malaysia. We said bye bye to Claire in Kuala Lumpur on Monday and flew to Bangkok for one more night before flying back to Hyderabad. In Bangkok we indulged ourselves in a steak/beef dinner with a beautiful, fresh salad starter. Sadly Eduardo was not there to enjoy the last night with us, since he came to Bangkok on an earlier flight and we did not meet each other until Tuesday morning. Funnily enough he was actually staying in the same hostel with us but we only found that out the next morning when he came to greet us. He had slipped a note under the door but we accidentally ignored it.

Anyways… I’ve put some pictures from the holiday in the gallery. I won’t bother to try to explain each phase of the trip in detail. Instead I’ll let the pictures (and the captions) speak for themselves. It suffices to say that the trip was a success. We had so much fun together. I loved the national park and its waterfalls in Kanchanaburi, the clean metropolis of Kuala Lumpur with its excellent public transportation and nice parks. The islands in Thailand were really cool too.

At home we were surprised to find that we had gotten the new lock for our door, finally! This Saturday we also got the furniture changed, finally. That had been in process for over a month. Nobody really knows anymore the reasons behind changing the furniture, because the new furniture is actually much worse than the old one. We also have less stuff now than before. The beds are less comfortable too.