The Blog of Gord

I read in the Times of India this past weekend that bloggers are “mostly self-indulgent diarists interested in one topic above all others– themselves”. Shameful. Well, back to my experiences in Bangalore…

On Saturday, I took an auto-rickshaw to Bull Temple. That was my first auto-rickshaw ride, which is hard to believe considering I’ve been here over a month. After breakfast I walked over to Richmond Road, flagged one down, and said I wanted to go to “Bull Temple”. It’s supposed to be a major landmark, so I didn’t expect any confusion. I got a blank look, though, so I tried again. Still nothing, so I got out my map and showed him. “Ah, Bool Tempooluh!” I guess I need to work on my accent, and meanwhile, keep the map handy.

Bull Temple was one of the few Bangalore sights mentioned in my guide books that I hadn’t seen yet. It’s open to non-Hindus, so I took off my shoes and went in. As you might expect, the temple has a statue of a reclining bull (“Nandi”, ridden by Shiva) inside, in this case 4.5m tall. The bull is over 200 years old, and the temple goes back to the 1500’s. A priest gave me the “blessings of the bull”. It seemed like a pretty quiet afternoon at the temple, as there were only a few people there, far outnumbered by the trinket vendors lining the path outside. Perhaps the crowds come later in the afternoon.

The temple is set in a nice park with a couple of other temples, so I strolled around there for a bit, enjoying the quiet, before going back out on the street to walk to Lal Bagh, about a kilometre away.

Lal Bagh is the big park I’d seen briefly on my first weekend tour, when I didn’t have time to properly explore it. The park is about 240 acres, including a large lake, hills, forests, gardens, and has a lot of different landscape arrangements to see.

It was laid out in the 1700’s by Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan, the guys you met in my Srirangapatnam blog entry from last weekend. I spent a good three hours hiking around the park, but I still don’t think I saw the whole thing. It’s a friendly, quiet place, probably in part because of the number of uniformed and rather tough-looking security guards patrolling. No beggars at all. I was stopped repeatedly, though, by people who just wanted to say hello, find out what country I’m from, my job, marital status, etc, in other words, typical casual small talk here. That happens to me a lot: in parks, temples, stores, on the street, everywhere.

After a good walk, I found a shady bench by the lake where I could read a book. That lasted about half an hour, when I suddenly heard a noise above me. I looked up, and there was a monkey looking straight down at me from a light pole four feet overhead. Then there was one on the bench beside me, and after a couple of minutes, there were about twenty surrounding me, including some with babies, all hoping for a treat. Of course that attracted lots of people who wanted to feed them bits of mango or nuts (there are people selling snacks all over the park), so that was the end of my quiet reading. Monkeys are more fun to watch than a book anyway.

My second auto-rickshaw trip was more eventful than the first. I ran into one of those aggressive auto-rickshaw drivers who have their own agenda, wanting to take you places where they’ll get a commission (or, in some cases, rob you). He was waiting at the park entrance, hoping for someone he could take sight-seeing or shopping, and wouldn’t take “home” for an answer. After a couple of minutes of polite arguing, I realized this wasn’t going to work, so I got out and flagged down an auto-rickshaw who was just driving by. That’s usually the safer bet anyway.

On Sunday, I walked to Brigade Road, the major shopping/partying area to do some shopping, and believe it or not, I ran into that same auto-rickshaw driver from my first weekend walk, the one who walks through the crowd trying to convince people to go to his rickshaw to go sightseeing or to another shopping area. This was actually our third meeting, since I also met him last weekend, and he remembered me both times. Bangalore has over 7 million people… how can I keep running into the same guy??? His schtick is that if I’ll go with him to one place for free, he’ll get a t-shirt for his kid. The more common line is “ten rupees only suh, one hour”. To give you an idea of how dodgy this is, the base fare in an auto-rickshaw is Rs 12 for the first 2 km, plus Rs 6 per km after that, so for it to make sense for these guys to spend so much time not driving, the commission they get for delivering marks must be appreciable.

