I - First days in Bangalore

Overwhelming – one single word that right now is THE word for me that best describes Bangalore in my eyes. Bangalore is full of different smells – overwhelmingly good smells of food and spices and overwhelmingly bad smells of dumpsters and human feces. Bangalore is full of noise – overwhelmingly nice noise of exotic birds and overwhelmingly bad, omnipresent noise of traffic. Bangalore is full of colors – sometimes overwhelmingly ugly colors of dirt, garbage and poverty, usually the overwhelmingly manifold colors of women’s dresses, temples, cars and flowering trees.

And Bangalore is overwhelmingly slow moving. In the first three days that I have been here so far I managed to do exactly one very important thing: Get an Indian SIM card. As a foreigner it is almost impossible to get a SIM card on your own without knowing the right people. So, at first I had to get ahold of the person who wanted to help me with acclimation, which is unsurprisingly hard without a working phone or an internet connection. Once I did get ahold of her and met her it took the two of us an entire day to buy a SIM card. She is a local, she speaks the language, she knows the right people but still it took us an entire day for something that in many other countries takes a few hours maximum.

But now that we do have working phones and mobile internet we can start working on actual projects, such as getting to know my work and colleagues, making friends, getting wifi at our house, getting our clothes treated against mosquitos, going (grocery) shopping and so on. My biggest project will be to get established at my work. I am very excited to meet everyone tomorrow and hopefully once that big part of my life here is somewhat clarified things will settle down a bit more.