Directly from Gurugram, India!

Hey all! Finally here is the post I promised to publish whenever I was in India! So here I am!

I actually arrived about 20 hours ago on March 1st at 1:30am in the airport and about 3am in our hotel, but before that my journey from Brazil to England was great.

I met Greg, Jose and Bernadette in Heathrow airport, London. It was the first three people I met from our CSC India 38 group and it was great. All of them were looking very excited to be there. We got the plane all together from London to Delhi and this last journey took about 7.5 hours.

In total, my trip took: 20h

From my hometown to Guarulhos airport in Brazil: 1.5 h

From Guarulhos to London Heathrow airport: 11 h

From Heathrow to Delhi: 7.5 h

Of course, I am not considering the time I spent waiting for the correct time for departure. I was able to sleep a little in the second journey from London to Delhi that it actually caused me some trouble to get asleep quickly. We arrived in the hotel at about 3am, but I actually got ready to sleep only by 5:30am and woke up at 9:30am to have breakfast with the team at 10am.

In the breakfast I met Julia (IBM Argentina), Carlos (IBM Mexico), Isobel (IBM Australia) and Kabi (Pyxera Global representant). It was a great time to talk and get to know each other better. The variety of culture and background is very interesting and it is definetly good to meet them and have this experience to learn more about each of their countries and also experience this journey in India. I had Chai (Indian tea) for breakfast and some pancakes with honey.

After breakfast, we decided to walk nearby the hotel and got to know some of its streets, and saw many auto-rikshaw, some women wearing Sarees and Kurtas, a lot of locals staring at us, some of us took some money from ATM. During our tour we started to see some people with colorful powder and also selling it in the streets, as Holi is celebrated starting this evening of March 1st and will end tomorrow evening. Finally we came back to the Hotel to meet Veronika, our local representative who will be supporting us throughout the month.

We chat from 3pm-5pm with Veronika and I learned a something new. According to the name of the person, Indian people can recognize the religion of the person and possibly even their cast. Did you know that? Very interesting.

After talking a little and after catching up regarding the plan for tomorrow - when we will celebrate Holi - we decided to go to the mall and finally have lunch, as because of jet lag none of us had before. In the mall, we walked around for a while, got to know some stores and restaurants, and finally we decided to have lunch, where I took Roti and Chicken Biryiani, which was tasty but veeeery spicy.

As we finalized having lunch (which was actually dinner because of the time), we went shopping where I bought a blouse to use during Holi festival tomorrow, as I was told the ink of the party may not get out of the clothes. We also bought some snacks to bring to the hotel afterwards. We arrived in the hotel at around 8pm, when everybody decided to move to each one's rooms to rest for tomorrow celebrations.

Today other folks are planned to arrive: Ana Gaby, Robert, Erin and Carla, everybody coming on the same plane, but we will only meet tomorrow as I am falling asleep now. The experience of the day was amazing, but now my body is claiming some rest for adaptation. Today was a very productive day and I am glad we could have this time to get to know each other better and India's culture too.

Thanks for reading my blog and see you soon!