India!

I've just come back from a week in Pune, India! This was a business trip which was rather impromptu. I left early Sunday morning after Tryfan's rugby thing the night before.  Since I need a visa to travel to India and a lot of logistics had to be arranged, I wasn't sure at all that this was going to happen until the last minute. But it all went to plan and was actually a really great week. I got to reunite with my old friend Anand who I used to work with in Gatwick but he moved to Pune a couple of years ago.

I traveled with my colleague Suha and her husband. We were on the same flight from Abu Dhabi to Pune, and India was new to all of us. That made it fun to share the experience of traveling by taxi on the roads. We had some really exciting car journeys between the hotel and the office! Despite huge trucks, cars, rickshaws, motorcycles, bicycles and walkers all sharing the same space, with apparently no rules (e.g., one way street signs don't actually seem to mean anything), we didn't see any crashes. People go fairly slow and use a lot of hand gesturing and eye contact, but each journey was a thrill.

  

 On the stretch between the mental asylum and the prison which are near the office, there is a row of crazy banyan trees. I've never seen anything like them - they are creepy and viney, but magnificent in their size and intricacy. Apparently Pune is famous for these particular specimens. In fact, Pune is surprisingly lush and green (though also extremely polluted).

 The work itself involved a small team of us - 5 from our company and 3 from another company and we were doing a workshop together in person since it would have been too hard to work remotely. It was really great to meet my colleagues in person after spending over a year working closely with them by phone, instant message and email. Here are Fayas, Nisha, me and Suha (Richard was missing from this photo).
Anyway, now I'm safely back home and its Saturday afternoon. And its December! Time for mince pies and brandy cream... yay!