Bangalore airport gives a pretty good first taste of India. It is incredibly crowded - we landed ten minutes before midnight, and it still was completely filled with people. Also, it smells of curry, masala, coriander and basically everything else. As you might suspect, I don't know what actually coriander is (or, for that matter, what the other things are) - but the place does smell of Indian spices. There is a duty free shop that sells such things.
A driver was supposed to pick me up from the airport, but I did not see anyone waiting. So I decided to venture outside, to finally get some fresh air. Immediately, I got a cool second taste of India. There were some huge (bunyan?) trees, plenty of outdoor restaurants, hundreds of funny little yellow three-wheeled cabs (called autorickshaws) and, of course, thousands of people.
It turned out that all the drivers waited only outside of the airport. After a while I met the guy Microsoft sent. Actually, there were two of them; and another two waited at the apartment, probably as a welcome committee. So two of the observations I heard about India were immediately confirmed, firstly, labor can still be very cheap, and secondly, every job needs two people - one to do it, and one to constantly talk on a cellphone.
The drive from the airport was an experience in itself. The traffic in Bangalore is notoriously crazy, a couple of orders of magnitude worse than anywhere else I have been to so far. People drive on the left side of the road here. But I noticed only later, because the driver was going straight down the middle. This was probably the only way possible to move forward, but it did almost cause some accidents. A couple of times he stopped just a few millimeters (inches) from a moped with two or three people. And another thing - nobody wears a helmet in this town.
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