Helen Stephenson's India Trip - June-July, 2006 - My first day at work

Monday June 19^th

I set the alarm for 7:30 and didn’t do too bad a job of getting out of bed, although I was a little later than I’d meant to be. I went down for breakfast, where I decided to sample watermelon juice. I don’t think it’s as good as sweet lime. I had a selection of fresh tropical fruits: pineapple, papaya, mango and two different types of melon; and I had toast and marmalade. They even had dairy free margarine already on the premises! The hotel seems to cater mainly for westerners, so I didn’t know whether they would have, but they’re really helpful about dietary things.

I was just wondering where the car which was to take me to the office had got to when they phoned me to say it was waiting. I’d thought it a bit entertaining that there was a phone in the bathroom, but that’s where I happened to be when they phoned me about the car!

My room at the Trident was very nice. It had two huge beds, a desk, a sofa, a TV inside of a cabinet, and wardrobe space including a safe with a combination lock. The bathroom looked positively opulent, with lots of mirrors and a washbasin set into a countertop. I was a bit worried about slipping under the shower, which was over the bath, and I asked for a bathmat, expecting a rubber one with suction cups to stick to the bath, but what I got was a couple of cane mats which floated! They did grip the bath when you stood on them, though, so they fulfilled the function I required.

I got to the office, where I met a lot of people that I have previously met when they have been visiting London. I had the day to get my act together ready to start training on Tuesday morning. I went through the early part of what I planned to present and fleshed it out a bit. I also ate in the staff restaurant downstairs. They serve vegetarian food. Some items contain dairy ingredients, but most don’t. They eat off stainless steel trays with about five indentations in them so that you can have a little bit of this and a little bit of that.

One of the chaps had a birthday, and during the afternoon, we went down to the staff restaurant with a large cream cake to which candles were affixed. We sung “Happy Birthday”, but I don’t think I’ll recount the rest of the birthday celebration in case it catches on elsewhere…

I packed up the laptop I’d been allocated and brought it back to the hotel, where there’s wireless Internet access. I put it to one side and picked up my camera and went out to take some pictures. The water features are really pretty, and fortunately they were all full of water by then. Some of them were empty when I arrived on Sunday as they were cleaning them.

You can see the wings of the hotel reflected in the water feature. One of the high-rise buildings in Gurgaon peeps over the top of one of the hotel wings. At the bottom of the stairs, you can see a deeper blue glimpse of the swimming pool.

I also took a lot of pictures of that beautiful swimming pool. You saw some of them on the previous page, but here are a couple more.

Then I went and got my swimming costume and went for a swim. While I was in the water, they lit the lights in the pool area. They also have four tall towers that must have gas jets inside and they light them with a long taper.

While I was swimming, the clouds started to gather and I saw some quite spectacular lightning, but it was far enough away that I wasn’t too worried about it.

After my swim, I paid a visit to Saffron, where I had their Rajastani special. Cracked corn turns out to be sweetcorn kernels, which are right up my street. The dish included those and a spicy tomato sauce with chicken. It was also served with a side dish of lentils and a millet bread. These last two items went incredibly well together and I wanted to have them again another evening.

After dinner, I repaired back to my room and took the laptop out. I found the hotel’s wireless Internet connection and got as far as the sign-on screen. Then I had to phone down for a user id and password and chose an hour’s access. While that was going on, I also tried connecting the Jobo Giga One to the laptop and the laptop could see the card reader slots and the hard drive, so I was pleased. I had a look at my pictures, resized them for Internet display and uploaded them to Yahoo! Photos. Then I took the Giga One offline and copied my card to the Giga One storage. I suppose I could have got the computer to do the copy, but I didn’t.