  I have arrived. I know that most of you didn't even know I was going, but nevertheless: I am here and alive in Hyderabad, India. Hyderabad is the location of my company's newest office building full of fifty of our newest star employees. I'm here to train them on how to test and develop my product. I should say one of my products, because I now manage two products.
The sister product in our product line has now fallen under my supervision also. I'm happy about that, but that's the subject for another blog. I departed NYC around 7:15pm on Thursday evening. My flight took me through London, where we landed and deplaned at 6:00am local time. This was a bit annoying because we were just going to get on the same plane to continue to Mumbai, but we had to get off with all of our luggage to allow them to change crews and clean up the place a bit. After an hour of sitting in a lounge area which we were not allowed to leave and an hour of standing in line to get back on the plane, we were finally back in the air for the 8 hour trip to Mumbai.
This was followed by a three hour layover in Mumbai before my flight to Hyderabad. I traveled on India Airlines for the entire trip over. I honestly thought this would be the most miserable travel experience of my life. My company had denied business class due to budget restraints so I was prepared for the worst. I was pleasantly surprised to see the trip go by rather quickly. I read and played Advance Wars and watched some movies. The food was very good. I'm a big fan of Indian food, and Indian Airlines did not disappoint. I ate mostly vegetarian meals, which were quite delicious. I met another American from the New York area in the Mumbai airport while waiting for my flight to Hyderabad. It turned out that he too was a development manager for a small software company traveling to Hyderabad for training.
In contrast to my short stay, he will be here for a month. When I told him that I work for CA, I was shocked that he knew our headquarters is located on Long Island. It turns out that he attended Stonybrook University, which is practically right next door to our office building. He started naming people he knows who work for my company and I happened to have dinner with the first person he named not two nights prior. I am constantly amazed by how small this world is. After an hour delay, we boarded our plane to Hyderabad. I was shocked to see that this 55 minute domestic flight was being served by a Boeing 747. I was half expecting a turbo-prop puddle jumper. When I boarded, the first thing I noticed was that the entire first two sections were packed with Muslims. It was a strange feeling being the only white American on the plane and getting dirty looks because of it. I was very disappointed to find out that I felt negative feelings toward Muslims. I guess it's not really Muslims in general, but people from this area scare me.
I don't know how the feel about Americans and I certainly don't want a problem because of it. I need to reflect on this some more. My flight arrived in Hyderabad around 3:30am. Since I was sitting in row 78 or 84, I was naturally one of the last people off the plane. We all had to go through immigration and customs, which took forever. Somehow, I kept picking the slowest line available.
Amazingly, my driver was still waiting for me when I finally emmerged from the airport. All of these events conspired to delay my arrival in the Taj Banjara until 4:30am where I was able to settle down and immediately fall asleep only to awaken for dinner around 6:30pm. Almost immediately after I had awakened, my friend who also works for my company (in Tefen, Israel) called my room. He wanted to let me know that the driver would pick me up in the morning and to ask if I wanted to have dinner. Considering the fact that I will be largely alone for the remainder of my trip, I took him up on the offer.
We ventured out of the hotel to a North Indian restaurant up the road. Our walk to the restaurant gave me my first taste of traffic in this city which is chaotic at best, but leans more toward deadlock during rush hour I hear. It's not uncommon to be late for work due to a water-buffelo crossing. There are no real rules for driving here it appears -- more guidelines than anything. They of course drive on the left hand side of the road here, which is tough enough to get used to. The best part is the fact that people really don't pay attention to lines on the road. Or lanes for that matter. People don't seem bothered when cars come the wrong way head on into traffic. They have developed a system of honking that seems to keep everyone on the same page and prevents any serious accidents. I'm looking forward to seeing how the system works at rush hour. 
