I have to admit, India was never terribly high on my travel bucket list, and before joining my current company, I just figured I would never go. But, upon learning that my company has an office in Bangalore with about as many employees as the headquarters in San Jose, I figured it was only a matter of time. In February, we started running a software implementation at work and sent the design consultants to Bangalore, so my boss and I went for two weeks to get that running. As with any good work trip, I didn’t spend the entire time working, and thus have some experiences to share in this blog!
My trip started with over 24 hours of travel (through Frankfurt) to reach Bangalore. I arrived to Bangalore at about 2am on Monday and met my driver for the hour-long drive into the city. I had been hoping that my late arrival would give me license to get a late start of the office, but one of my other team members who had taken a different set of flights (and arrived an hour after I did) had made it clear that he would be in the office early, so I figured I had to be, too. So at about 7:30am, after a tough night, I walked down and sampled the hotel breakfast. I was staying at a very fancy Indian-owned hotel in the (supposedly) hip part of town (Taj MG Road), so the breakfast was a mix of Western and Indian foods. Over two weeks of eating breakfast in the hotel I found that I was quite fond of all the different types of parathas and chutneys they served, as well as the watermelon that was unbelievably sweet and juicy. This Indian food was immeasurably better than the Indian food I had eaten on my flight from Frankfurt to Bangalore—pumpkin masala (with other accompaniments that were a mystery to me as an uncultured American), which I had been subject to only because they ran out of the non-vegetarian option.
My first ride to work (with company driver Giri) was a cultural experience in itself. While I’ve seen other countries that have hectic driving styles (looking at you, Peru and Mexico), nothing prepared me for India. Driving is done on the left side, lanes are entirely ignored, mopeds outnumber cars probably 10:1, traffic signals and controls hardly exist, and at one point I saw 6 people riding on one single moped. It’s pure chaos. I quickly learned not to worry about this stuff. If it looked like a bus was going to T-bone us, we would get out of the way just in time. The drive from my hotel was about 2 miles and took 20-30 minutes depending on whether the traffic was awful or terrible.
I don’t need to bore you the specifics of work, but I will tell you about my fun lunch experiences. When I first got to the office, it was just me and the consultants—my boss had not yet arrived and wouldn’t for two more days. Luckily, the consultants were from India and based in Bangalore, so they helped me get some chicken biryani from the cafeteria upstairs. The cafeteria was really just a bunch of metal carts with mystery food inside, so I was glad to have some local help. And it was good! I was glad I didn’t get the vegetarian combo meal that most other people seemed to be getting. I love immersing myself when I travel as much as the next guy but I was really glad to eat something my body understood—chicken and rice. I was wiped out after work, so I ordered room service (lame, I know). I told myself that if I was going to be lame and order room service, I would at least order Indian food, so I ordered a kerala paratha (delicious) and lamb biryani (gave me my first bout of food poisoning).
The next day at lunch was an experience. When it came time for lunch, our two consultants wanted to go outside the office and find something nearby, so I asked one of my Indian counterparts which direction to walk and he pointed a certain way out the 7th story window. I don’t know if we got turned around somehow, but when the consultants and I finally got to the street and started walking, it was not the scene I was looking for. People were serving food out of crumbling cinder block structures, the street was filled with rubble, and literal cows were wandering around. I looked at one of the consultants and said, “I don’t think it’s in my best interests to eat this food.” He concurred. We ended up back in the cafeteria where I tried an egg bhurji, which was actually quite delicious. For dinner that night, alone again and not feeling up to the adventure of going outside, I sampled some dim sum and ma po tofu at Memories of China in the hotel lobby. Real Chinese food is commonplace in Bangalore and I ate it probably three more times at various places while I was there. It was nice to see that American tastes had not yet corrupted Chinese food in India—no fried meat bits in sticky sauce anywhere.
Once my boss arrived, things changed—we started having better lunches ordered in and going out for group drinks and dinners. One interesting place we went as a group was the Tipsy Bull, which used a gimmick that seemed to be common among bars in Bangalore—demand-based pricing. Supposedly, depending on demand for each individual drink (of which there were hundreds), prices would rise and fall throughout the night. I didn’t buy it—prices were moving all over the place despite the fact that we were just about the only people there. We took advantage of the ridiculously cheap prices and got several rounds of Johnnie Walker Blue Label for about $5 per pour. When in India, take advantages of the cheap prices, I suppose.
