Arriving in Prague

I’ve ranted about Lufthansa enough, so I think I’ll omit the blow-by-blow account of my journey from Bangalore. I will, however, note that my day trip to Pune was on Sahara Air – they fly various combinations of BLR/PNQ/HYD service using CRJ-200’s – and their evening PNQ-BLR was 55 minutes late. I’d built enough time into the schedule to allow for this, but even so: on future visits to India, I think I’m going to make it a rule not to rely on evening connections on the day I leave.
So back to Europe. The FRA-PRG flight was on a Lufthansa A320 with no more than 30 passengers, which made it a very comfortable 45 minute hop. And they served a simple cheese sandwich – wonderful black bread, sharp cheddar, iceberg lettuce – that was infinitely better than anything they’d provided on the various intercontinental routes. There must be a lesson there.
Arriving in Prague, we pulled in to a rather deserted, obviously new terminal building, and the intrepid band of passengers traversed the jetway and various escalators, breezed through Immigration, and waited for our bags to appear on the carousel. I noticed that one of the passengers had a Sun Networks bag, and about the same time he noticed that I was wearing a bright red Sun Microsystems jacket. It turned out that it was Pavel Suk, the site director in Prague and the host for my visit. He’d just returned from 10 days in California; like me, he was finding the transition to -8C weather something of a shock to the system. The coincidence was convenient, since we were able to share a taxi into the city: Pavel was going to the Sun office, and I was going to the Diplomat Hotel, just a few hundred metres down the road.
I LIKE this hotel. My room is comfortable, and everything just works. OK, Internet access is overpriced and a bit unpredictable, but it’s functional. But the decisive factor was my experience in the CD Club restaurant. After unpacking and taking a shower, I headed downstairs for a relatively early dinner. I’d already checked out the menu on the web, and had picked out (vegetarians avert your eyes) the “veal goulash with black beer, roast chanterelles and ham-dumplings”. You can’t get much more Czech than that. But to complement such a rich combination, I really wanted a simple salad, and they didn’t have one on the menu. All their salads were, frankly, over-elaborate.
So I explained that I wanted a local red wine, the goulash, and a simple salad to go with the goulash. The maitre d’ didn’t bat an eyelid, and moments late I had one of the best mixed salads I’ve ever tasted, with remarkably good tomatoes and cucumbers, and olive oil and balsamic vinegar on the side. The goulash was superb, too, and the very dry red wine balanced the intensity of the veal and mushrooms perfectly. And there was more wonderful black bread, this time with finely chopped nuts stirred into the batter.
(Is this an example of what Terry calls “food porn”?)
Tomorrow I plan to explore the old city – the Stare Mesto. And then on Monday, before I head over to the office, I have to make sure that my laundry is in hand. I deliberately packed light for this trip, and if the hotel doesn’t make good on their same-day service pledge, I’m going to be in some difficulties….

So far, so good

I’m now at the Red Carpet Club at Frankfurt after a 10 hour haul from Bangalore. No real problems, lots of tedium. LH coach seats provide very little thigh support, and the food was crap. Yesterday’s meetings in Pune were very useful (and enjoyable).

Now we get to the complicated bit…

Later this evening I’m going to start packing my bags in preparation for the most complicated bit of this business trip. Tomorrow morning I’ll check out of my hotel (the Royal Orchid) in Bangalore, but I’ll leave my suitcase here. At 7 AM, my driver will take me to the airport to board a flight to Pune. My colleague Vish will meet me at the airport and we’ll drive to the ex-Storability facility just outside the city. After a packed schedule of meetings, I’ll return to the airport and fly back to Bangalore, arriving (hopefully!) at 8:05 PM. My driver will take me back to the Royal Orchid, where I’ll grab a quick dinner and retrieve my suitcase. Finally at about 10 PM I’ll return to Bangalore airport, pay off my driver, and check in for my 2:15 AM flight to Frankfurt. That’s scheduled to land at 8:15 AM local time, and I’ll have a 4 hour layover before my flight to Prague, which I should reach at 1:30 PM.
Whew!
So if all goes well, my next blog entry will be posted from the Diplomat Hotel in Prague, on Saturday afternoon. (However I might post a “Quicky” en route.)

