It was a relief to finally get home from India and the UK on Saturday night. I think the trip was one of the most challenging I’ve done to date. The utter chaos on the roads and the pervasive feeling of decay evident in the built environment were my strongest impressions.
The trip out to Bangalore went ok. I was thrilled to find that British Airways business class seats (London-Mumbai) lie completely flat, making sleeping much easier than anything else I’ve encountered. Mumbai airport was my first introduction to India, and I immediately realized that I was in a part of the world that was very unfamilar to me – dirty, smelly and in dire need of maintenance (actually in dire need on being flattened and rebuilt). It’s hard to know whether this is a reflection of the actual poverty in the country or whether it might partly reflect lower historical expectations of building and environmental standards.
It took me two hours to get from the international terminal to the domestic terminal, and I then spent another two hours sitting/lying on a cold marble floor, while dozing intermittently and waiting to be able to go through security to the departure waiting area where they actually had seats.
My meetings in Bangalore were generally successful, although there were a few moments when I wondered whether we were going to achieve very much. Being able to get to know some of the Indian software staff we will be working with was one of the highlights.
The trip from Bangalore to London via Mumbai was a also bit stressful. I was travelling with a colleague. When we got to Mumbai, the line for the shuttle bus to get from the domestic terminal to international was miles long and moving at geological speed. Given my earlier experience going in the other direction, i stepped out of the line and asked the agent at the Jet Airways counter whether there was a chance we would miss our flight to London. He confirmed this suspicion and advised us to go out of the terminal and take a cab to the international terminal. A woman behind us in the line was also travelling to London and Chicago, so we invited her to share the ride with us. Just negotiating with the taxi driver was an experience and involved a lot of shouting. I was glad that Henry seemed to know what he was doing. Somewhere in the melee I lost my watch.
{mospagebreak}
The ride to the international terminal was pretty long, maybe 10 minutes, and when we got there the place was teeming with people (this is about one in the morning).
The inefficiency of the check-in process was quite amazing. The line for first class check-in was moving incredibly slowly, and to make it worse, I had to get my suitcase scanned. There was a separate line for that, and it was about 100 people long. Fortunately, one of airport staff came up to me and asked where I was flying to, and took me to the front of the line and put my bag through the machine. Of course afterwards he wanted a tip for helping me, which I was happy to give him.
While we were waiting to check in, we got to chat with the woman who had shared the taxi with us. It turned out that she lives in Lake Zurich, not just in LZ but actually right in my neighborhood, within a quarter mile. Amazing that we should just happen to be standing next to each other in a line in Mumbai airport in the middle of the night.
The flight to London was fine, though I didn’t sleep all that well, even with the great BA seats. I bid farewell to Henry and braced myself for Britain. A few frustrations here. I won’t bore you with all of the details, except to say that the Britons don’t seem to have a strong grip on the concept of customer service! I picked up a rental car and realized that I had no directions to get to either the Motorola facility in Basingstoke or my hotel. Still, resourceful fellow that I am, I set off cheerfully, figuring that it couldn’t be that difficult to figure out where to go.
Finding Basingstoke wasn’t much of a problem. Fortunately just after I turned off the M3, I saw a sign to Viables, and remembered that that’s where Motorola is located. Following my nose, I started to recognize some of the route from other visits and eventually made it to Motorola. My admin had told me that the hotel was within walking distance of the office, so I drove around hopefully, assuming that it would soon leap into view. No such luck. So in the end I had to go into the Motorola facility, in my unwashed post-flight state, to ask for directions. Folks there weren’t enormously helpful, but pointed me in the general direction, and somehow I managed to correctly navigate several roundabouts and eventually found the Hilton.
My afternoon meeting at Motorola was very successful and in the evening I had the pleasure of catching up with David Pearce, a long time colleague from Motorola. The next morning I drove back to Heathrow and caught my flight to O’Hare.