Goa: Part 4

The next morning was supposed to start at 9am with 3 sessions going at once allowing people to choose what session they wanted to go to. I say supposed to because when I rolled over there at about 9am there were about 3 other people. I was under the impression that these sessions, while not required, were strongly encouraged. I figured that at least the other people in my training class would be there so we could continue to make a good impression and someone would be happy they had hired us. I am not sure what time things actually started because once I realized no one was there I went back and had a nice breakfast and still made it back only 5 minutes late to the first session.

I realize some people reading this (all 3 of you) have no desire to read anything technical so I will be brief. The first session was about a strangler application which was really cool, although I may have walked in just because it said strangler in the title. The other really cool session was about our president running a triathlon (not Obama he should stick to improving his bowling). He showed a pre-training picture and you could see he had lost a LOT of weight. He said something about 42 kilos but Google tells that is 98 pounds and that seems extreme. I must be remembering it wrong. Anyway it made me think of Magee and triathalon experience. The president later asked me if I was planning on training for a triathalon since I had asked some questions, and I considered it for about one billionth of a second before I remembered I hate swimming and I like to drink beer.

After about 4 sessions I was feeling pretty good about myself, especially since there were about 30 people total attending sessions until about 11am. I had shown that I cared, or something like that and headed off to lunch. Conveniently after lunch happy hour at the hotel bar began again so I rounded up some people, some of who looked still drunk from the night before and began to exercise my liver again. After a while we decided to go hop in the pool but quickly found out that the poolside did not have happy hour. So people from the pool had to make the treacherous journey up the steps to get their 2 for 1 loving. I say treacherous because marble is fucking slippery even when its dry. We were supposed to put our swim suits on and meet back at the hotel bar and that's about as far as I made it because my friends betrayed me and went straight to the pool and left me waiting there. I sat down with some of the Australians and resumed drinking beer. I was having so much fun talking with them that I never made it to the pool, and just laughed at the steady train of my friends coming up to get more beer and then sliding back down the steps.

After a while I headed down to the beach and watched people play sand volleyball, feeling very sad because I love sand volleyball. I knew I couldn't play though because my foot still hurt just from walking the quarter of a mile to the beach. People finished up their games pretty quick and headed off and I got to sit on the beach myself for a while. It was pretty relaxing except for the retarded security guard who kept shining his flashlight at me to make sure I wasn't drowning 50 feet from the water. This is the same idiot who told my friend Vivek he couldn't go down to the beach at night because it is monsoon season. This would be a more compelling argument if it was you know monsooning (is that a verb) but it was completely dry. I'm sure some asshole lawyer made up some stupid rules and this security guard just got stuck trying to follow them, but I eventually snapped and told him to stop shining the light at me. Not sure if he quite knew what I was saying but you don't have to be a genius to figure out how annoying that has to be. He compromised by only shining it near me every minute or so.

I headed back up to the hotel which was strangely deserted. I eventually tracked people down in the ballroom place where they were having a cultural show. This cultural show included everything from traditional Indian dances in traditional dress to elaborate skits. While some of the skits were easy to understand and pretty funny a good portion of them were in Hindi so I was bothering whoever happened to be standing near me for translations. The highlight was this skit which was super elaborate and long. It started out with some dude getting his company taken over by another evil dude (keep in mind this is only what I think happened since only 1/3 of it was in English). The evil dude cut off the other guys arms, which was done with hilarious special effects - he spread his arms out real wide, someone pantomimed cutting them off and he pulled them to his side real quick and someone wrapped a blanket around him from behind. He then charged his son to save his company and died. This took like 15 minutes minimum and there were scatterings of jokes / dancing during the whole thing. Then we had an intermission for about 15 seconds and they then summarized everything that had happened in the last 15 minutes by acting it out in fast motion. This was fucking hilarious as it basically involved 15 people running/flopping around the stage acting as quick as humanely possible and again seeing the dude get his arms cut off again, minus the dramatic suspense. Part 2 began and the son went on a stereotypical mystical journey to find something. He met with a famous software developer, which was pretty nerdy but consider the audience, and did some training which transformed him into none other than the dark night, Batman. Seriously he took off some clothes to reveal the logo and put on a mask and cape. He then applies for a job at this company (still wearing the batman suit) and starts working. I don't know what happened at this point because there were like 10 Hindi jokes in a row and my translator had gotten tired of me asking in a stage whisper "what the hell just happened?" and ninjaed off. The long and the short of it was some chick fell in love with him and he got in a fight with the evil dude. They then decided to settle who gets the company via some gameshow challenge. These gameshows were apparently Indian reality shows / game shows and I don't have a clue what they were doing except for the Slumdog Millionaire who wants to be a millionaire reference. Batman loses to the evil dude 2-1 for the surprise ending, which then becomes more surprising when one of his henchmen takes off HIS shirt and shows that he is superman and stabs the evil dude in the back with what looked like a spoon. Superman then links arms with batman and they skip around the ballroom to thunderous (if confused) applause.

After this it was time for the main event the rain dance, which we had seen diligent hotel staff setting up all day. When people had first said there was going to be a rain dance I thought that maybe it was some traditional dance or a rain theme or something. This was incorrect what it actually was, was a dance floor setup outside with a metal frame around it and hoses pointed down towards the dance floor. I'm not talking light drizzle rain either, this was a torrential amount of water coming down on a pretty large dance area with huge speakers aimed at it pumping very loud music. I was feeling pretty skeptical that people would go out and dance in this arena which seemed more suited to a water park ride, but I was again impressed as immediately people started running out there. Unlike the previous night there was only a cash bar (thank god we would have had deaths) but since there is no liquor tax in Goa prices were still reasonable. For the most part though people were not really drinking and dancing they were just having a great time.
That picture is really not that great sorry.

Anyway the crowd became about evenly divided between people watching wet people dance and people actually dancing. Mother nature then decided this ratio was inappropriate and it started pouring. It struck me that any other outdoor event would have been ruined by this, but if anything this just made more people flock to the dance floor. I was watching from the side since after a hard night of trying to do crazy Indian dance moves, my crippleness was at an all time high. I was feeling a bit drowsy so I decided to grab a few redbull vodkas, which I then introduced Nitin to. At first he thought they were ok, but then realized they get you very high. High is the Indian way of saying drunk. I would like to take most of the credit since my elixir gave him the courage, but Nitin then proceeded to talk to the same girl for the next two hours. Progress since then has been shaky but that's a story for another post.

Eventually I got dragged out on the dance floor, immediately has someone slip into me and landed funny on my bad foot and limped back to my drink. The founder of our company was dragged out there as well, unfortunately for him wearing a nice dinner jacket and slacks. He seemed ok with it but he later told me he suffers from the same ailment as me (complete inability to dance). His mother decided on her own she wanted to go out there (I would conservatively guess 70) and several other people made a miniture ring around her so no one would crash into her. I was very impressed she was up for, at 70 I doubt I will even consider dancing let alone dancing in a flood. Things finally wound down about 3 or 4 am. At this point I was more than a few red bull vodkas in and apparently other clever people had been buying entire bottles of whiskey so when the bar shut down at 2 they weren't even fazed.