coming home soon?

we've been thinking about it but flights have been booked. no real hurry to get home - we are having a great time. Everyday we think we are leaving tomorrow but we find ourselves having one incredible "last night" experience which keeps pushing back our departure.

We have really settled into Bangalore and have made a ton of friends, in addition to making a lot of progress on our work. We will keep everyone posted (but expect us state side in the next 1-15 days)

Our Iranian friends

ever



So, you think its hard trying to develop a relationship with an Iranian girl?
Even if she is into you, its still hard to know where to go with it, what is the expectation?

Actual conversation:

Girl: "I don't know what it is about you Zak, but I really like you. You are really different than all the other guys I've ever liked..."
Zak: "Well, how so?"
Girl: "Well, see, all the other guys... they hate freedom. and you... you love freedom,"
Zak: "Thanks?"

Our favorite late night food joint

This place is the only place in Bangalore that is open past 11:30 Yada Yada Yada I'm glad I found some ciprofloxaci pills (one of the most powerful and versitile antibiotic medications available to treat a multitude of infections.)
Please post comments on what you think we Yada Yada'd over.

An afternoon stroll

This is a 7 minute walk from our hotel-

Jeff's Indian haircut

Jeff's first haircut abroad, ever.

I woke up yesterday and realized that I needed to get my ears lowered. So I went to down then street (a 5 minute walk), strolled by 7 cows, 4 stray dogs, 3 stray roosters, and 2 stray cats (today I decided to count how many stray animals I could see on my street). Normally in the states I get the cheapest haircut as possible, $10 (for a couple years I cut my own hair), but I wasn't in the states so I decided to not skimp of quality. walked down a side street to find Schwartzkopf Unisex Salon .
The actual experience:
they washed my hair - I drank tea while my hair dried - the actual hair cut about 25 minutes- my face was massaged for 5 minutes - they washed my hair again - they sprayed my hair with hair spray - 1 hour- cost 70rs (about $1.8 ) This was the best hair cut experience I have ever received and it was 1/5 of the price I pay the cheapest barber in Sarasota.

-Jeff (don't worry I do not really have a mohawk- that is how the guy styled it, I look like normal me)

We would like to thank Jerry for being an avid reader and comment contributor.
We will be departing from India in the near future.... :(
We have not decided the day or from which country we are coming home from. We will make an official blog announcement when the decision is made (we will probably be in the states come labor day).

still alive

hey all - been settling in real good in Bangalore - sorry for the lack of updates.

bangalore is an amazing city; the disparity between developed and undeveloped, priviledged and unprivileged, and the future and the past is clear and evident in all that we do and in all that we see.

well have more updates for you later. hope all is well

61 years of Independence

Over the weekend we witnessed India's independence day August 15th. There was mayhem in the streets and millions of Indian flags everywhere. I always find it interesting how other countries celebrate their independence. We posted a video clip of our ride downtown during concert (notice how close the people are to the road).


Jeff

Desi Nights

I sat back in my seat and pondered my surroundings. It was almost one am, and we were sitting in a open air bungalow as the cool fresh night air gently breezed through our hair, sitting outside, post curfew, at the Royal Orchid Hotel. Here, the town's trend setters brazenly violated the local post 1130 PM ban of alcohol consumption and ban on live music, as the glow of the moon cast long shadows on the heir and heiresses to tomorrow's promise.

It was a small yet distinct crowd, with people from all over the globe, Pakistan, England, South Africa, Holland and other exotic locales.

But despite the relative deluge of modern and attractive women there, all eyes were set on our small table. There we sat with our newest friends, whom we had arrived with just about thirty minutes earlier, from an equally posh hotel lounge.

There were four of them, dark haired beauties, all from Tehran, here on holiday. Each of them more beautiful than the next, they were each dressed like the Persian princesses they were, their dresses worthy of praise even if attending the Oscars. Long and beautiful, they were made from the finest silks of the Middle East and conservatively hugged their bodies; and the dark red lip stick of one was outdone only by the piercing eyes of another.

