This week has been pretty uneventful, although I've been very social after work - which may be considered an event in my lazy air-conditioned life.

On Tuesday night we had our team dinner at a restaurant called 'Laguna' whose gimmick was that they had sand and a pool of water throughout the restaurant with fish swimming in it. Unfortunately, many people found out the hard way that there was water, and even our manager accidentally stepped right into the pond on her way in. The dinner had a 'fairy tale' theme, which involved a lot of creativity, since most people here, including myself, don't have random costumes sitting around read to use.

I went as Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz, and I came to work in the morning, hoping to get some props. "Ok, I need a stuffed dog, a basket, and red sparkly shoes!" - Within 5 minutes I had all three items from people's desks, just within the optimization team. Rupa was hilarious, because she told me that I must be mad to expect anyone to have red sparkly shoes in their desk, until she remembered that she actually had red sparkly shoes in her desk! I joked that only in India could I ask if someone had red sparkly shoes at the office, and they'd actually have them! Other costumes included 'superman' and 'batman' with the symbols printed out and taped to people's shirts, Harry Potter, Hansel and Gretel, Ali Baba, Lois Lane, a leprechaun, and several characters from Archie comics (who I didn't recognize).

Then yesterday I went out for TGIW with some ex-pats. We went to an ‘Ex-Pat’ bar called Frangi Panni which roughly translates to ‘Gringo Water.’ There were 3 German girls (Anja and her two visiting friends), an Italian named Roberto, Grainne, Anup, and several Hyderabad Googlers. It was ‘ladies night’ so all the girls got free drinks, and they played ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ and ‘Thriller’ and we ate something called the ‘premium fries basket’ which included French fries, curly fries, hash browns, potato skins, and more – enough to clog the arteries for a century. There were a bunch of balding middle aged white men there, who I assume must work for Microsoft ;) The ex-pat experience is a strange phenomenon.