Off to Work
The week at work was surprisingly normal. The office building that Amazon uses is a modern office complex not too dissimilar from those on the Seattle campus. This made the workweek into an interesting mix of foreign and familiar: a seemingly normal day surrounded by friends and acquaintances at work juxtaposed with the traffic, food, and other very foreign elements of working from Chennai.
Most week days played out similarly, and they always started with the breakfast buffet at the hotel. The buffet consists of a selection of Indian dishes along with more familiar breakfast foods. I like to load up on a mix of the two, frequently including a selection of curry, some Indian bread (typically paratha or iddly), pongal (a rice dish with a similar consistency to oatmeal), hash browns, muffins, and donuts.
Most folks in the Chennai office shift their hours fairly late, so there isn't much point in getting in before 10am or so. My sleep schedule ended up stabilizing with a wakeup time of about 7, so I have some time after breakfast to read or finish up a last bit of work before the driver arrives at 9. My routine back in Seattle almost always involves a rush out the door every morning, so having a bit of time to spare is a nice change of pace.
The drive to work takes about 45 minutes, but just people-watching has proven entertaining enough to occupy me through the trip. I find it surprisingly interesting to watch and learn how people handle various traffic situations, when to honk the horn, when to pass, how to position yourself on the road, and so on. The fact that it's so different from what I'm used to makes it all the more interesting. Part of me wants to try it for myself sometime, but the other part of me wants to continue living.
Work is by far the most normal part of the day, but lunch usually brings something interesting. One day we went out to a nearby restaurant for lunch, but most of the time we head up to the company cafeteria. The cafeteria offers lunch combos along with a la carte options, but I've always gotten the combos for simplicity's sake, which involved a main dish with a handful of sides and a dessert. There is always an option for either North or South Indian cuisine, so I've just been alternating between the two. At a price of only 50 rupees (less than $1), I really can't ask for more.
Friday, being the last working day before the holiday of Pongal , featured a special holiday lunch containing the special sweet pongal associated with the holiday. However, the most interesting thing about the lunch was the other sweet: a stalk of sugar cane. I had never seen sugar cane eaten before, but my coworkers showed me how. Basically, you tear strips of the skin (bark?) away with your teeth and the take bites out of the flesh inside. The inside is fibrous, but full of water and (surprise!) sugar, so all you need to do is chew it until you get most of the sweet water out then spit out the remaining fibers. Definitely an interesting experience.
After lunch I would typically work until 7 or so when the driver would arrive to take me home. A couple of times I needed to continue working from the hotel to finish things up, but typically I spend my evenings reading. Having finished the A Dance with Dragons , I've been in a bit of a reading mood and have been plowing through books faster than I have in a long while. So far I've finished both Speaker for the Dead and Ready Player One (both very good), and recently started Dune . Needless to say the Kindle has been seeing good use.
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