In between spiels for chess sets, articulated wooden cobras, Rolex clones, sunglasses, posters, and people offering to pray for me for money, I checked out various handicraft stores. The ones with the best selection seem to be the ones run by the governments of India or Karnataka. These are fixed price stores with some assurance of quality, so while I might be able to bargain for a better deal elsewhere (theoretically), I find this sort of browsing a lot more pleasant. Then I visited Planet M, a big music store, to see what it was like. It’s like any big music store in North America, except that it’s divided primarily by language rather than genre, with many separate sections, each dedicated to a language, some of which I hadn’t heard of before. Compare that to Canada, where French-Canadian music is filed under “International”, mixed in with Scottish bagpipe bands and Tuvan throat music. “Pop” here seems to mean western pop. CD’s are typically Rs 150 (C$3.50), DVD movies about Rs 400 (C$10.00).

With a couple of hours left to kill before dark, and being in the entertainment district, I decided to try one of Bangalore’s famous pubs. “Pub World” sounded promising, so I stepped around the cow on the sidewalk (I’m not making this up! I also had to avoid a donkey around the corner from my house earlier), and the white-gloved doorman ushered me in. It was dark, freezing cold (at least it felt that way since my shirt was soaked), and looked almost exactly like any upscale bar back home. It wasn’t busy, especially considering the crowd outside and the temperature in the high 20’s. The clientele, what there was of it, seemed to be mostly westerners, including a couple of half-tanked ex-pat Brits complaining about “tourists”.

For me, “Pub World” conjurs up images of banks of taps with exotic brands attached. I sat at the bar, asked what was on tap, and the bartender pointed at The Tap, singular. Kingfisher. Guess I’ll have a pint of that! You’ve probably had Kingfisher at an Indian restaurant before, so you know it’s an OK beer, but this was like walking into a pub in Canada and seeing only a Labatt’s Blue tap. After a nearly beer-less month, and a day of walking around in the sun, the first Kingfisher went down pretty good. So did the second. The third wasn’t too bad either. I was in my happy place, not even minding watching golf highlights (“golf highlights”; see: “oxymoron“) on ESPN.

Bike Ride

Today the company van wasn’t available for the trip home, so one of the guys on the team took me home on his motorcycle. I’ve been on plenty of motorcycles before, but never in no-holds-barred traffic like Bangalore’s. Before, I thought riding in a car here was exciting… this takes it to a whole new level.

In related news, the state of Karnataka (of which Bangalore is the capital) is introducing helmet laws on July 31, making helmets mandatory for both drivers and passengers. Currently nobody has to wear a helmet, and very few do. There’s some debate as to whether it’s going to be enforced. Some in the government object on the grounds that the average middle-class family can’t afford four helmets, since they’re often all on the bike at the same time. Others want it only to be enforced on larger roads where there’s room to go fast (as if being inches from cars moving at “only” 50 km/h makes it safer). In any case, if the helmet laws are enforced to the same level as other traffic laws, it’s not going to make much of a difference.

Food & Allergies

No, not mine; as far as I know, I’m allergic only to work. Instead, one of my Japanese housemates had been looking increasingly incomfortable lately, very itchy, and finally had to visit the hospital today to get it checked out. That must have been fun. He’s to stay off eggs, meat, and fish for a week.

I wonder if it could be insect bites. Last week he changed rooms because his old one had “bugs” in the air-conditioner, and in my first week, I had thought there were fleas in my room. Once or twice a week the house gets shut up and sprayed with something nasty-smelling, but there are still things biting in the night here. That’s in addition to the mosquitos, of course, so in addition to taking anti-malarial drugs, I wear DEET to bed.

Bangalore is in the tropics, after all. One evening I caught this critter crawling on my bedroom wall. He was about four inches long.

Saturday 15 July

This weekend the lead tester on the team organized an outing to Mysore and area. As originally planned, it was to be a two-day trip, and everyone was coming: all twelve people on the team, plus me. Four had to cancel, but we still had a good turnout, with nine of us committed.

The plan was to get an early start, so I was up at 04h15 to get ready, and finish packing. Several people would meet at the office (1 km from the guest house), then I was going to be picked up at 05h30, then we’d pick up the rest of the team who were meeting on the other side of Bangalore. As usual, it didn’t go completely according to schedule. I ended up being picked up about 06h20, partly because of the flexibility of social time here, but also partly because nobody could find the guest house. I was waiting down by the gate, and didn’t have a phone with me, so I couldn’t give directions. I enjoyed a quiet half hour in the front garden with the security guard, who doesn’t speak English.

