Yup, made the transition from Singapore to Bangalore India today – about a 4.5 hour flight and generally wasn’t bad. Found myself in 51A with ‘no status’ – window seat which was nice. Nice guy next to me falling asleep on my shoulder was also ‘nice’. We arranged for the hotel to pick us up at the airport and were treated in 5-star style. Everyone so far is incredibly nice and very helpful. Ashley booked a tour of the local market and history so we did that – which then turned into a downpour – but generally a very good tour. I really enjoyed being in the market. This is about a 180 from where we were in Singapore where everything is polished and new.

So let’s see – we walked through a historical temple ‘summer palace’, then a fort, then the market – got to cross the street in Indian traffic which in itself is a unique experience. Then tour multiple markets – the amount of flowers was truly amazing. Even more spectacular was the 50-100 people that we saw sitting in 5 ft wide stalls hand sewing the flowers together. Taking the smallest flowers and hand stitching them into long strands with hundreds of flowers on each strand. The strands only last for three days, then get replaced, but when you look at the pictures you can see that this is a daily thing – and there are hundreds of vendors. It pretty much is mind numbing to watch and think about how many people are doing this daily and for how little.

We did go into a Mosque / temple – which we could not take pictures of the main area but could downstairs. It’s a new place and made of all white marble with amazing carvings everywhere. Was super neat, had to take our shoes off which was also fun. Then the rain had really started and built some pretty amazing puddles everywhere. So there we are in our tennis shoes – with ankle deep water running in the street – if you’ve wondered why Indian folks wear sandals – they just walk thru it. We, of course, tip toed our way around the concrete streets and huge areas of water. In the end I just had to step into it and life goes on and things will dry out accordingly.

We are here for a very short period of time, flying back early Saturday morning through Germany – so 2 days of meetings and then gone – so it really is 63 hours in India. I do want to come back at a slower pace to actually see things in more detail – and possibly more cities. The weather is definitely not as hot / humid as Singapore.

That’s about it, off to a work call then by the looks of the room a pretty solid night of sleep.