Trip to Hampi

Hampi sunset
Originally uploaded by Zhenia.

Here is the essense of how my travel guide book describes most large Indian cities: "A noisy, congested metropolitan that is a convenient stopover point one the way to better places...". Not a very nice description... but after a trip to Hampi I understand their point of view a little better. Check out the picture -after all, our opinion of places depends on other places we have seen!

Hampi was a capital of an ancient Hindu kingdom in southern India. Right now it is a village with castle ruins and many many temples, set in the middle of a beautiful landscape... mountains of boulders and banana plantations. That was my best weekend in India so far!

IC... what?

A few months ago I saw this ad banner about ICICI bank on a banner in my Yahoo! mailbox. "This must be a joke", I thought, "Surely a bank cannot have a name like that".

However, I started to prepare for my traineeship I found out that ICICI is one of the biggest banks in India and that in fact, it manages payroll for all domestic employees of Satyam, my traineeship company. "Cool", I thought, "I'll have an ICICI account, sounds kinda funky".

So during the 3rd week of February, all of the interns from my batch had their ICICI bank accounts set up and started to patiently wait for their February salary. 3 weeks passed - no salary. Half of us ran out of money and started borrowing from the other half. We also tried to investigate the problem. Satyam confirmed that the money has been transferred to the bank.

That's when the action started. #1 - Excuses from bank guys: Apparently, there was a problem with our accounts. Apparently, the bank was missing some letters from the company, photocopies of our passports etc. Apparently, there was something wrong with our visas. #2 - Promises by bank guys: "You'll have money by 3:30 PM tomorrow." "You'll have money in 30 minutes." "You'll for sure have money in 5-10 mins!"

This has been going on for 2 weeks. Most of us trainees are now broke and calling home to get $ from our parents (I'm ok). The ICICI dudes had 40 days to notice and sort out any issues with our documents (although one would think they could let us know about any problems when they opened our accounts in the first place) but they didn't budge until we started calling them 10 times a day (that's because they would not pick up the phone) and went to complain to the boss of their boss.

Apparently, ICICI is a joke after all. Hahaha. And a very lame joke, too.