I thought back to the social scene I had left behind just two weeks ago in Sarasota, Fl, and how foreign this place was to it.

What had been common back home; drinking Bud Light and watching the Devil Rays, had been seamlessly replaced by the soothing sounds of our private (and illegal) live gutarist, the stars in the sky, and the company of new friends, all set within the confines of the most luxurious hotel one might hope to encounter.

We chatted politics and laughed about stories of our mutual escapades - a similar experience we might have had in Roma, or our disdain for food in mainland China. My attempt to learn a few words of Farsi kept them entertained for sometime, as they laughed at my ineptitude, but appreciated my effort.Our conversation even turned serious, discussing implications and interpretation of Sharia law, and I asked delving questions about their ability to be 'a modern Muslim woman,' . They had interesting questions about back home in the United States, and I too had questions about Tehran. I asked what life was like, and the excitement of them to share their stories with us warmed the entire group and enlightened both Jeff and me to the realities constraining the people of an entire land.

As I intently listened to their tales, I leaned back in my chair, and sipped by drink. The night was cool; much cooler than in Florida, and the stars were bright. I looked around and my surroundings, the opulence of the location, the beauty of the locale, and the diversity of the present company.

The euphoria of the relaxation and comfort I felt, mixed with the knowledge I had no where to be, no one to call, and nothing to worry about was overwhelmingly soothing. I was just enjoying myself in Bangalore, drinking in the moonlight, learning about new places and new cultures, without a care in the world.

"This is what I want my life to be like one day," I pondered to myself, as our friends chatted in Farsi.

then, it only took a moment, but I came to the realization.

this is what my life is like.


-Zak

We are still alive

Sorry everyone for the lack of posting on our part. We are still alive and still in Bangalore. We have found some international friends to share our leisure time with. We also have been exposed to the nicer side of town. We also get to watch the Olympics live, but they do not have the same type of Olympic coverage over here. For example, there is only 1 channel that shows the Olympics and half of the time it is in Hindi. They rarely show any basketball or baseball. We get to watch a lot of table tennis, boxing, and shooting. We are still working very hard and we have settled in the outskirts of Bangalore at a very nice hotel (check out the pictures). Ok, there will be many more posts in the next couple days. Stay tuned.

-Jeff

Singh is King, our first Bollywood experience

Check out these video's to get a better idea of Singh is King
Music video preview
Movie trailer


Singh is King, our first Bollywood experience. Since we have arrived to India we have seen hundreds/thousands advertisements for this new movie that was coming out call Singh is King. So it finally debuted in India and we decided to see what all the hype was all about. So we stroll up to a completely backed 1-movie movie theatre @ 9:30 for the 9:45 showing. We are not sure if there are still tickets available because there are hundreds of people standing outside, but we try anyway. We ended up getting 2 of the last seats in the Balcony. We thought that this movie would be like other Bollywood movies and have English subtitles, but we were wrong. So we start watching this movie and the first sentence was in English and we were delighted. After the first sentence we did not understand another one for the rest of the 3 hour film. There was a packed theatre and they were a crazy bunch. During the previews the theatre was filled with whistles and yells when a pretty girl appeared on the screen. This was an amazing experience, to watch a summer blockbuster in Hindi without subtitle and still kind of understand the movie. I do not know how familiar everyone is with Bollywood movies, but they are a lot of fun to watch. It is a hybrid between a chick/flick and a musical with better dancing. I recommend searching youtube for Singh is King and you will see what we mean.

That is all for now.

