Thank you, come again

So because of the salary we make here in India each month we have had 30% of our salary taken out in to pay Indian tax. That is a nice chunk of money. Well recently we found out we get that money back due to the duration of our time here. Evidently we weren’t here long enough or something, I don’t really care why, we just get it back.

This made most of us really excited because we have made so little money here to begin with. Many of us, I know, are going to be scraping for cash for the first month or two trying to get adjusted to American cost of living while only have made Indian salary for the last six months.

Well today we applied for something called a PAN card. It is needed to file for tax returns I think. Many of us aren’t sure what is really going on, we aren’t really educated about any of it, we are just told what to do. One of the requirements was a passport sized photo, which most of us had because we were told to bring so many with us to India. However, after taking the pictures in with our application, we found out that our passport sized photos were about 2 times as big as they wanted. So we all had to get new pictures taken.

After being jerked around for almost 6 months in India, especially within the last couple weeks, my friends and I decided to have some fun with our pictures. Keep in mind, these are for official Internal Tax Department (Government) forms.

Ryne	Johnathon	Eric

Well, you can finally see proof of what I do in the office.  Just click here to find out.  You won’t be disappointed.  What you will see is pretty much an everyday occurrence.  Sadly, this is just the first time we’ve recorded it.

It is somewhat of a big file (close to 30 MBs), so if you have slow Internet just wait a little longer, it is worth it.

So I went home for Christmas for about 5 days.  It was an adventure let me tell you.  I’ll go into details about that in a later posting called ‘Rant’.  Home was everything I could have imagined.  I didn’t have to worry about much of anything compared to here.  The holiday food was great, got to see family, and just got to relax with good company.

All of my family was definitely surprised as none of them had a clue I was coming home.  It was priceless.

*UPDATE* I have now posted pictures of my trip to Delhi and Agra. You can view pictures of the full trip here or you can view pictures of just the Taj Mahal compound here.

This weekend was only my second trip outside the state of Karnataka. Thursday night 3 of my friends and I decided that we wanted to go to see the Taj Mahal. So that night we bought 4 plane tickets to go to northern India, Delhi to be specific. The plane landed in Delhi around 11:00 pm and we progressed to get a taxi from Delhi to Agra, the city in which the Taj Mahal sits.

After we got our taxi it was around 11:45 pm and we were hungry. Our taxi driver took us to a place but when we got there the gates were closed and they turned us away. That is until our taxi driver went up and had a few words with the guard at the gate. We proceeded to have dinner at this restaurant, I believe it was called Resto Splash but I’m not sure. I’m glad our driver managed to get us in for dinner here, as it was possibly some of the best Indian food I have had here. I know that Northern Indian food is different than Southern Indian food but I did not realize that the difference in spiciness was so big. The food tasted amazing but it was very spicy. My friend, Ryne, was breaking a full sweat just eating his chicken. I, however, was able to tolerate it enough to come out with only a runny nose.

After dinner, it was around 12:45 am at this point, we took off for Agra. We arrived in Agra around 4:45 am and our driver took us to a hotel where, again, he had some pull to allow us to just use the hote facilities to clean up (wash our faces and brush our teeth). We chose not to stay at any hotel that night because we were going to see the Taj Mahal at 6:00 am so we could see the sunrise at the same time. According to the locals that was the best time to see it.

Within the first five minutes inside the grounds that the Taj sits on, I was the victim of pigeon droppings. We were walking through an open structure that had plenty of pigeons roosting at the top and I was the unlucky person to get dumped on while taking a picture of the Taj through this structure. Since it was so early and cold, I had no choice but to clean the sleeve of my sweater. Luckily enough two of the guys with me carry hand sanitizer at all times.

Seeing the Taj was pretty neat to begin with. You get to see just how big this place really is and how much marble was used to build it. It is astonishing. However, once you get over that novelty the place is fairly boring. We were able to go inside the Taj, which I was excited about, but soon after going in I realized that, it too, was boring. Once inside all that exists is a room with an octagonal partition where two tombs are located. It just so happens that the setting that these two tombs are in is the only thing that is asymmetrical about the Taj Mahal.

I think one of the reasons I was not so excited once I saw it was that I was expecting a lot more out of it. It is, afterall, one of the top seven tourist places in the world which puts a lot of pressure on it to stand up to its reputation. I am still glad I can say that I have been to the Taj Mahal. There are not many people I know who can say the same.

After leaving the Taj, we ventured back to Delhi. On the way our driver stopped at another neat looking structure. I have pictures of the place, but can’t really remember the name of it, so I’ll add that later.

After this we finally made it to Delhi. The trip back to Delhi seemed to take a lot longer than it did to get to Agra. Once we were back in Delhi we had our taxi driver take us to a hotel by the airport since our flight left at 6:45 am on Sunday. As we were driving there we drove through a neighborhood that looked fairly typical for India. It was not clean but it was disgusting at the same time. That is until we saw four children all squating on the sidewalk dropping a load off. At first I thought it was odd and a little weird but then I looked at the sidewalk on the other side of the street. To my surprise, the sidewalk was covered in human feces for about a quarter-mile. When I say “covered” I mean “covered” in the most literal sense. Just piles upon piles of feces right on the sidewalk. It would have been almost impossible to walk on this sidewalk without even stepping in it. We even had to roll our windows up as the stench was getting to us.

That was pretty much the last exciting thing that happened on my Taj trip. I have a lot of pictures of the experience and will put a link to them as soon as I upload the pictures.

So I’m currently at “work” and it is 11:30 am.  I have yet to do anything today because I have not been assigned to do anything.  This is the start of my 5th week being a software engineer and have not “engineered” a single thing yet.

The highlight of my day so far was the daily trip to “Muffin Fest.”  Daily, my friends and I take a trip to Coffee Day, the Indian equivalent to Starbucks, to get muffins.  Most of the time it is just to get out of the office for a few minutes.  These are some really good muffins that come in a variety of flavours including: Blueberry (my favorite), honey, chocolate chip (which I hear is horrible), and almond.

I will most likely be leaving for lunch around 11:45 am and may or may not come back to work after that.  I’m starting to feel bad for leaving work at such an early time, but one can only play so many games of Microsoft Hearts and Solitaire in one day.  Trust me, if I actually had some work to do then I would have no problem coming back to work from lunch.  I just hope this isn’t what being a software engineer in the U.S. will be like.