I'm 23!

these last few days have been good, both professionally and personally. training on Thursday and Friday were a bit more interactive and interesting - in fact i learned a lot about global effectiveness and the company's business solution model and how and why it works so well. we start our real meat&potatoes training this week, either tomorrow Monday or the next day. i'm really looking forward to it.

outside of that, things have been going swimmingly well. i hadn't gone out on the town this past week in the evenings - by choice, mind you - because i wanted to just get my bearings on campus and warm up to my surroundings. the way i see it, Mysore isn't exactly that kicking of a city, and we're gonna have PLENTY of time to explore. so about 40 of us went out together Friday night to a place called Planet X, which was basically like a Malibu Grand Prix or a Dave&Buster's back in the States. great restaurant, bowling, go-karts, video games, mini-golf billiards, even a hookah lounge. it was bad timing on our part because we got to the place around 8:30, and our taxis were coming to pick us up at 11:00 so that we could be back on campus before midnight. i'll explain that in a minute. by the time 40 people finished dinner and paid the bill, it was about 10:15. getting into the hookah lounge had a cover of Rs 300 for a couple [1 girl 1 guy] or Rs 300 for a single guy. clearly women are a hot commodity. so a few people went into the lounge, a couple went go-karting, and a few of us, including me, stumbled onto the arcade and played video games for a while. which was definitely fun =)

so the deal is this: we live on a campus that feels, at least from the outside, like a military base or a compound. there are only 2 entrances onto this 335-acre campus, and both are heavily guarded. to that end, if we go off campus - say to go out to eat in the city - we have to sign out with the guards. and when we come back we have to sign in again. and there is a curfew every night - Sunday through Thursday nights we have to be back on campus by 11 pm, and Friday and Saturday night by midnight. hence the bit at Planet X about getting back before midnight. if you're late, you pay a hefty fine. the reason we have the curfew in place is for our safety - or so we're told. but even if we didn't have it we would be back on campus by then anyway, since the entire city shuts down by 11 pm. not like the States, where you could be out at 2 in the am when the clubs close and still have cafes to go to that stay open all night [Waffle House comes to mind].

then of course, Saturday was my birthday. it was really great - about 30 people who came out. Eric S was instrumental in coordinating taxis and figuring out how many people were coming. props to him. we went to this hotel called Pai Vista, which is like a super-nice hotel in Mysore with an awesome restaurant called Gufha, which means cave in Hindi. pictures in Album 3 are from that restaurant. and next to Gufha is a lounge/rock bar called Opium, where they play hard rock music RIDICULOUSLY loudly and you can't hear yourself think after just 30 seconds in there. it's kind of crazy. instead of Opium, we opted to retain our hearing and went to this little hole in the wall called, quite simply, The Keg. pictures in Album 3 from that too.

it's Sunday afternoon as i type this, and seeing as how i just woke up a couple of hours ago, i'm starving and need to go find food. so i'm cutting this short and will write more later.

oh, by the way - i moved rooms. more later.