Ladies?

if there is one characteristic quality of our time so far in India, it is the sever lack of women; well, even woman, in our day to day life. yes, we have been focused on our work, but even back home when under the same impetus, it still leaves time for socializing with those of the opposite sex. Here, though, the culture is so different that it is unlikely to find girls in the common places; the bars, the coffee shops, or even the side of the road.
Dancing here has been banned in Bangalore by official decree, not to mention the closing time of 1130 PM of all bars and clubs, making our social endeavors all the more complicated.


its amazing how sensitive I have been to the absence of women in my daily interaction - perhaps it is indicative of the presence of girls in my life back home - and how much they play apart. gone is the playful flirting or texting which fill so much of my social time, replaced with bars, cofee shops, and street corners in guy to girl ratios easily over 100 to 1.

its amazing how both jeff and I now turn when we notice a girl in jeans; we pause, turn and stare - something which calls no attention back home in the states.

more rarely, we'll catch a glimpse of a girls' shoulders who is scantily wearing a sleaveless tee shirt, and it stops both of us in our tracks... we stare not only in amazement, but partially in disgust, as if we have been offended that a girl would dare wear such clothes... strange how we have adapted so quickly.

it seems, unfortunatley, that this trend of lack of female interaction will continue without abating and there is nothing we can do. we just have to wait, i guess, until we get home

Into Bangalore

It's been a few days since Ive written, but thanks to Jeff, you all haven't been out of the loop. The last few days have found us becoming more and more accustomed to the lifestyle here - habitual and random power outages, friendly yet unhurried service, and the craziness of the traffic, which, by its very nature, seems to condemn us to a swift head-on demise each time we get into a car or autorickhsaw; yet now we seem unsurprised when we emerge at our destination unscathed, with all our limbs, and most importantly, breathing.

Work has brought us to Bangalore, the IT hub of India. We were greeted by a glistening and shiny new airport worthy of a spread in architecture digest, which, we thought, was a harbinger for what to expect for the rest of Bangalore. It wasn't completly accurate, but wasn't completely wrong either. In Bangalore, the tree lined beautiful tech campuses of Fortune 500 companies like Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft, Adobe, etc sit unceremoniously ajoint to a congested road filled with the sites and sounds we've already discovered across India - cows blocking the road (today we even saw a camel doing the same), suffocating exhaust fumes from the buses, and the general mayhem that is normally present and which Ive already described. Next to these campuses still lie the tin roofed shack, the dilapidated building, or the isolated farm house - all reminders that the development praised here in India is not yet complete nor equally affecting everyone.

Cribs- Bangalore edition

Cribs Bangalore edition- Look how pimp our pad is!!!! Also, notice the picture which is outside out apartment door. The picture is on me pointing at the falling-down, tiny tin roofed hut that is connected to our beautiful brand new building.

Landing in Bangalore's sweet airport

This is us landing in Bangalore. This airport is the nicest/newest airport I have ever been in. We flew on KingFisher airline and had a very enjoyable meal during our 40 minute flight.

Off to Silicon Valley

In 10 hours we will be in an Airplane headed to the Silicon Valley of India- Bangalore . We do not know if our hotel has internet yet, so stayed tuned. We will hopefully have internet in our hotel/apartment.
The pictures: 1. Here Zak samples some of the local ice cream while we enjoy some time @ the beach. 2. This picture is of us and our Pizza Hut. After a long day of work we relaxed with some Pizza Hut- we ordered the full Punjabi Teekha Chicken pizza . We are also watching an episode of the office during dinner. What a great way to relax.

Sorry for the lame post, but it is wicked late here and I just booked the tickets (3 am) and I wanted to let everyone know where we will be tomorrow.

Jeff

St. Thomas the apostle

Today, we went to the St. Thomas the Apostle - 's cathedral.

No Big deal but this is only 1 of 3 churches in the world that can say they are build above an Apostle's remains. (the other 2 are in Spain and Italy)

The tour of our Pad

Here is a brief tour of our apartment. We start in the living room then go to Jeff's office and end in the bedroom/ zak's office.

