10 things I have learnt this week

1. Chinese people move around with their umbrellas open everywhere they go. They use an umbrella when its sunny and also when it rains. It really disconcerting to go out on a bright, hot day and see like a sea full of open umbrellas everywhere. No one wears sunglasses. You are more likely to be stared at if you wear sunglasses rather than if you have an umbrella open in the hot sun.
2. People in my office take power naps after lunch. They put their head down on the desk and actually SLEEP. Its really, really weird to come back from lunch and find half the office dosing on their desks. Some of them even have little cushions to be more comfortable while napping and the 10-year-old in me wants to make my mobile phone ring and wake everyone up one day just to annoy them all.
3. Lunch is officially for an hour, but unofficially its for an hour an a half which always ends up extending to mostly two hours. I love our lunch breaks; they are awesomely long. People eat for an hour and then nap for 30 minutes or so.
4. Most of the people don’t actually know what they are eating half the time when they eat out. So, if you order a dish and you ask someone (even the waiters) what is in it they have this blank expression. Also, everyone eats out, the concept of cooking food for yourself doesn’t seem to exist.
5. Everyone has an obsession with visiting cards. Everyone has a visiting card. Even the bartender in Starbucks has a visiting card! Hell, even I have a visiting card (which is totally the best thing that has happened to me here, by the way! I actually have my name printed on a card, OMG!)
6. Chinese people have Chinese names for everything including Coke, Sprite and McDonalds, which are not mispronounced words for the original names, but different words altogether Kekoukele, Xue Bi and Mai Dang Lau respectively.
7. The Starbucks here puts coffee jelly in their frappuccinos (which I am kind a slave for, by the way). I know it sounds really awful, but it tastes so much better than it sounds and I might even venture to admit that it actually tastes good with coffee jelly. However, ever since I was a kid, I have never been rational around jelly, so my judgement is pretty biased.
8. When you go to restaurants, they ask you whether you want ice water or hot water. There is no in-between; you are not allowed to have your water at room temperature in this country. Its either frozen and makes your throat numb or is tepid and tastes of pee (don’t ask how I know this!)
9. I am one of the few people in this world that think that the Chinese accent is great. However, after spending a week here, I find myself talking in it at times and that has started bothering me.
10. A lot of restaurants shut down at 10 at night and the underground stops at 11. I’m assuming Chinese people like to go to bed early. This will teach me to complain about the Milanese metro that shuts at midnight.
11. And this is a bonus one: Cigarette packets warnings have the sign ‘smoking may cause impotence’ instead of death because impotence is so much worse than the fear of death.
    

PS: I'm really sore right now all over because I was forced to go out and play gaelic football for two hours straight on thursday. I'm really awful at it and yet I ended having such a lot of fun but my muscles are dead.

WTAF China?

How stupid do you think people are? No, like seriously? Do you think blocking YouTube, Blogger and Facebook in your country going to stop people from getting around this in any case? I'm not going to say any more because I don't want the government tracking my blog or anything, even though the idea of the Chinese government secretly monitoring my blog to see if I'm divulging state secrets is quite funny considering I haven't seen anything worthwhile in the 12 exact hours that I have spent in this country.

I am currently in city of Guangzhou (look it up and be ashamed if haven't ever heard of it!) sitting in the bed of my expensive-but-really-crap-quality-room (I shouldn't complain, at least I have a working air conditioner and satellite television which has exactly 100 channels in Chinese, and none in any other language!). Growing up with an OCD mother has given me extremely high hygiene standards, which makes every other place that is not my home not good enough for me. But I am determined to survive for the next two months and yes, there will be a lot of whining from Pan but she will surely but steadily make it through.

Work starts tomorrow, and I'm kind of looking forward for that becasue I am possibly the only human being in the world who looks forward to work (since it is still a novelty to me!). For the first time in my life I was throughly checked through by Chinese custom officials who opened my suitcase because they couldn't imagine why anyone would need five pairs of shoes for two months and the conversation went something like this:

Official: You have shoes, yes?
Me: ummmm...yes
Official: How many?
Me: I dont know, maybe about four, five pairs.
Official: You sell shoes?
Me: UH...no they are all mine.
Official: You have five shoes for two months?
Me: But they are my shoes. I need them!
Official: Why you need five shoes? Can we see your shoes?
(which is when I had to open my suitcase and prove that the shoes were indeed mine! And mind you this was when I had removed like two pairs last night because the bag was getting too heavy. That will teach me to carry so many shoes around the world)

Happy New Year

NB: This is one of the trams in Milan that has been decorated with lights. Its really fabulous to see it passing by at night!

