TWU Amazing Race (part 2)

In the last post we took a look at the beginning of the Amazing Race events.

The second event? Darts. Darts in the park. The kids from Chicago were assumed to be good at this, because it's an American game. Unfortunately darts to Americans isn't the same as cricket to Indians. We adjusted the rules slightly: If a dart hit the board, it was worth 5 points; if it somehow landed on the bullseye, it was 15 points.

Then began the mummification process. We took the tallest, and slenderest, member of our team and mummified him to the nth degree with toilet paper. It was quite funny to see the crowd of park-goers gathering at this point. By the end, our mummy couldn't see, though he did claim he could breathe.

The last phase was coming up when I spotted some graffiti. This graffiti wasn't in the style of Detroit or Chicago though. This property defacement was so different I needed a picture.

Finally it was time for the Amazing Race. We all started with one clue, 1.5 hours, and a beginning location. Our team's location was MG Road, which was covered in depth here. We ran there from the park, solving the clues between strides. Lucky for us a 25-year local of Bangalore was on our team.

The race involved tons of running. The first clue lead us to a restaurant where no one knew they were supposed to give us the next clue. We finally wrangled it out of them somehow and ran down the road to the next location. This continued for an hour, with local knowledge playing an incredibly important role.

Highlights

An extraordinarily cramped ride in an auto-rickshaw

Sprinting through a downpour -- monsoon season is not over

Flagging a driver down and hitchhiking in his car -- 6 of us in a compact

TWU Amazing Race (part 1)

On Sunday, August 15th, the graduates of the previous ThoughtWorks University scheduled a day in the city. It was incredibly generous of them to take the time to prepare events and guide us throughout the day.

We started the day in Bangalore's Shiva Temple. It was an interesting escape inside the city, with mountains created in the temple that attempted to take visitors to another place. The relentless growth was obvious though, as billboards and building corners peaked above the faux mountain tops. Shiva, the god of destruction, was present. "Interesting," I thought, as I cut my arm on the way in as I felt my peace of mind destroyed in thinking of the looming implications.

From the temple it was on to a park. We had breakfast and arranged ourselves into teams. Just as you'd expect from a group of 20-somethings, the team names we had to choose from were the Naked Warriors and Flying Dragons. Solving the tough problems as I often do, we compromised on my hybrid suggestion and competed as the Flying Naked Warrior Dragons.

The first competition was multi-faceted. Each team member had to complete the sequence:

1. Jump rope to the potato sack
2. Get in the potato sack and hop to a line in the ground
3. Tell the next member of your team to start step 1
4. Run back with the sack to the middle of the course
5. Grab the jump rope and return it to the start

The cycle gets repeated until you've run out, at which point the clock stops and your team's time is recorded.

Remember those street dogs? A tame one was present for all of this event.

MG Road

The MG in MG Road stands for Mahatma Ghandi, as per Wikipedia. This is one of the busiest roads in the city and a big part of the TWU Amazing Race held on Sunday, August 15. It features tons of shops, restaurants, pushy street salesmen, and street dogs.

To say the road is bustling is a vast understatement. It reminds me of Chicago during the Blackhawks' Stanley Cup Parade. Today was India's Independence Day, but the word from locals is the area generally looks like this:

Shops are compact here. Moving to Chicago was a shock because of how much less space existed for stores than in Michigan and suburbs generally. Coming here is just as much of a shock. You'll find rows with more stores than I ever thought could comfortably exist:

Unsurprising are the stores that feel right at home in India:

The list of surprising in much longer though. The American presence can be felt in every corner of the world. It sometimes shows up in odd places, as in jeans companies (Wrangler, Lee, Levi's) having their own stores -- a rarity in the States if it even exists. The short version of what I was surprised, and slightly disappointed, to see:

Now, of course it isn't all clothes here. The restaurant you'd expect to be here definitely is -- and even does home delivery

But also so is one that I didn't expect at all.

Bonus: it appears to be the cleanest KFC I've ever seen. Could it be I'm looking forward to eating at KFC for the first time ever?