Tuesday, July 19, 2005

The Summers

Completed the practical training and reached home last Wednesday evening. Now for an account of it all. This one is gonna be a long entry....

The Training. 60 days, 35 in Bangkok and 25 in Rayong (port city about 200 km SE of Bangkok. Houses the countries biggest industrial estate).

2 plants, Thai Organic Chemical Company (TOCC) and Thai epoxide and Allied Products Company (TEC). Six days a week, about eleven hours a day. Lots of work.

Learning, CFD, life in a chemical plant and life outside India. A little bit of Thai as well ;)

Friends, loads of them. A wide spectrum of people ranging in age, nationality, sex and religion.

The officers in both the plants were mostly Indians, the operators and others, all Thais. The Thai people worship the king as if he were God and the first thing I was told was never to utter a word against the king. Other than that Thais are cool and easygoing people. I understood that when I was told by a shopkeeper to go look at some other store for the mobile sim card that I wanted to buy as he was ‘busy’ having lunch then.

So lemme start from the very beginning. Was not given a filmi farewell with a pooja ki thali, tilak and all at the airport but yes mummy was apprehensive about the entire 'internship in Thailand' thing. Bangkok airport, baggage nowhere to be found and am not being able to locate a single official at the airport who could converse in English (yes, English is not at all popular in Thailand :O, language is an issue) After a lot of panicking a sweet old english lady helped me find my way to the lost and found counter where much to my relief some officials understood English. It took them more than two hours to locate my bags with the ones that were unloaded from a Swiss aircraft that had landed at just the same time as mine. Much to my amazement (and more to relief) the driver who had come to pick me up had the patience to wait all this time for me outside the terminal (easy going Thais). Now this driver (Boonjit) went on be a friend of mine, owner of a BMW, a major in archaeology, inspired by 'The Transporter' he is a regular transporter for the Aditya Birla Group. Owns a nice flat in Bangkok, plans to marry his girlfriend this July and join the archaeology department subsequently.

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