Budapest Diary - Day 3

First day in office! I thought I would dress decently, in a shirt, and appear before the colleagues who had never seen me before – not even a photo on the SAP Address Book (If you’ve bothered to check my address book page, you’ll know why). However, when I checked the shirts I found them badly crumpled. Hence I decided to switch back to T-shirts and put on my favorite tiger-eyed black garb. To avoid an extra bag I decided against carrying the lap-top case. The result was a huge backpack containing my camera and the laptop, and I looked the part of someone on the way for a trek in the Austrian Alps. First day in office!

It’s a long way to office from the hotel – three trains, totaling to almost an hour. The journey takes me from one end of the city to the other. It is quite beautiful in its own way – on one side is the sparkling water of the Danube, and on the other, the apartments filled with graffiti. These guys seem to have something for graffiti. You can find it everywhere – even more than what you find in US city. As is the case in Bangalore, the office is situated in a remote location on the outskirts of the city, in a so-called software park. Over here, software parks are not characterized by hip-hop crowds and shopping malls aka ITPL.

Once I reached the office all the guilty feeling that I was not properly dressed for the occasion evaporated on its own. There was hardly anyone who was formally dressed – most of them were in shorts. The office itself is quite pretty, more of the Bangalore model than the Walldorf model, with open cubicles, which my colleague declared that it irritates him at times. Pragati found it quite to her liking, and for me it doesn’t matter. Lack of meetings in the morning meant that I could finish my work faster. Lunch was nothing much to talk about, and now, we were back on the Walldorf model, with me not able to figure out what I was eating!

The afternoon, as expected was spent in meetings, discussing what we are doing, and what we had to do (the usual stuff), and the evening was spent in the shadows of the enormously beautiful Hungarian Parliament building, where Pragati was adamantly staying away from a cute dog, with an ever more cute owner.

Observation of the day:
On the whiteboard of the meeting room was scribbled the following phrase:

Make oneself heard/understood/felt.
No matter how ugly/homely/plain (however ugly/homely/plain) she is.

Am still wondering what it means