Beach front in Chennai

We decided to visit Chennai's beach because our friend highly recommended it to us. I think we took a wrong turn or something... On our way to the beach we walked by 19 goats, 28 chickens, 13 dogs, and they were all just walking around and eating any garbage they could find. After walking down a narrow animal lined street we reached the water!!!! Just to find fishing boats and dead fish everywhere. We shot these videos from the spot we first stepped foot on Chennai's beach. We noticed about 500 yards to the left a bunch of Asian and western tourists enjoying nice clean sand. So we walked over to the tourist section to buy some ice cream and we ate it together in a park across from the beach.

Jeff's office

To be a productive as possible my office (Jeff) is in a completely separate room than Zak's office. We can communicate via G Chat, skype, and yelling. Here is a brief tour of my office for the past week.

day recap

its been so great getting the emails and comments from all of you. its great to know you are all reading - its fun to share our experiences.

I have traveled a lot, but never quite like this. Gone is both the urge and obligation to 'take advantage of every moment' that is incumbent on such big trips; the feeling that I have to go out and explore, to experience new things, and to see all that I possibly can at every waking moment. Instead, I've replaced that sentiment with the focus and determination to work on my project with the zeal normally reserved for exploration.

Today was indicative of such a determination, it found both Jeff and I working from the apartment all day long. It was one productive day. I spent around 4 hours working with my coder to squash a new bug we discovered while Jeff spent even more time on a few projects of his own. We shared dinner and drinks at the one trendy spot in town, called Zara, a fancy tapas bar which was packed. Jeff had a cocktail called a 'harvard', with cinnamon infused rum. Pretty tasty.

We could not have found a better place to get our work done than Chennai. There are literally no distractions to our work: no friends around, nothing on TV, no idea where to go, how to communicate for the most part, no big tourist attractions, etc. Perhaps most importantly, there are no girls here to divert our attention. Because of the culture here in Chennai, women are rarely out alone - and never out to a bar. In fact, drinking is frowned upon here, so bars close at 12 on the weekends. It is incredible how much work you can get done when going out and chasing girls is not part of the itinerary. So, we basically picked the boringest town but we couldn't have picked a better place to really crank through our work.

We will be leaving here in the next few days to go to Bangalore, which is known as the Silicon Valley of India, where I am sure there will be some more distractions, but thats where we need to go next, so we just have to hunker down.

There is, however, one tourist spot I will try to make an effort to see, and that is the St. Thomas Cathedral. I took a very interesting class last semester called the Making of Christianity and we spent a good amount of time focusing on St. Thomas and his contribution to the rise of Christianity. For those of you who don't know, he was one of the 12 gospels. His writings were lost for almost 2,000 years until an entire codex in Coptic was found in a cave in Egypt in 1945. The writings were met with great fanfare from academics, but with great disdain from the Catholic church. Unlike the canonical gospels, Mathew, Mark, Luke, and John; Thomas' writing did not speak of stories of Jesus, but claimed to have literal sayings haven been spoken by the living Jesus of Nazereth. It also made no reference to sayings of Jesus after his crucifixiton, something which both shook and troubled the Church. To scholars, it was very interesting to possibly have the literal words spoken by Jesus to provide some first hand account of the actual, living man. The word of God has long been sought after, especially because the first line of Exodus proclaims "In the beginning, there was the word, and the word was God." Did Thomas' writings hold the key to deciphering thousands of years of mystery and debate?

Either way, when this document was discovered it sent shockwaves through the academic and religious world. To make a long story short, this guy, Thomas, wandered all the way from Egypt eastwards to India bringing the Gospel with him and preaching to anyone who would listen. It was here, in Chennai India, of all places, where he eventually settled in the first century AD and was then executed (martyred to some). His remains have been here ever since, and a cathedral was built in the 1500's to house them. I look forward to going to explore this place, given how much time I had spent studying him in class. Very serendipitous of me to stumble into Chennai I guess.


Ill let you know how it turns out. I also owe you a recount of the meeting with my coder, which I began to detail in an earlier post. stay tuned. off to bed now...