It is the dawn of another year, and every year during this time, I go into a sort of panic. This is just partly because I'm getting older, but mainly because of the fact that I feel the need to press a rewind button in my head and go through the things or the lack of things I've done this year. It always makes me feel utterly unaccomplished and useless.

However, that said, I do feel as if I've come somewhere this year. Of course, I could have done so much more, but its these little things that count in the long run, right? I worked in an actual office for the first time in my life, and survived without being a complete klutz. I don't get cramps of crippling panic in my stomach when I have to phone unknown people to ask for information any more, I can successfully deal with meeting new people without making a complete fool of myself, I am not as bad with directions and navigation as I suspected myself to be, I don't mind asking people for help when I have completely and utterly lost my way (pride be damned). I can also navigate through almost any given public transport system in the world (because once you've managed to do it in Bombay, how hard can anywhere else be?). Oh, I am also super competent at filing documents, sending faxes and making databases of addresses and phone numbers of random companies on excel.

It just took just three months of office work for me to learn such important life lessons. If I ever manage to get a full time job, I just might write a book entitled 'Pearls of Office Wisdom - 101 ways to make your work life bearable and almost pleasant'.

Resolutions? I have a lots and lots of resolutions starting from: consume less chocolate, sleep for shorter hours, eat healthier food, less procrastination, more hard work, and ending with: more studying, watching less TV shows, reading more real books, learning to cook, learning to drive, being less grumpy, winning a Nobel Prize and solving the problems in the Middle East. I think it makes more sense to have a list of 'feasible' resolutions and 'infeasible' resolutions. But when I tried to do this I came to a very unpleasant conclusion, wherein I realized that most of my resolutions fell in the 'infeasible' category. So I think that it would be better if I just steered clear of resolutions this year.

So overall, I think its been a good year for me, in any case. I'm not sure what the coming year is going to bring, but I'll deal with it when it comes. When you become twenty one, you expect the universe to suddenly show you your place in the big scheme of things. Its very disappointing to note that this does not actually happen, so the only thing us lowly mortals can do is to go on living our lives and realize that its all going to fall into place eventually.

I wish everyone a super year ahead! Don't take my advice and go ahead make some resolutions :)

9 to 5

I always though that I wasn't cut out for nine to five jobs, but working for three months in an office has made me realize that I don't mind them all that much. Ok, there is the whole 'Oh god, I hate this mindless drudgery' factor, but how many people can boast of earning money while doing something they genuinely like?

To tell you the truth, its not like I earned any money while I was working, since it was an unpaid internship. All I got was university credits and an experience to last me a lifetime, as the internship guide said. The problem with working in an office that is not paying you is that they don't care much about what you're doing, which is not always a bad thing because it gives you a lot of time to do other things that you've always meant to do but never got around doing (i.e blogging, catching up with tabloids, looking at universities, wasting time on wikipedia etc.)

Being the lowly intern that I was, I arrived at office in the morning at 8.45 a.m and was given some menial tasks for the day. I browsed the internet, did the crossword and/or sudoku, worked for a bit, had lunch, chatted with my colleagues, made a few calls for work, updated and charged my ipod, worked a bit more and then got ready to leave by 5.30 p.m. That sounds like a nice day, doesn't it? I don't know why people complain about their jobs so much. This lifestyle suited my lazy self muchly. Most of the day was spent hanging around and waiting for my boss to come to office, which was mildly irritating in the beginning, but I got used to it soon enough.

It wasn't a bad life, but it wasn't a particularly stimulating one either. The week used to pass so quickly that I didn't even have time to think where time was passing, and by the time I realized I was tired, it was already the weekend. If I had a choice I'd probably not get out of bed for two days straight, but my friends wouldn't hear it otherwise, and I used to occasionally be dragged out in the evenings by either my school friends or work colleagues. Before I had time to even think about what was happening, three whole months were already over!

I had a good time at work, but this could be because I wasn't burdened with work to do or because my colleagues were really fun or maybe because it was the first time I was working, so I was over-enthusiastic. Sometimes, when I am drudging through exams and finance calculations, I happily think back about the time where my day used to consist solely of writing emails, making phone calls sending out faxes, and then a nine to five job doesn't seem all that bad!

Life as a n00by b00by

I was so ridiculously nervous on my first day at work. If I hadn't been so terrified, I might have seen the humour in the situation. I am very ashamed to admit that before this internship, I had never worked before in my entire life. Twenty years without doing a decent day's job is something that doesn't go well on a person's CV, and so I decided that to use this summer to do something more useful than lying around on a sunny Mediterranean beach.

I landed in Bombay on a Saturday night and my internship was to start on a Monday morning. I knew that I was going to be in Bombay right in the middle of the monsoons and kind of expected all the rain. However, I wasn't expecting the heavens to start celebrating with my arrival with a deluge of tropical rainfall. I figured that the rain would subside by the time it was Monday because it couldn't possibly rain continuously for more than twenty four hours, could it? Clearly, six years away from the city had taken away my memories of its wild rainfall.