After a long week of travel, work, and jet lag, the weekend came. I had been looking fairly intently to try and find something to do over the weekend. It seemed like a lot of the cool sights within driving distance from Bangalore were too far away to comfortably do in a day. I had looked into flying to Goa, but this proved to be too expensive and complicated to pull off last minute. So on Saturday, my boss and I enlisted our fearless driver Giri, to take us to Nandi Hills, which apparently is a bit of a Lovers Lane-type area up in the highlands outside the city. One the way up, Giri asked to stop for breakfast and treated us to some local foods in a very authentic spot on the side of the road. I had already eaten, but I could tell he wanted us to try some stuff, so I told him to order me one thing and I would have some. He came back with three trays of food. I gulped down a double-dose of Pepto Bismol before eating and made it out unscathed. I don’t know what I ate, but it was pretty good! It was interesting to get out of Bangalore, which is often called the Silicon Valley of India due to its concentration of wealth and tech, and into the rural outskirts of the city. The scenery and standards of living changed quickly. Nandi Hills was cool, too—it was too smoggy to see the views, but I was more interested in the monkeys that were roaming around anyway. After taunting Kelsey with some monkey pictures and taking in the scenery and culture, we headed back into the city, ate an excellent lunch of real tandoori meats and took a tour of the city by car. The highlight for me was the centerpiece building of UB City (the company that owns the ubiquitous Kingfisher beer brand). This is a 30-something story tall glass building with an enormous white mansion built on top as the penthouse. I think Donald Trump is probably kicking himself that this guy in Bangalore thought of building a fancy residential tower AND a literal mansion on the roof before he did. That night, my boss and I went out looking for beer that wasn’t Kingfisher (seemingly the only brand anyone carried except for maybe Budweiser). We went to what was supposed to be the hip spot in town, Brigade Road, but didn’t succeed. We ended up finding a local microbrewery called Biere Club that had a good variety on tap, as well as some good food. Tired after a long day of driving and walking, we headed back to the hotel.
On Sunday, my travel companion had plans to play tennis with one of our coworkers in the morning, so I set out to explore the town on my own. I briefly considered using Uber to call an autorickshaw, but then decided that I valued my health too much to do so, and called a car with seatbelts and airbags instead. I set out for the Lalbagh Botanical Garden, a massive park in the center of the city that was supposed to be quite nice. However, I got there and realized that you needed to pay to get in, and they wouldn’t take credit cards or my American money (I hadn’t bothered to get any rupees). I walked about half a block in search of an ATM before realizing that I had no idea where I was going and what type of area I was in, so I Ubered back to the hotel to get ready for brunch.
Brunch was quite the production. We went with a big group of coworkers to Byg Brewski, a massive brewery-restaurant on the outskirts of town. I had no idea what to expect, but my boss had a feeling that we were about to drink and eat to excess. We walked in and those feelings were immediately confirmed. The restaurant is an enormous open facility with multiple bars and kitchens, an extensive water feature in the middle, and two levels of seating. It could easily fit several hundred people as a restaurant and over a thousand as a nightclub (as it becomes at dark). On Sundays they do an all-you-can-eat-and-drink deal, which we all did, and you can probably guess where this is heading. The food was great—an enormous open buffet with everything from traditional Indian dishes to seafood, Mexican, and Chinese. For the first three hours of lunch, their beer tap was broken, so they were only serving mixed drinks. As I’ve found elsewhere, non-American mixed drinks tend to be on the sweet side, so they went down too easily. To make matters worse, our waiter for some reason thought that whenever my boss or I ordered a drink that we were ordering for each other. So he’d bring out two of everything. By the time the beer finally came, I had four cocktails sitting in front of me. And then I had to drink all the beer! There was a lot of alcohol sitting unconsumed on the table by the time we left. We did take two of the beers to go for the ride back into the city (can’t do that in the U.S.!). I think our driver was very amused to be carting around two drunk Americans. As it was about 4:30pm, we went to Arbor Brewing Company closer in to our hotel and had some proper IPAs. The last stop of the night was McDonalds, because it was just that kind of night. The next morning I woke up to a message from my boss that just said, “Ouch.” Luckily, as a 22-year-old, I got to skip out on the hangover that follows 9 hours of drinking in the hot Indian sun.
With the weekend over, it was back to the grind. Most of my meals came from the hotel restaurants, though I did sneak over to the mall across the street twice, once for some fancy Chinese food and another time for some American-style food. Since I was staying the the “international” area, there wasn’t a whole lot of local food to try, unfortunately. After one last trip to a brewery with coworkers (I forget the name but they had more than just light lagers, thank goodness), it was time to head home. All the flights to Bangalore arrive from 1-3am which means the departures leave even later. I think my flight was at about 3am coming home. After a struggle to stay awake till then, I got a final ride from my driver/friend Giri. In the airport, I picked up some mysore pak, a candy made from ghee and gram flour that my coworkers always bring back with them. The flight was ridiculously long back home. Between Frankfurt and San Francisco, I got to sit in Premium Plus on United, which is basically business class, so that was very nice. Aided by my melatonin-Benadryl cocktail, I slept almost the whole way home. It’d been so long since I’d had real Western food that I was even looking forward to the plane food. Then I was served United’s take on chicken korma, so that dream would just have to wait. Once on the ground, I Ubered home to my lovely fiance who promptly took me to In-n-Out.
Bangalore isn’t a tourist city. Sort of like San Jose, it’s business first and everything else comes after that. But even with limited time and research, I was able to make it to a number of cool places. I wouldn’t recommend you take your next vacation there, but for a work trip, it was a very cool experience and way out of my comfort zone.
Planners on the Go 