For nine people, we had booked a “9+1″ vehicle, for nine people plus the driver. What we actually got was a “7+1″ Toyota Qualis, an SUV with two rows of seats behind the driver’s seat, so with nine of us (plus the driver) it was going to be a bit cramped. We stopped at the office, picked up a couple of cases of water bottles, filled up with diesel at a Shell station (at Rs 37.3 per litre, or about C$0.90) and then went to pick up the rest of the team.

With everyone finally collected, we found some breakfast (idli and chai), and were on our way by 08h00.

Even though the vehicle came equipped with a fold-down video screen, we ended up just listening to music all day, a lot of Indian pop music and Bollywood movie themes. We kept flipping between CD’s full of MP3’s, so for a while we’d listen to Hindi music, then Telegu for a while, then Kannada, etc. I’m afraid I wasn’t able to tell the difference, but everyone else sure could. Some of the tunes were quite catchy.

The distance from Bangalore to Mysore is about 140 km, and we made pretty good time, covering that in 2.5 hours including the usual al fresco pit stop by the roadside, and a short stop for snacks in a town. At the snack stop (roti made with dried fruit), we (and lots of other vehicles) were parked illegally on the side of the street. A police van with a loudspeaker informed us of that, driving slowly past telling people to move along (in Hindi, or maybe Kannada, I guess), but nobody paid much attention.

About 15 km out of Mysore, and our initial destination, is an area called Srirangapatnam, which is historically significant as the base from which Hyder Ali and his son Tipu Sultan staged successful battles against the British in the 1700’s. Eventually the British won after killing Tipu Sultan in the fourth battle of Mysore, and were able to take over south India as a result.

Our first stop was the Sriranganathaswamy Vishnu temple, which was inside Tipu Sultan’s fort. The temple was there long before the fort, as it is over 1000 years old, and will be there long after. It’s in great shape, especially considering the wars that have been fought around it. As usual, after running the gauntlet of postcard and bangle salesmen and beggars, we deposited our shoes at the gate (for a rupee or two, someone watches them), and then followed the roped path past the idols and priests. No photography was allowed inside, of course.

Back in the car, we drove past the ruins of Tipu’s winter palace (just a jumble of stones now) and saw the spot where he died in battle with the British, marked with a stone in a small garden. We also drove past his mosque, Jami Masjid, but didn’t go inside.

Our next stop was Tipu Sultan’s summer palace, in Dariya Daulat Bagh. The summer palace has two entrance fees: one for natives (Rs 5) and one for “foreigners” (Rs 100). “Bagh”, as I’m mentioned before, means garden, and the garden is very nicely maintained. It must take a lot of work considering the grass is cut by hand!

The palace itself is a museum now, with artifacts from Tipu Sultan’s life: coins he had minted, paintings, the clothes he wore in the paintings, and murals celebrating (one might say, gloating over) his victories over the British.

Next was a stop at the river bank for a boat ride on the Cauvery river. Actually it’s a raft ride, on a small, flimsy reed raft. All nine of us, and an old fellow with a paddle, squeezed onto the plywood floor that kept us from falling into the river. I learned later that falling into the river wouldn’t have been a good idea: I haven’t been vaccinated for immunity to crocodiles.

After the palace, we stopped at Gumbaz, the mausoleum where Tipu Sultan, his mother, and Hyder Ali are entombed. Shoes off again, we went in to view the caskets. Inside the motif was tiger stripes since Tipu’s nickname at the time was the Tiger of Mysore. Outside, workers were applying fresh whitewash to the towers, perched on rickety bamboo scaffolds.

That was it for Srirangapatnam. We headed into Mysore (about 15 km away) for lunch at the Hotel Siddhartha (that was the Buddha’s name before he became the Buddha, and there are supposed to be a lot of Tibetan exiles living in the area, but there wasn’t a noticable Buddhist theme to the hotel), where we each had a large north Indian thali for Rs 85. The south Indian thali was Rs 10 cheaper… perhaps the extra Rs 10 on the north Indian meal was for the extra spices. North Indian food is hotter than south Indian, if you’re wondering. It was excellent, but my lips were tingling even more than usual afterward. In fact, was hot enough that I drank a glass of water before I realized from the taste that it was probably tap water; the water here is very hard. I’ve been pretty good about drinking bottled water on this trip with only a few exceptions, and then it was (I think) filtered, so my imagination immediately began transforming every digestive gurgle into incipient dysentery.