It rained on Sunday morning, on Sunday afternoon, on Sunday evening and on Sunday night. I went to bed hoping that it would subside by the next morning because I didn't particularly relish going to work on my first day under the pouring rain. But luck, as usual, deluded me and it was pouring so much on Monday morning that I couldn't even look at the building in front of my house through the window.

I decided to take a taxi to work instead of trying to brave it out and wait for the bus like I had initially planned on doing. I was also very paranoid about reaching late, so I left extremely early and was wearing formal clothes and flip flops (and carrying my nice sandals in my bag). As a result, I arrived at work at 8.30 instead of 9, which was actually the time I had to report.

The first thing I noticed was that the office was flooded with ankle length deep water and one of the doors to the office was blocked due to the creation of a large muddy pond. Additionally, everything, including the computer CPUs and the wires were swimming around in the water. The office was also practically empty. I mustered up some courage and bashfully introduced myself to the receptionist who had thankfully just arrived. She told me in the nicest possible manner that one could to tell me that she didn't think that anyone would actually come to work today because of the rain, and I could sit wherever I found some space in the office.

Slowly people started trickling into office by around 10.30/11.00 in the morning and I had to undergo a very painful experience of explaining my life story, the circumstances under which I had come to live in Italy, study in Milan, and come back to Bombay. After knowing all they had to know about my life in under ten minutes, people eventually lost interest and went about doing their work as I sat uncomfortably counting the cracks in the ceiling. I was so worried the office was going to blow up any second because of all the wires that were floating in the water and that we were all going to die that I kept thinking of creative ways of quickly exiting the building. However, everyone else seemed relaxed enough as if this was a regular occurrence and continued working on their computers.

I sat on a chair all day, did the sudoku in the newspaper and read a fashion magazine until someone finally noticed that I existed. They were very nice and told me that my boss wasn't going to be in office for the day and that they didn't know what to do with me because there was neither a seat or a computer free for me in the office. There is clearly not much one can say to that. I got back home feeling very lonely and left out.

The next day, the sun was shining brightly; I got the bus on time; the office was no longer immersed in a puddle of muddy water; I took my laptop to work; someone created space for me to sit; people seemed friendlier; I was given my own stationary pile (and we all know that nothing makes your narrator happier than the sight of new stationary); someone invited me to sit with them for lunch; and my boss came and gave me work to do. It was what an ideal first day should have been!

Friday is my last day and work, and I am truly going to miss coming here daily. All these people that initially seemed scary and unapproachable turned out to be really nice and friendly, and I sort of feel silly for being so nervous around them.

Blogshead Revisited

Its been more than a year since my last blog post and I know that I have been missing for a ridiculous amount of time. To tell you the truth, I've been wanting to resume blogging for a very long time now, but have been putting it off at the back of my head. The thought of starting over from the very beginning seems very daunting, doesn't it? I'm pretty sure that the handful of people who might be reading my blog earlier have probably removed it from their sidebars.

I don't have any nice blogger friends any more, apart from one, who I'd like to think is also my friend in real life. But I have bravely decided to start blogging again, at least for a while and see how it goes. I'm sure its going to be as much fun as it was the first time, and I promise to try my best to update as regularly as possible.

A lot of things can change in one year, but nothing much seems to have changed in my life. I'm a year older, and that isn't as fun as it used to be. I still remember how desperate I was to become thirteen and I had made this whole countdown upto my birthday. But once you become twenty, birthdays just remind me of how time is running out. I feel old; everyone else seems to be younger and more accomplished than me. Ok, I admit that this doesn't take much effort, but earlier at least I had my young age as an excuse for my laziness, but now even that seems to have gone away.

However, on a less depressive note, there have been a lot of changes. I've travelled quite a bit in the last whole year, and I'll be surely be talking about that in my future posts. I'm just a year away from getting out of university (but I'm not sure whether I'm supposed to dread it or look forward to it, although presently I'm tilting towards the latter option).

I've been in Bombay for the last three months working an as intern here, which is as lowly as it sounds. I have always heard horror stories about interns being used as slaves in the offices that they are working in, but my experience here has been surprisingly pleasant. Also, living in Bombay after being away for almost six years has been wonderful. I know I always look at Bombay with rose tinted glasses, but I can't help it, I've always been like this. I've been braving the monsoon and taking public transport every day for the last three months and I still don't seem to mind much (even though I shriek like a twelve year old every time my hair gets wet!)

I still have a couple of weeks to go before uni starts and I'll try my best to be prolific before that.