Business trip to India

I posted this in LinkedIn a few days ago

Kristian Harder and I visited Tata Consultancy Services in Bangalore and Pune two weeks ago, and I would like to thank the whole team for making us feel truly welcome, specially our hosts Anil Gangolli, Ronney Samuel and Sneha Sikchi (Malpani).

Our teams have been working together for several years and there is a strong foundation to continue our collaboration, based on our common commitment to deliver high quality data and software products. Thanks for letting us take part in your townhall meetings to provide context on Business Aviation and how we use data to drive decisions and enable value.

On a more personal note, playing cricket for the first time and doing it in India will be a cherished memory.

Mumbai airport

 

India - Bangalore and Pune

 

Business trips are always busy and you end up seeing hotels, airports, offices and restaurants (if you are lucky). Not everything is nice, however there is always a chance to capture beauty when you see things through the eye of a photographer

Doha

 

Turns out you can see a fair amount of Doha in a long layover en route to somewhere else, which is what I did a couple of weeks ago. Just get a transit visa, jump in the metro with a day pass and be willing to do quite some walking (we clocked over 30 thousand steps).

Six Views of Mount Fuji

 

Almost a month ago I took these (and many more) photos of Mt Fuji, just seventeen kilometers away from it. One of the few times I wished I had a better camera and a proper tripod with me (I stopped lugging a tripod with me as I used to ten years ago). Which means that the tripod in one of the photos above is not mine, it belongs to a japanase photographer with way better gear than me who was there patiently taking photos. I wish I knew how his photos came out. Despite the language barrier we exchanged a few smiles and head vows as we both had Canon cameras. I guess there is always a chance that the internet will make its magic and connect us.

How to plan a two-week holiday in Japan in a few days

TL;DR

Step 1: Buy your tickets in the last minute. 

Step 2: Hurry up!

In a burst of spontaneity a month ago, we bought flight tickets to Japan on Sunday 9th for a flight departing on Monday 17th from Frankfurt with a stopover in New Delhi. We left home on Sunday to drive down to the airport, stopping by in Leipzig to visit my mother in law, so not a lot of time available for planning such a trip, even less considering I was still fully working that week. So we focused on the essential bits and managed to do the following before leaving:

• get an eVisa in case we would get out of the airport in the stopover in India. We only took the decision once we were in New Delhi, tired from the overnight flight but eager to see at least the Akshardham temple.
• book a hotel in Tokyo for initial 6 days with a rough idea of what to visit and draft itinerary for rest of the days, details to be arranged on the go. We did it through booking.com and we got a free taxi transfer from Narita to Tokyo (which is a long long way). Even better, we got an extremely nice chinese taxi driver who made the trip very enjoyable with her comments.
• buy 7-day JR passes and Suica cards, thanks to this shop in Berlin.
• download a few maps and make sure we had a translation app. As back-up we bought a German-Japanese phrase book in Leipzig on Sunday evening.
• buy one eSim card for India and another one for Japan. This was a very last minute (last second?)  thing even by the standards of this trip and turned out to be a lifesaver. We bought them on the day we were flying out and it hugely simplified our life, no need to queue for sim cards at airports, no need to book and return wifi packs, etc. If you travel around the world, check Airalo, great value for money. Plus, shameless plug, you can use JC8079 as referral code to get a few dollars discount on first booking.
• forget the second battery pack for my sixteen-year old camera and, even worse, the charger. The solution was to create an account in Amazon in Japan and have one of each delivered to my hotel (btw, it turns out that batteries and chargers for old Canon cameras are super cheap in Japan!, bullet dodged...)

Although we were each allowed to check in 46 kg plus hand luggage, we decided to travel light and just take a carry-on and a rucksack each, which were not even full! The lady at the check-in desk in Frankfurt airport was amused as everyone else on that flight seemed to be lugging huge suitcases.

Inspired by Molinos and her roadtrip last year, I bought a notepad and managed to write something often enough to keep some of the magical details. Just that she writes about a million times better than I do, however it´s the intention that matters and it will be a nice thing to read in twenty years.

And just like that, we were off to a great adventure!

Pitufo viajero

He contado los aeropuertos por los que he pasado y me salen 58, aunque no puedo asegurar a ciencia cierta no haberme olvidado de alguno (por ejemplo sé que he estado varias veces en París pero no recuerdo si en Charles de Gaulle, en Orly o en los dos).