After lunch we went to see the Maharaja’s Palace (links here and here). Wow! It’s a huge palace set on vast grounds right in the center of Mysore. It was the home of the royal family that ruled much of south India for centuries, except of course for the period when Tipu and his father were in power. The royal family, by the way, now lives in Bangalore in another palace.

Photography inside the palace is prohibited, and there are metal detectors on the way inside, so cameras have to be left outside. Shoes too. For Rs 5, I exchanged my camera (minus memory card) for a safe-deposit box key, and at another counter (nearer the palace) we all deposited our shoes for half a rupee per pair. Then we went for a long barefoot walk through the palace in a long line of tourists. The decorations are lavish, to say the least. The walls are lined with paintings. Many of these are of parade scenes and other state events with large crowds of people, elephants, and horses, but to my surprise, they weren’t just generic crowd scenes, they had legends underneath to indicate who’s who. In one room I had to laugh: a set of thrones were on display, beside which someone had left a plastic lawn chair. I think that was meant as a joke.

After a while, the extreme opulence became monotonous, and I started thinking about what it would be like to live there. I picked out a nice room with golden pillars and a stained-glass ceiling where I’d put my computer desk, and decided my cats would probably enjoy chasing plastic bottle caps on the polished floors, but in the end I decided it would be never-ending job sweeping up dust-bunnies and not worth the trouble.

After the palace itself, there’s a small museum with photos, including very recent ones, of the royal family, and some of their belongings, including quite a few record players, toy cars, and other memorabilia.

After the museum we collected our shoes and cameras and took a stroll around the palace grounds. Altogether we spent 2.5 hours there, and could have spent even more time. Besides the Shweta Varahaswamy temple at the entrance, there are supposed to be a dozen others on the grounds.

We next drove to St. Philomena’s cathedral (links here and here), which is described as one of the biggest in India, though rather modest compared to what you might see back home. Outside were the usual motley crew of limbless beggars and trinket vendors, but across the street while we were waiting for the latest installment of snacks to be purchased, one woman had an act that I hadn’t seen before. She must be made of rubber and have no joints, because she was able to wrap her legs back around herself before crawling away on her hands. I thought to myself, “Did I really see that?”

At this point it was 17h00, and we had a decision to make: do we spend the night in Mysore, or drive home? We’d seen nearly everything we had planned to see, except Brindavan Gardens and Chamundi Hill. There was only enough daylight left for one of them, and Brindavan Garden was one that has to be seen in the evening, so we chose that one and decided not to stay the night.

Chamundi Hill would have been nice to see, because it’s a good hike to the top where there’s supposed to be a nice view of Mysore, at least on clear days. Saturday was overcast though, and humid, so the view might not have been that great, and none of my companions are big hikers. There’s a temple on the hill, and a brightly painted statue of the demon Mahishasura, from which Mysore got its name. The demon looks a bit like one of the Mario Brothers to me. You can see him on the Wikipedia Mysore article.

We drove out to Brindavan Gardens, and had enough light to take some pictures up on the dam across the Cauvery river, and relax for a while on the grass before the Musical Fountain show started at 19h00 when it’s completely dark. Musical fountains seem to be popular here, as there’s one in Bangalore too, but I’d never heard of them before this trip. Each show is fifteen minutes long and the fountain gushes and lights flash to the accompaniment of Bollywood show tunes.

By 20h00, we’d found our driver and the car again (in the dark), and took off in search of dinner. We were hoping to find a dhaba (roadside restaurant) that had beer, but our first attempt ended in failure, so we stopped at a dépanneur in a town called Mondia and picked up a bag of beer and whiskey to take to the next place.

That turned out to be a place with the amusing name “U.S. Highway, Daba” that is a collection of thatched huts with a stone tables, plastic lawn chairs, curtains for walls, with a dirt floor. I had thought the guys on the team were non-drinkers, but most turned out to be fairly experienced elbow-benders. Out of nine of us, only three were non-drinkers.

