Much belated update...

So what's going on guys?

Sorry it's taken me so long to give an update, but work has been pretty rough lately. 3 or 4 12-hour days in a row kinda wears you down. I was here till almost 9:00 PM on Friday night while a bunch of my friends were out drinking, relaxing, having a nice dinner at Blu Bar! It was just killing me being at work that late on a Friday night! I'm really enjoying the work I am doing, but my project is due by the middle of this week and there's still quite a lot of work to be done. They have, however, given me a team of employees to help me. Chandan, Veena and Rahul. HA! Doesn't that RAHUL! Sorry... Anyway, they are helping me create 13 case studies and boy is their help sorely needed! I'll let you all know the progress on my work. As soon as this project is done I will begin to work on the corresponding website to the brochure I'm creating. The whole project should be done by the middle of next month at which point I will begin a new rotation with another team in Corporate Marketing.

It's been a while since I've spoken with you guys, but last weekend I went on vacation over the long weekend to Hampi. We left on Friday afternoon for Chikmanglur, where we stayed at the Taj hotel, which is set amidst the coffee plantations of India. Pretty good coffee. That was about an 8-hour drive, including the popped tire we had to deal with. So we were stalled in this little village for about 1.5 hours and I don't know if these locals had ever seen white people before! A decent crowd gathered by our broken-down Toyota Qualis to see what was going on, and when the children realized that the car was full of white people they ran away only to peek out at us from behind buildings. Crazy, eh!

We saw a few temples around Chikmanglur, which were really cool. Here are a few pictures.

We then drove another 7 hours or so to Hampi. You have to keep in mind that most of these roads are hardly roads at all, more like dirt paths. This was the bumpiest, muddiest, rockiest ride of my life! This is a fairly mild representation of what we dealt with for countless hours of the roadtrip. In reality what we dealt with was muddier with more rocks:

A picture of myself with our driver, Shakur. Pretty hilarious dude. He was so proud to be carrying around the group of us.

Hampi was awesome! The landscape is made up of huge boulders, banana plantations and ancient temples. Like nothing I had ever seen before. Absolutely beautiful!

We ate lunch at this really cool restaurant on the banks of this river called The Mango Tree. Here’s a picture:

Later that afternoon we hiked to the top of this mountain where there was a really amazing temple that offered a view that literally took my breath away. This temple is about 600 years old and the steps up the mountain were just slabs of marble strewn the whole way up the mountain. A fairly treacherous hike, but so worth it! Here’s a picture of Winnie and Laura at the top.
Another shot of the incredible view:

So all in all a great trip. I was really able to see the beautiful parts of the country that you would never guess exist from living in Bangalore. I'm gonna get my hands on other people's cameras for more pictures from the trip, so be looking out for those. There's also a very funny story about being attacked by monkeys, and I cannot possibly do it justice without the pictorial narrative.

We have another vacation coming up in the middle of October and I’m thinking about planning a trip to maybe Goa or Kerala, which are both supposed to be incredible!

Anyway, I’ve gotta get back to work, but I will definitely post a few updates this week to keep everyone up to date.