Arriving in India

I arrived in India on Monday morning, and it's finally time for my first post!

I arrived, together with my colleagues Tina, Frederikke and Helene, at 0500 local time monday morning. As you can imagine, we were pretty tired by the time we had gotten through immigration and customs.

Our driver picked Helene and I up from the airport and took us to the apartment that is to be our new home for the next 6 months. Originally, we were told that we would have one small apartment each -- however, after we finally found someone who could provide us with keys, it turned out that the two small apartments were actually one larger apartment, on the 13th floor.

 

This is my bedroom, in the middle of unpacking. The bed was extremely hard -- fortunately the manager for the serviced apartments is very helpful and agreed to replace the bed with a softer one, which arrived on Tuesday.

This is the dining area and living room.

This is the living room.

The kitchen is quite big, but there is practically no content in any of the cupboards -- we have 2 forks, 2 knives and 4 plates. In addition there are a few pots and pans, and that's about it.

The bathrooms are ok, although there is no hot water in the shower at the moment, so showering in the morning is a real wake-up call!

The apartment is in a huuuge complex, I think there are 20 apartment towers, each with 15++ floors. I took a walk around the complex Monday afternoon -- it takes 10-15 mins just to walk around!. There is a swimming pool (or two?), a small supermarket, a coffee shop, tennis courts, and apparently a pharmacy / medical clinic inside the complex, and probably much much more. Pictures below.

 Our apartment tower.

 The complex is very big - this is just the "inner ring".

 The swimming pool.

Nightfall.

I have now been to work for 3 days, the days are passing very quickly. The workdays are from 09:30 to 19:30. This includes a 1hr lunch break, as well as various small tea breaks if there is time. The project team has been amazing at welcoming me into the project. Everyone is so friendly and helpful! My "buddy" in the project, Pooja, has helped me with everything from buying lunch to opening a bank account and getting an Indian sim card. I will come back to life at work in a later post.

Because of the long hours at work, we have not had much time at the apartment, resulting in this post being a little long and all over the place. I will try to post regular updates on life in India, hopefully I will manage some smaller posts quite often. Now it's off to bed, and another day at the office tomorrow!