Birds

Black kites (Milvus migrans) seem to be everywhere in India. Whenever you look up, you’ll see several of them, lazily circling, looking for scavenging opportunities. They are as ubiquitous as pigeons or sparrows in England.
This afternoon I was looking out from my 5th floor hotel room, trying unsuccessfully to take a few photographs of the kites that occasionally swept past my window. As I was about to give up, I noticed that half a dozen of them were getting agitated about something in the river that flows past the hotel. I decided to try my luck photographing them from the bridge.
By the time I got down to the bridge, the kites had moved on (of course). However I did get a few pictures of kites, and also of the small herons that hang out on the trash in the foul-smelling river. And here’s a 2.1MB QuickTime clip of kites soaring.

Thriving@Hyderabad

I spent most of the day at a “Thriving@Sun” session for some of the ex-SeeBeyond staff in Hyderabad. It was good to have the opportunity to work with the HR and SunU representatives in India, and it was delightful to renew ties with many of the staff I’d met in October. Only about a third of the team were at the session – the others had attended earlier sessions – and to those that I didn’t get to meet this time around I offer my apologies; I’ll be back as soon as I can.
During the break before my talk, I left iPhoto displaying a slideshow of pictures from the welcoming party. I posted a few of them on my blog back in October, but for those who asked I’ve now uploaded all 22 of them into my Photo Gallery.
The flight back to Bangalore was delayed for a while; the incoming aircraft was late, and then we sat on a taxiway for an ATC-imposed hold. Once again there was a hot meal. Did I mention before that on Jet Airways the food is served with metal cutlery and a starched cotton napkin, folded perfectly and secured with a decorative silk cord? In economy?? (I positively swoon at the thought of what they must do for business class.) And after the trays had been cleared away, we started our descent with a pitch-over that must have “unloaded” us by 0.5G. I expected the first officer to announce that “we’ve started our dive into Bangalore”. Very impressive.

Every traveller's nightmare

It’s every business traveller’s nightmare: sleeping through the alarm clock. In this case the alarm clock was my Treo, and I slept through it because I’d switched it to “silent” mode during dinner last night. So at 5:15 a loud buzzer sounded in my room. Not the phone (why not?) but a noise disturbingly similar to a fire alarm. I jumped up, checked my watch*, and realized that this was the time that my driver was to pick me up!! 10 minutes later I was dressed and out of my room, and by 5:40 I was meeting my colleagues at the airport. I was marginally awake, and acutely concious of the lack of a shower!
Check-in for the Jet Airways flight to Hyderabad was a breeze. Inevitably the only available seat was a middle…. Never mind, it’s only a 45 minute flight. (And since this is India, we’ll get a full hot breakfast on the flight.) We’re bussed out to the stand to board the 737-700, which is almost full.
By 7:25 we are fed and descending towards HYD. The first officer comes on the PA to announce that the temperature in Hyderabad is already 30C (86F).
I’m visiting the ex-SeeBeyond facility in Hyderabad with a number of colleagues from the Bangalore office. Last time I was here with my colleague Dale Ferrario, we both noticed the complete anonymity of the office, with no SeeBeyond signage to be seen. I’m sure he’d be pleased with what greeted me as I walked into the building this time around:
Sun logo in Hyderabad office foyer
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* There’s an odd thing about my watch. It’s a Citizen Skyhawk, an exquisite piece of engineering, solar powered. You set it to UTC, and then it can display various time zones (on the digital display or via the hands) with just a press of a button. It has just one, glaring weakness: it can’t cope with time zones that are not an integral number of hours away from UTC. India is UTC+5:30. [Corrected – thanks Amateur Blogger.] So while I’m here, I keep the watch on Karachi time (UTC+5) and mentally add 30 minutes whenever I look it it. A firmware upgrade would be nice….