Pictures

(from top left to bottom right) A YMCA in Bombay on the beach- Zak in the middle of a street after visiting a Hindi Temple - The GateWay to India, it was built a long time ago- This is one of Mumbai's top beaches. Notice everyone fully dressed during monsoon season @ the beach...

The Indian Headshake

"Do you know how to get here?" I asked the rickshaw driver as I handed him the business card of the hotel before we committed to riding in his vehicle


He gently took the card from me and thoroughly read it. He looked back at me. He peered into my eyes, making strong eye contact, while his head tilted on his shoulders; his eyes floated up in his head and His lips turned up in a cryptic smile. He shook his head at me which seemed to indicate he unfortunately did not know the location, but the coy smile communicated that we were being no bother to him.

Taking his head shake as a sign I would have to find another rickshaw, I thanked him and began to turn away.

"80 Rupees!" he said to me, before I had even made one step away.

I looked at Jeff. Why would we go with this guy if he had no idea where we going?

_______

"Can I have some coffee, please?" Jeff asked our waiter. The same response demonstrated by our rickshaw driver was made by the waiter, a slight shake of the head, with an enigmatic smile.

A little upset, Jeff said thank you, and we got back to our conversation. Just moments later, our waiter brought the coffee.

After a few instances of getting a similar response to our various quieries, we quickly discovered that unlike in the states, where a head shake is a sign of disapproval or disagreement, here in India, it is the opposite.

So, it takes us just a few moments each time to process any answer. People will answer us with the words 'No Problem', but shake their head while saying it. It is really confusing.


-Zak

Dusty Roads Lead to Gold

As our autorickshaw driver expertly navigated its way through the congested and filthy streets, I peered out towards the constantly changing backdrop which quickly sped by. The smell was pungent, the air stung with humidity, the sound of horns blasting and pedestrians on their way engulfed us, and the hum of the motor underneath our seat made it impossible to forget exactly where we were or to forget exactly how far we had come.

What had started out as a whim project in my dorm room in Cambridge last October had led me here. For the past few months I had spent countless hours online and exchanged thousands of emails with her, she was the lead engineer on this project, after all. But up to this point she had existed only as a name on a screen, as an email in my inbox. I had never even spoken on the phone with her, and now as our autorickshaw bumbled down the road, on the way to to her house, I felt a mixture of emotions; I was both nervous, excited, and anxious.

I thought about how different the scene passing me by was from my work station back in Cambridge. Oxen pulled carts, women carried jugs on their heads, and vendors on their streets hawked their goods. Just ten days ago, I had never even heard of Chennai, but, for some reason, I now found myself zooming through these obscure yet crowded streets, taking shortcuts through one-way allies, lined with straw and tin huts, off to meet my coder, all in the name of opportunity.

I thought it interesting how my pursuit of success, my quest for achievement, had brought me all the way from Cambridge - home to MIT and Harvard - arguably the seat of knowledge and perhaps also of academic and professional opportunity - to here, down a dusty road, and into the unknown.


-Zak

Rise and Shine

I just woke up - 6AM here, to get some work done before my meeting today with one of my coders. We are, it seems, getting very close to reaching the end of one of the projects - which I started last October, but every time I think we are done, we discover a new bug. persistence is the name of the game, if this were easy, everyone would be doing it.

Jeff and I have an in person meeting at 3PM and I have a lot of work to prepare for that. I wish I could have cooler updates, like Jeffs, but I promised myself I had to focus on my work before I get a chance to really delve into those type of experiences. Hopefully, I will be done soon and have the opportunity to visit a little. However, my experience, thus far, is unique, because I am getting a less traditional perspective of India - working directly with the very people who are buoying this burgeoning economy.

More updates soon.

