My first days

I want to come into detail about my first days and the culture shock I have lived through (and still do). Already the very first hour in India confronted me with a widely known aspect of this culture that I haven’t expected to touch me that soon: Religion.
At one side there were the Ganesha-Festivities all over the country. That was the reason why I could not continue my journey to Bangalore and Vellore by bus or train as those were all booked out long before. I had to spend the whole day in Hyderabad waiting for the domestic flight to continue to Bangalore in the evening. This extended my total travel time to more than 32 hours what exhausted me quite a bit.
At the other side Hyderabad has a large Muslim community so on that same day there were thousands of Muslim pilgrims at the airport travelling to Mecca during the ‘Ramzan’ (Ramadan) – all of them wearing nothing more than a white towel and sandals, I was continuously astonished watching this happening around me.
Perhaps I should mention that the airport in Hyderabad looks not exactly what one expects an airport to look like. There is a lot of business going on and if there wasn't a mosque right in front of the main entrance(s) I would rather compare it to a bigger bus terminal or train station in Europe.
Well, at the end of that day I decided to conveniently stay at *any* hotel in the centre. The next day I woke up, with a horrible jetlag as i had never experienced it before. That was in a hotel in the centre of Bangalore - not exactly a bargain. Again, things were not coming close to expectations to the Indian Silicon City. In front of that hotel there was a muddy street, disgusting noises, everywhere dirt, tunes, poor people, horning vehicles of all kind, no free space and some 50 metres of a walk I spotted the very first holy animal - a cow. In the next street I was amazed by the first temple, a quite boring one from nowadays point of view. And as before, wherever I went to people wanted to talk to me, beg, sell some goods or just for the fun of knowing my name and/or where come from. While walking further, an exotic religious sound (wouldn't call that singing) that remotely reminded me of Muezzins or the Qur'ān-readings in the Qatar Airways plane radio made me experiencing pure India from the first moments on.
In other words, nothing that looked like the most westernized city of the country.
I figured out later that this was not the newest part of Bangalore.

I was expected to arrive in Vellore Institute of Technology very soon, so I had to continue without completing interviews in Bangalore at that time. From nowaday's point of view that was good luck since only later I got really good contacts to relevant experts.