I already learned a lot about India yesterday when arriving at Diamond District. The chaotic traffic was not that surprising, but arriving at the reception was somewhat interesting. We took at least three stops on different guest blocks of DD to ask directions. Finally, in a dark corner of a block, I found the office of the apartment rental company. It took three or four trials on the doorbell before the door was opened, and after that some twenty minutes for the personnel to figure out what to do. There was no sign of the systematic approach I have gotten used to in Finland, so it took quite a long while to fill up all the papers and reach the apartment. All in all, India is the complete opposite of Finland in terms of punctuality, organiztion and labor practises. Everything is done by hand, since there are so many people to do so little.

The attitude to completing things is also totally different. I’ll let a couple of pictures tell it all:

Well, this stuff still works, at least most of the time. The shower sprays water all over the bathroom, water boiler can not be on at the same time with air conditioning and so on. Luckily I have two showers and the other one seemed to work better. Breakfast is served straight to my kitchen table and a maid will take care of the cleaning and laundry. The first shock is over, I am listening to my favourite music and I even have oatmeal whenever I want. These kind of small things make a huge difference, and I’m pretty sure I will like it here after learning the ways things work.

More pictures to be added later this weekend.

EDIT: The rest of the pics: http://heze.dyndns.org/gallery/v/misc/india/

Tags: diamond district, food, luxuries, ways of working, what is different