Bangalore, Day 8 (with photos!)
Feb. 7th, 2012 11:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bjarvisSome translations:
1. A rupee is about $0.02.
2. "Timings" means "office hours" or "business hours"
3. The ground floor is "0" in most elevators. What the locals call the first floor would be the level above ground level.
4. Car horns are used as turn signals. And Bangalore drivers do love their "turn signals."
5. Traffic moves on the left side of the road. It also means that pedestrians tend to also pass each other on the left, which conflicts severely with my deeply in-grained habit of automatically passing on the right.
A friend had arned that Bangalore has periodic & frequent power outages. For the first few days, I think we were outage-free. Friday and Saturday however were not good days for the local utility: the power blanked out for about 30 seconds several times on each day. I'm not sure however if the restored power was from each building's own backup generator or from the utility; when/if the utility power did come back on while the generators were in use, it was entirely transparent to me.
The office where I work is entirely populated by laptops so everyone's battery carries them through the brief outage. Uninterruptible power supplies provide bridge time for the network devices and storage. I'm glad however to have never been trapped in an elevator during one of these brief outage. I was trapped behind an escalator in one shopping mall Saturday: the attendants were refusing shoppers access while the techies manually restarted the escalators.
I wonder what happens to the traffic lights --like anyone looks at those things anyway.
Hey, let's have a few pictures! Here's a little something I recorded this evening on my walk from the office to the hotel: I have to walk through this mess twice per day.
Here's a shot of the office where I'm working, "Prestige Obelisk," 8th floor:
A familiar scene in nearly any country these days --great wealth next to great poverty.
Next to crows, dogs are the most common critters. I've only seen two dogs who were clearly household pets: the rest are simply very sociable strays who nap anywhere they like, including in the street.
The gov't is attempting in small ways to reduce the noise pollution but frankly, I think this little digital wonder surrendered & died on its first day.
1. A rupee is about $0.02.
2. "Timings" means "office hours" or "business hours"
3. The ground floor is "0" in most elevators. What the locals call the first floor would be the level above ground level.
4. Car horns are used as turn signals. And Bangalore drivers do love their "turn signals."
5. Traffic moves on the left side of the road. It also means that pedestrians tend to also pass each other on the left, which conflicts severely with my deeply in-grained habit of automatically passing on the right.
A friend had arned that Bangalore has periodic & frequent power outages. For the first few days, I think we were outage-free. Friday and Saturday however were not good days for the local utility: the power blanked out for about 30 seconds several times on each day. I'm not sure however if the restored power was from each building's own backup generator or from the utility; when/if the utility power did come back on while the generators were in use, it was entirely transparent to me.
The office where I work is entirely populated by laptops so everyone's battery carries them through the brief outage. Uninterruptible power supplies provide bridge time for the network devices and storage. I'm glad however to have never been trapped in an elevator during one of these brief outage. I was trapped behind an escalator in one shopping mall Saturday: the attendants were refusing shoppers access while the techies manually restarted the escalators.
I wonder what happens to the traffic lights --like anyone looks at those things anyway.
Hey, let's have a few pictures! Here's a little something I recorded this evening on my walk from the office to the hotel: I have to walk through this mess twice per day.
Here's a shot of the office where I'm working, "Prestige Obelisk," 8th floor:
A familiar scene in nearly any country these days --great wealth next to great poverty.
Next to crows, dogs are the most common critters. I've only seen two dogs who were clearly household pets: the rest are simply very sociable strays who nap anywhere they like, including in the street.
The gov't is attempting in small ways to reduce the noise pollution but frankly, I think this little digital wonder surrendered & died on its first day.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2012-02-07 04:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-07 05:08 pm (UTC)dog
Date: 2012-02-07 08:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-07 10:08 pm (UTC)I know this is awful of me, but I struggle mightily and without success to overcome my distaste for the name of the Indian currency. It sounds to my English-wired brain like a sexually-transmitted disease, cf. Herpes.
"Timings"
Have you encountered "Prepone" and "Crore" yet?
Car horns are used as turn signals
…and as brake lights, and as windshield wipers, and as door handles, and as speedometers, and as gearshifts, and as just about every other part of the car. And high ("main") beams are used as low ("dipped") beams.
Traffic moves on the left side of the road.
That's the nominal theory, anyway.
pedestrians tend to also pass each other on the left, which conflicts severely with my deeply in-grained habit of automatically passing on the right.
Interesting…I grew up in a right-traffic country and when walking, as when driving, my habit is to pass on the left. On moving walkways in airports and such in North America, the signs always read "WALK LEFT - STAND RIGHT". I've found pedestrians in left-traffic countries (my data points are the UK and India) tend to pass on the right. Where does your pass-on-the-right habit come from, do you reckon?
I share your opinion of what happened to the noise monitor.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-08 02:49 am (UTC)I was ready for those but they haven't happened yet. I have encountered "lakh" a great deal though.
And the escalator 'walk left, stand right' thing holds true here too. Unless of course it involves clueless people who just block the whole damn thing --just like they do in DC.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-08 12:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-08 02:48 am (UTC)I must confess though it is all very orderly in its own way. By most North American & European standards, it's utter chaos but it works pretty well, getting large numbers of people from one point to another with few accidents. Indeed, the only accident I've seen thus far happened on Saturday on an otherwise empty street when a dog ran out in front of a motorcycle (both survived).
no subject
Date: 2012-02-08 12:41 am (UTC)dogs
Date: 2012-02-08 03:22 am (UTC)Traffic/walking patterns
Date: 2012-02-11 05:59 pm (UTC)Hey, I gave a bunch of data to your blog site and I'm no longer anonymous. I wonder who got the best deal :op