My typical day in Hyderabad

My typical day is getting up at 9am at the hotel, packing up dirty laundry from the day before and dropping them at the front desk on my way to breakfast buffet at the hotel restaurant.  For breakfast I always have coffee, bacon, and a croissant.  Sometimes I eat fresh pineapple, maybe scrambled eggs.  When I'm really daring I'll get a glass of juice, but only fresh pineapple because it's not from concentrate and has a thick skin that bad water can't penetrate.  Hard fruits safe, soft fruits not.

After breakfast I go to the hotel's Deli and get a sandwich and a can of Pepsi to go for lunch.  I pack lunch in a Wegmans thermal shopping bad to stay cool.

I go back to my room and pack my laptop into my backpack for the office.  Then I get ready, shower, shave, and dress from about 10:25 to 10:50.  I take my malaria pill about this time, and lock valuables in the my hotel room safe.

My driver usually arrives by 10:45.  I walk down to the lobby between 10:45 and 11:00 for the ride to work.  My driver, Hussain, is a quiet man in his 40s.  His hair is slightly redish, and he always wears a white dress shirt.  (Incidentally, most Indian men seem to dress in western dress shirts for the office.  It's the women who dress either native, western, or some combination.)  Hussain drives me in a white Toyota Innova.  It's a minivan smaller than the Toyota Sienna available in the U.S.  The Innova is air conditioned, thank God.  It's in the 90s by 11am.

Traffic is nothing like back home.  Intersections are "fluid." You just drive into them slowly and make your move when there's a space.  The car horns are used a lot to get smaller vehicles to move over and be aware that you are there.  The road is crawling with a combination of cars, vans, motorcycles, scooters, and auto rickshaws.  There are lines painted on the roadways, but lanes are relative.  Traffic laws seem to be more suggestions than rules here.  We seem to often drive down the middle of the road, scooters to the left of me, auto rickshaws to the right.  I'm one passenger is a nice, large vehicle with a great view.  Around me are auto rickshaws packed like clown cars and scooters with two, three, four(?), or five(?!?!) aboard.

Along the ride I pass roadside shack stores, tents, and general poverty that is way of life for many here.  Closer to work, I come upon large, glass-covered office buildings.  Oracle, Dell, Deloitte, to name a few, all have offices here.

I work at the office from about 11am to 9:30pm.  The sun goes down around 6:30pm, so the return to the hotel is in the dark.  Once again, cars, buses, trucks, motorcycles, scooters, and auto rickshaws jockey for position.

There's a large KFC restaurant on my route home.  KFC appears popular in India.  I'll have my driver stop there some night on my way home.

I usually get back to my hotel by 10pm.  Then I relax for a while before dinner.  I usually go to bed between 2 and 3am.  Then I start again.

Kent