Oh my god. The food. The food.
First day here, I have breakfast in the hotel, get into the office and spend the morning in meetings where we discuss business processes and how technology should be used to make them work. I was to understand later how this becomes relevant.
I get to talk to the other folks here - all of the technically competent. And the people here are a very diverse group. Right now the Filipinos have the edge, and the Singaporean, Indian and the Chinese are right on their heels. The Germans, British and Americans are a decided minority. I was glad to see that a very large proportion of the developers here are women (close to 35%). That is compared to the 7% or so we have in San Francisco and was a nice change to be in a normal environment like that.
The only problem I see is that the culture here is very heads down and task focussed. They’re all like “give me my task, tell me when it’s due and go away”. Which is not the way my company works. We like a lot more collaboration - mainly because some of these processes are dynamic and change during the process of code development.
So lunchtime rolls around and a group of us decide to go for Indian. We go downstairs, hop into the subway (more about that later) and go to Little India. Once there, we walk into a cute little South Indian restaurant, looking just like one would in Bombay and place our order. Which is where their business process falls down. The meals come with a free drink. And two of us in the group did not want a soda with our dosa. Which was a problem, because their ordering system would not accept a meal order without a drink. After some back and forth while we desperately tried to avoid doing any tech support, we went ahead and got bottled water with our meals.
The food is incredible. I sat there eating my idli and vada and dosa, breaking the idli to dip it in the sambar and licking my fingers clean after each bite. Mmm. And this was just my first meal here.
That evening, we went out for drinks and later, everyone wanted to go eat at the buffet in my hotel. Now, used to hotel food in America, I was naturally horrified. And everyone kept assuring me otherwise. So I decided to go ahead, since I could satisfy my food explorations another time.
The hotel buffet is a restaurant inside the lobby of the hotel. It was surprisingly packed and we had to wait 30 minutes for a table. We had our beers so we didn’t mind waiting. Once inside, we hit the buffet: it was less of a buffet and more of an attempt to duplicate the hawker stalls, There were different food stalls inside, and you could walk around sampling a little of everything. There was Thai, and Singaporean, and Indian and Chinese and Korean food.
I had Singapore’s national dish: Chicken rice. The dish is exactly what it says. The chicken is boiled, and once it’s cooked, dunked into ice water. The broth is used to cook the rice. That makes the rice extra delicious. The highlight of the evening was discovering that the fruit bar had fresh mangosteens. I’d never had one before and oh wow, they are yum. I think I’m going to find a grocer that sells those and get some to eat over the weekend.