Mmmm, beer! I had a couple of Kingfisher Premium Strong beers, my first beer in four weeks. Yum!

After dinner and a few beers (or whiskeys) the rest of the trip home was more lively than it had been. I hadn’t had enough beer to induce me to sing, but several of the others certainly had, in several different languages.

We finally got back to Bangalore about 01h00. Back at the guest house, I washed my face, washed my feet (aching from another day of walking barefoot on stone), and collapsed into bed.

Lots of people have been asking me about the Bombay bomb blasts yesterday, so I thought I’d let everyone know:  Bangalore is over 1000 km from Mumbai!  I’m fine; your concern should be for the Mumbaikars.

A friend forwarded me a link to today’s Globe and Mail coverage, and it looks like it got more attention at home than it did here.  I found out from my brother by IM about half an hour after it happened, and there was a detailed article on Wikipedia within an hour, but it wasn’t on the Times of India website until later in the night.    In the paper this morning, the front page was about 3/4 about the explosions, plus a total of perhaps two pages inside, and an editorial.  That was it.

Here in Bangalore, even people who used to live in Mumbai didn’t seem too concerned.  Bomb and grenade attacks are a pretty frequent occurrence (though more in the north); only the scale of this one is bigger.

I didn’t notice any changes in Bangalore today, but I don’t live too far from the office.  I asked my driver if he’d noticed anything different, and about the only change he saw was an increased police and military presence at the airport.

Saturday, 8 July 2006

I know, you’re thinking those are three dishes from my latest culinary adventure, but no, those are placenames.

On Saturday I went for a long trip out of Bangalore, to visit some ancient temples that are quite a bit off the beaten path. If you have a sufficiently detailed atlas, you might find the area by looking west of Bangalore over halfway to the coast, and north of Mysore, around a place called Hassan. A number of interesting old temples are in the area around Hassan, about 200 km west of Bangalore on National Highway 48. On a good road like that, you can expect to average about 1 km per minute by car, so that’s about 3.5 hours just to get to the general area. We also had a lot of driving to do in that area that wasn’t on major roads.

The plan was to get on the road by 07h00, which meant arranging for the cab to arrive an hour earlier to allow for some tardiness. The driver was to be the same fellow who’d driven for my tour the week before. Sure enough, at 06h15 I had to call him, and by 06h35 we were away from the guest house.

The first stop was the office to pick up my travelling companions for the day, two software developers and a tester from the group I’m training. They’re all from the same state (Andhra Pradesh), newcomers to Bangalore, and have never been to the places I was going, so this was going to to be a treat for them too. They eventually arrived on their motorbikes, helmetless of course. All three of them crammed into the back seat of the car, a Tata Indica (about the size of a Suzuki Swift), so it was cozy back there, but fortunately they aren’t big men.

By 07h25 we were off. At that time of day on a Saturday, the traffic is already starting to pick up, since most people here work at least six days a week; only in the IT industry do people get five-day work weeks.

Our plan was to get some breakfast on the road. Our first try was a dhaba that looked like it was open, but wasn’t, at least not for food, but we were able to get a glass of tea. Forty-five minutes later, we got to a decent-sized town called Kunigal and found a “hotel“. There we had idli (steamed rice cakes) and puri (balloon bread), and of course various sauces.

Back on the road, we had another hour to go before our first destination. The highway wasn’t too congested, but it was slow-going anyway. Everything uses the highway. Cars, motorcycles, ox-carts, herds of cattle, goats, sheep, bicycles, auto-rickshaws, tractors, buses, trucks, pedestrians, almost all of which are carrying enormous loads. It’s amazing what can be carried on a bicycle: huge bundles of tree branches, giant bags of food, a travelling cookware salesman’s entire inventory… you name it. I’m now used to seeing motorcyles carrying three or even four people (mom’s usually sitting side-saddle on the back, often talking on a cellphone), but on one occasion I saw five: three adults and two kids, all on one motorcyle. The three-wheelers also carry unbelievable loads, considering that they’re basically small two-stroke motorcyles: I counted at least a dozen kids crammed into one on its way to school, and eight adults in the back of another, putting along at 50 km/h.

