Indian Food Anyone?

I guess it's been long enough since I posted on this old thing.  I wish I was motivated to post more, but I just never am unless something big happens.  As it turns out something kind of big is happening tomorrow.  I'm leaving on a business trip that will take me halfway around the world. 

I'm leaving in the morning for a little over a week in Pune, India.  Pune is a city of about 4.5 million people in Southern India just southeast of Mumbai in Maharashtra Province.  I've heard the food there is spicy, but not as spicy as northern India with a little bit more sweetness thanks to their use of sorghum.

I'll be training a couple of people to provide IT support to our staff there in Pune.  We used to always fly them here for training but discovered that receiving training in the USA (no matter how lame or insignificant) made them so much more marketable that they almost always left for greener pastures soon afterwards.  So I get to go like 8,000 miles around the globe to train two people.  Training that would normally take 2-3 days.  Training that I now have to try to stretch to 5 days.  I guess we will go real slow and do a lot of review and repetition.

I was actually supposed to leave this morning, but my flight from Des Moines to Chicago was cancelled due to inclement weather in the windy city and we couldn't find an alternate that allowed us to make our international connections.  So I get to try again tomorrow morning to make the trip from Des Moines, to Chicago, to Frankfurt, to Mumbai, to Pune.  Leave at 8:00 AM CDT on Friday and arrive in Pune at 5:00 AM Sunday morning their time.  There is a 10.5 hour difference (yeah...ten and a half) so actual travel time in airplanes and waiting in airports is about 34-35 hours. FUN! 

At least my company was generous enough to book me in business class for the international legs of the flight, so I'll get a comfy seat that lays flat. (People sitting near me are going to have a long sleepless flight if I have a couple of adult beverages and start sawing logs in my lay flat seat.)

I'll be sure to come back here and post along with stories and pictures when I return in a couple of weeks. 

On the home front I have played a couple of sessions of poker at my home base casino, Prairie Meadows Racetrack and Casino.  Nothing all that exciting to report.  I had one  session where I got my money in good against a loose player with an overpair and he hit a two outer on the river to stack me. Another time I lost my stack flopping a full house and losing to a better full house on the turn.

My last session was an entertaining one, but I only left with a small profit of about $40.  When I arrived at the table there were two players with pretty big stacks for a $1-$2 no limit hold em game.  One was an elderly gentleman I had played with before and he was tight, but not nitty. The other was a guy I had never played with before, but he was very clearly drunk.  Like slurring and cursing drunk.  He was getting warned on about every other hand about his language by the dealers.  At first he was playing relatively conservatively, but then he decided he had a problem with a couple of the guys on my end of the table and started playing really loose.

If one of his villains from my end of the table entered a pot, when the action would get to him he would just pick up a random handful of red chips and splash it in the general area in front of his seat. It was usually about $40-$75 each time.  A lot of times he did this without ever looking at his cards first.  Then if people folded he would tell them what pussies they were and ask why they came to a casino if they didn't want to gamble.  At first the drunk was getting lucky and hitting weird two pairs or unexpected flushes, but eventually his luck started to turn.  It was pretty clear he was going to lose all of that money he had in front of him if we all just kept him happy and gambling. 

The old man to my left (different than the one with the big stack mentioned earlier) did not appreciate this style of play and started to loudly and aggressively tell the drunk how he felt. I started whispering under my breath to him to not tap the glass, but he didn't care.  Eventually drunk guy started to lose some significant hands and his stack that at one point had ballooned to almost $2,000 dropped back to just above $1,000.  The old man's needling, which didn't seem to bother him when he was winning, finally drove him from the table.  Myself and three others immediately cashed out and left.

I took a quick walk through the table games area before leaving and found drunk guy sitting at a $10 blackjack table betting $100 a hand.  Apparently he was determined to try to lose all of that money one way or another. 

See you back here in a couple of weeks.