Living

This is the apartment where the bank has put me up. It's in the Nungambakkum area (Stirling First Cross St), which is a quiet and leafy street away from the chaos of the roads.

It's the 3rd floor , our lounge has the unobscured bay windows you can see here. It's damn hot in that apartment, The flat roof above gets baked all day. Without the aircon I imagine it's a bit like the chicken feels in the Tandoori oven. Chennai has a lot of sea wind, luckily, which cools the heavy humid air so it's tolerable. 2 of the 3 aircons failed last week and the repair man was away in Bangalor, I was close to relocating to a hotel, it was too hot to sleep well. Putting the fan on full speed is not calming - I get buffetted about as the ceiling is quite low!

The shots below are looking down the road, and inside the lounge.

New project - India!

So much for being OI's Eastern Europe regional director, here I am in Chennai, India on a project...well, at least the "East" bit was right.

I've been here 3 weeks so far, but it seems like 3 months :-( The main reason is the volume of traffic and the waves of noise that wash over you - ringing two-stroke exhausts, horns being beeped - it's just so tiring. The mornings can be bad, though at least that is done in daylight, but the evening trip home...when you can see the smog in the headlights, ugh. And the auto's (above) are open, right? and murphy's law says they will always pull up alongside the big whale of a bus, just so that the 4" exhaust is pointing right into the back of the auto. Unerring.

Ok, so there's lots of vehicles on the roads, but that least that also equates to a lot of people being moved about too. Not like one-person-per-car in the UK. 4 on a bike is not uncommon - nor 5. The most I've seen is six. After that they'd have to get fancy and do an inverted pyramid or something :-)