Zak

Jeff's Day @ the orphanage

So, last night we ran into my friend from Panama, Lila. She has been in Chennai for the past 2 months working for a couple non-profit organizations and helping kids who have HIV . Lila invited me to go to the orphanage with her in the morning and I most certainly accepted her generous invite. This orphanage had 19 children in it and I forget the exact numbers, but I think 10 of them were HIV + and 5 had full blown AIDS. She wrote down her address on a bar napkin and told me to meet her @ 9 am. I woke up very excited and I met Lila outside of the church she is staying at (Church of South India CSI). We each got a café and a bottle of water total came to 20 rupees (- about 50 cents and it was a litre of water- good deal) . We then took an autorickshaw for 50 minutes thru some of the worst living conditions I had ever seen. We almost got into 9 accidents on the way there... The stench was bloody awful, a mixture of urine, human/dog/ox feces, throw-up, burning tires, massive amounts of car pollution, body odor, and a hint of jasmine... (this smell is a familiar smell when we are not in the best parts of the cities here) . I was pretty nervous about the experience because I am not that good with kids (especially large groups of kids that I have never met). We arrived around 10:30 am and then I spent the next 3 hours playing with all the kids, watching them dance, and celebrating one of their birthdays. All the children were in very good spirits and were amazing to be around. At times I was entertaining groups of 5-10 children (hard to believe, me entertaining children...) by taking pictures of them while they were posing and showing them the fotos. They thoroughly enjoyed looking @ their pictures . It was a very humbling experience because they are dealing with horrible situation much better than I thought possible. It is heartbreaking to see children who (ages 5-9) are born with HIV, at no fault of their own (most of them were born to Indian sex working mothers or to other HIV + parents who abandoned them). In Indian the people with HIV are completely shunned by the society and most doctors and people won't touch or get near them. It makes normal challenges and hardships that I face utterly miniscule. I took many pictures and videos of the children (I posted all of the pics from the orphanage on Fbook, if you are my friend). If you guys want to see the videos that I have taken please check out my youtube account (search jjw04f ).

All in all today was breathtaking to say the least. I am extremely thankful for the opportunity that Lila gave me. We have upgraded our blogging skills (we added pictures + video to our past posts). Now I am off to bed...

Jeff

workin in India

today was a day well spent but I am exhausted. I worked out of the apartment all day while Jeff went off to visit an orphanage.

we ate dinner on the other side of town, taking an autorickshaw (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto_rickshaw) both ways - which is a three wheeled open air tax which runs on a moped motor.

India, to me, seems very familiar for some reason, I am already used to the hustle and bustle, the noise and the traffic.

tomorrow I have some in person meetings so im off to bed early. Ill let jeff tell you about his day at the orphanage, which I am sure was more impressionable than my day in the office.

-Zak

Road to Capitalism

Hey guys we are on the road to capitalism! Check it out...

arrived into Chennai

we arrived last last night in Chennai, where our real work will begin. Zak is meeting here with a few coders (one of whom he's worked with for along time remotely).

the town is bustling and dirty. the tour guide book does not reccomennd it and few tourists come to this part of the country.

jeff has a friend here in town who is spending the summer working at an orphanage with children who have HIV.

We met up with her and her friends last night after we got in...they are all leaving tomorrow as it is the end of their summer stay. We went to a little bar in a very nice hotel, and we were suprised to see it close at 1130PM - not uncommon for this area which is very conservative, muslim, and where drinking is generally frowned upon.

we did not mind the early close as we both were exhausted from a long day of travel.

this morning marks Zak's first real day of work - he is staying in the apartment to get some work done, and has sent Jeff to the orphanage to have an experience of a lifetime. I am sure there will be stories and pictures to follow.

thats all for now,

Zak and Jeff

This place is a total sausage fest

out on the street, it is about 50:1 guy to girl ratio. its very rare to see a woman out walking on her own. jeff and I have finally found where all the girls have been hiding: McDonald's.

ive always been interested what a Mcdonalds in India was like, and it lived up to its expectation. The place, as they always are when im abroad, was absolutley jammed. no hamburgers on the menu - I had a samir wrap.

food was good and the place was full of trendy young people enjoying their lunch.

now its off to the airport.

-j and z