This trip has been a blast.  I really hope I can come back here.  I’ve decided that I’m not much of a camera person and the next time I travel I need to bring a video camera or something.  I keep not knowing what to take pictures, and then I realize that I just want to capture the whole thing to show people.
The last couple of days I’ve been making a point of taking the team out to lunch (make up for all of the lunches that bought me).  I’m feeling like I’ve got a good connection with the team now and I’m excited for how this will turn out.  These guys are bright and motivated.  On the business side, this has been incredibly productive.

Yesterday was my last day at the Chennai office.  For both lunch and dinner I went out with most of the team and they over-fed me both times.

For dinner I got the authentic Tamil-Nadu treatment.  No plates, no silverware, just a banana leaf, a rice-noodle naan type thing (I’ll get the name of it from Sriram today) and serving ladles.  After sprinkling some of the drinking water on the banana leaf and wiping it down with our hands (“cleaning” it, apparently this is the normal first step), We were served soup and the main course.  It was amazing food.

After dinner we went to go see a Tamil moving (that was actually a dubbed over version of a Malayalam film), called Panthaya Kozhi.  The theater that we went to was, according to Sriram, the type that “normal, non-upper class people go to”.  They apparently have pretty nice theaters in other parts of the city.  In the end I got a fairly authentic Chennai movie going experience.  The rest of the guys that I was with were complaining after the moving saying that it didn’t have enough songs and dancing and there was too much of a plot… go figure.