As promised, here is a run-down of what I've been up to in November & December. I'll start from the most recent since this weekend was ridiculous!
Trip to Nagarjunasagar Dam
Yeah, try saying that name...
So we started off on our day trip to the dam (about 3 hrs away) a little late thanks to our friend Vik who kept sleeping through my reminder calls. After a nice (read: terrifying) drive, we arrived at the dam, which was actually really beautiful. At the dam, you can hop on a ferry to an island with a museum and some old monk monuments so we jumped on the 45 min ferry. The scenery was great, but that's not the best part of the story....
So apparently, in India, if you're white and wear sunglasses, EVERYONE things you're a movie star or something. With 2 white guys, 1 white girl, & 2 obviously American Indians, we were mobbed by people wanting to take our pictures as soon as we got out of the car. But by far, the best part of the trip was when we got to the island. As we were pulling up, there were a ton of people waiting to catch the ferry. We told Dmitry to wave to see what would happen and the crowd erupted in applause! It was the most insane thing I've ever seen! You HAVE to check out the videos. This one is of them cheering as we got to the island and this one is of me walking up through the crowd. I had to turn off the video because people kept asking for my photo. A few guys even asked to take a picture of us shaking hands with them - like we're some sort of government officials! It was literally the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen. We kept joking that we had to keep our sunglasses on no matter what because otherwise they would see that we weren't famous and we're just frauds :) And after all of that, we were exhausted! I can't even imagine being a real celebrity and dealing with that every day!
Start of the dam pictures
Indian Wedding
So now that I'm an honorary Facebooker (sorry Google!), I tagged along to one of the Facebook team's weddings. My first Indian wedding! I think the highlight for me was the saree. It look about 15 minutes to get on (thanks to Aruna!) and is basically one 20ft piece of cloth that you bunch and tuck together. The wedding was Parsi, which is a very rare religion in India so the wedding wasn't what you would normally find (aka - it was only 2 days instead of 3-4). We ended up crashing the food/dancing part and had a blast! We ate off of banana leafs and the food was super yummy. And we pretty much started the actual party by hitting up the dance floor - go figure! All in all - awesome time.
Start of the Indian wedding pictures
Ridiculous Indian "Rave"
So one night we ended up getting out of dinner really late so ended up following people to an after party. This was supposed to be the cool place to go and is open until 4am. The actual set-up was pretty cool since it was big and by the lake, but there were pretty much zero people there. Good thing we found some amazing dancers to entertain us :) Sarah and I pretty much danced for 3 hours straight and just mimicked what these crazy dudes on the dance floor did. In India, there are a few differences with dancing: 1) it's all guys on the dance floor - we were the only girls and 2) any movement that you can do with your body is considered dancing (think Elaine from Seinfield). There was a lot of fist pumping and jigs to keep us busy all night. Sarah and I even tried to make up a ridiculous dance to see if others would start doing it. We started jumping up and down and flapping our arms like birds. Yeah...that caught on in a matter of seconds. Need I say anything more?!
Start of dancing pics
Thanksgiving
The Facebook landing team and I are buddies now (if you didn't know) and the good news was that Facebook was going to pay for a nice Thanksgiving feast! My contribution was my last 3 bottles of delicious imported wine. Pretty sure I drank more than 1 bottle, but that's another story :) Anyway, we made a list for the caterers consisting of every possible Thanksgiving dish and sushi and wonton soup. Random? yes. But come on - we all miss sushi!!! The sushi was actually pretty good once they brought us soy sauce. They somehow remembered wasabi, but forgot soy sauce! And of course, they said it would arrive in 20 min so we all decided to wait. About 30 min later, it was 10 minutes, then 10 minutes later another 10 min. I told them I didn't believe them anymore. The food ended up being pretty darn good and only a few dishes were really bad or weird. We had a great time drinking real wine, eating loads of food, and having a cucumber fight. Pretty great Thanksgiving :)
Start of Thanksgiving pics