Más datos inútiles:

• En aproximadamente la mitad de los aeropuertos he estado por el trabajo (sobre todo los más lejanos y los del Reino Unido que no son del área metropolitana de Londres).
• En trece de ellos simplemente hice escala de camino a algún sitio sin siquiera ver la ciudad. De hecho en un caso hicimos escala y ni siquiera salimos del avión (!)
• Unos treinta aeropuertos están en Europa (o estaban, porque Tegel y Tempelhof ya no existen como aeropuertos). 
• El país en el que en más aeropuertos he estado no es España, es Reino Unido.
• Y como curiosidad final, en algunas ocasiones el aeropuerto de despegue y el de destino fue el mismo: en Cuatro Vientos para las clases prácticas de Mecánica de Vuelo en la carrera y en Torrejón de Ardoz en un vuelo de reabastecimiento durante la mili (yo no iba en un caza, ya me hubiera gustado)

Quedan muchas cosas por ver y descubrir...

PS (Nov 2023): Dos nuevos aeropuertos y ciudades visitadas, Nueva Delhi y Lisboa

PS (Jan 2026): Cinco más en 2025: Poznan, Doha, Bangalore, Pune & Mumbai; y por fin ya he estado en Amsterdam y Bruselas y no solamente en los aeropuertos

Starting a new book

Against all odds

I spent more time than I would have liked to in several airports last week. Paper books are quickly becoming a rarity. And people reading on electronic devices don´t seem to show the same level of concentration. Right after I took this photo, another lady took the empty seat next to me. She was reading something on her iPad and, at short intervals, having a whatsapp conversation. Not quite the same.

Sala de espera en Heathrow

A la vuelta de la última vez que fui a EEUU hice escala en Heathrow. Era muy pronto y la sala de espera estaba vacía. Creo que me tomé un cuenco de fruta y me bebí un zumo de naranja mientras que hacía tiempo para el vuelo a Berlín. Sin duda alguna, una forma mucho más cómoda de esperar. Me pregunto como será el de primera clase.

Harvard

I walked around Harvard court for a while, but could not enter any of the buildings there (I guess for good reasons). The one I entered outside of the court was the Science Center also walked around the nearby Sanders Theater, where the lessons of CS50x are recorded.

Massachusetts Avenue

I had a quick lunch at the Stratton Student center (not pictured above!) and when I came out, the weather had not really improved much. Initially I had planned to go to the MIT Museum, but seeing that the weather was not that great and that I did not want to drive to Hartford in the night, I decided to skip that and go straight to Harvard for a quick walk.

Snowstorm

This is what the next day looked like in the morning. Good thing about Boston, there are plenty of things to see close by. The two at the top of my list were MIT and Harvard. So off I went (driving very slowly) to nearby Cambridge before driving to Hartford in the afternoon.

Freedom Trail (vii)

By the time I took this photo, the blue hour was finished and I was tired enough to call it a day (actually a very long day due to the time difference). Just walked back to South Station and got onto the bus back to the hotel at the airport. Nice that the center of Boston is so small. Easy to understand why it´s called the Walking City.

Freedom Trail (vi) - Quincy Market

I am usually too lazy to retouch my photos. In this case the perspective effect on the tall tower behind Quincy Market is simply a bit too much. So I gave the perspective tool in Gimp a try.

I am quite convinced that this sudden interest in correcting perspective has to do with me recently reading about image warping here. But I wonder if I have not stretched the Market and the tower a bit too much...

Freedom Trail (v) - Old State House

Some times I take my tripod for no good reason, just in case, end up carrying it around for hours and never get to use it. Well, not this time. It was already too late for my old camera´s sensor to take these photos just by cranking up the ISO (too much noise) or holding the camera by hand (exposure too long, i.e. blurred image for sure). And there came the tripod to the rescue...

Freedom Trail (iv)

Something that always gets my attention are these churches buried in between high rise buildings. The churches are not small, it´s just that the buildings around are huge.

Freedom Trail (iii)

Freedom Trail (ii)

Freedom Trail (i)

If you don´t have much time in Boston, one easy option is just to go for a walk along the Freedom Trail. So that´s what I did. It was not that cold and, thankfully, it was not windy (unlike the following day...)

This was my first stop, the House of Representatives, as seen from the Boston Common.