This is a guest post by Rein Raudjärv, who at the moment is with Toomas Römer at the Great Indian Developer Summit. Edited by Jevgeni Kabanov for brevity and to fit with other blog content.
Our trip started after a big birthday party. I slept in (my phone battery ran out of power) and got no time for breakfast or anything. There were almost 25 extra kilos of luggage and with a re-check-in to a local Indian airline in Delhi we decided to leave our back wall and some T-shirts in the Tallinn office. We got to Finland quickly and easily.
The flight to Delhi took about 7 hours. The landing at about midnight was delayed because of the thunderstorm above the airport. The first impression of India was high temperature (above 30 degrees Celsius). There already were guys waiting at the airport waiting to carry your luggage to the nearest (his cousin’s) taxi. We had to use the taxi to get to the next airport. People were sleeping outside the building — we didn’t understand why they were not allowed to enter. Inside most of people including the personal was sleeping as well.
We got to the flight to Bangalore (officially named Bangaluru) in the second morning. The taxi trip to the hotel illustrates the Indian traffic in the daylight. The number of lanes is very dynamic. They have lot of scooters and 3-wheel drives. I also saw a cow sleeping on the sidewalk. Nobody was interrupting the holy animal. In general India is not so clean. At the same time people are quite friendly and happy to help us.
The first day at the conference started with several hours setting up the booth. We had only a table, a chair and a title “ZEROTUMAROUND” waiting for us and no WiFi in sight. We asked for extra tables and a plasma TV. Trying out different things we finally came up with the final booth layout. The title and WiFi got fixed during the day. Except for the slow network connection, hotness (felt like 30 degrees inside) and lacking of toilette paper everything went really well. During the day there were several folks enjoying our cartoon and giving some fliers in front of our booth.
Tags: conference