Family of four:

Anyway, 3.5 hours and 150km after leaving Bangalore, we were in Sravanabelgola. This is the location of a famous Jain temple, including an 18 metre statue of Gomateshvara, a Jain saint, carved out of a single stone over 1000 years ago.

The statue is on the top of the hill, reached by about 600 steps carved into the rock, and shoes or socks aren’t allowed. The rock was very smooth, and not difficult to walk on barefoot, though that wouldn’t have been the case if it was wet or very much hotter. It was a warm day, by the way, and we were all sweating by the time we got to the top. After all that walking barefoot, naturally my feet were a bit sore (coming down afterward was worse than going up, with nothing to cushion the pounding on the stairs). Later, I realized that the tops of my feet were sore too, and found that they’d been sunburned.

Gomateshvara is in perfect condition. While we were there, pilgrims were constantly pouring water, milk, and all sorts of other stuff on its head from an overhead scaffolding. For a thousand year-old guy, he’s in great shape. Must be all the milk baths.

At short time after leaving Sravanabelgola, we had to get a flat tire repaired in a little place called Channarayapatna. That took about half an hour, which I spent getting stared at while the other guys went out to forage for snacks. The tire back in one piece, we drove to Hassan for lunch at the Hotel Sri Krishna. According to the guidebooks, this is one of the better places in Hassan. Their rates were posted on a plaque in the lobby: single Rs 325, double Rs 600, Double AC Rs 975. C$1 ~= Rs 40 currently, so that single room is about C$8.00. In the restaurant, we each had a North Indian tray, for Rs 65 each. That’s quite a bit, but it’s a fancy place, and we sat in the small air-conditioned room (that’s extra).

Our next destination was Belur, home of the 990-year-old Chennakeshava temple. This one had very intricate stonework: the buildings are covered with highly detailed carvings of figures. It was raining by now, and of course we were barefoot again, so the footing on the smooth stone was trickier. Inside the temple it was very dim, with only natural lighting, except in the central shrine which had an electric light.

Outside the temple, I had my first real experience with haggling, buying some statues of Ganesha. I wasn’t entirely successful, though; I paid Rs 50 each for two, while my Indian companions got theirs for 30. When they pointed this out to the seller, she threw in another one for me.

Once the souvenir sellers and beggars realized we were buying stuff, they descended en masse. We jumped in the car and barely made our escape. They were very persistent. I asked my companions if this was special treatment for me, but they said no, they get the same thing. It must be the clothes. Before the horde attacked, I managed to get a picture of this cow checking out our car.

Our final destination was the Hosaleshvara temple in Halebeedu, and by now it was raining. Barefoot again, we wandered around the temple grounds, again admiring the 960-year-old and again fantastically detailed stonework. Outside the temple building itself were two statues of bulls (“Nandi”) which are, I’m told, often located near shrines to Shiva.

It was just before 18h00 when we left, and the rain started coming down more heavily. The light was starting to fade, but before it disappeared, we stopped by the side of the road and took some pictures at a flower farm.

As if driving on narrow, pot-holed, Indian secondary highways isn’t exciting enough, we were now doing it in the rain, with the sun going down (that happens fast this close to the equator), so soon we were doing it the dark too. As it went from twilight to pitch-black, I wondered at what point people would start to turn on their headlights. It was sometime long after complete darkness, anyway. Once the headlights go on, though, they tend to stay in the high-beam position. There are signs requesting that drivers use their “dippers” since the high-beams are blinding, but without the high-beams, the reflectorless vehicles, pedestrians, and animals that are still on the highway would be completely invisible. As we passed hay wagons and trucks on a highway wide enough for perhaps two vehicles, there would often be a single headlight headed toward us… is that a motorcycle that will have barely enough room to get around us? Or is it a car with a burned-out light that will kill us all? Whew, just a motorcycle… this time. Also fun is passing a large truck while simultaneously being passed ourselves, with a pair of vehicles racing toward us, also passing each other, everyone’s horns blaring and highbeams flashing. Sleep in the car? Not likely!

We made a couple of stops along the way for snacks, including a tray of something called pani-puri from a sidewalk vendor. So much for sticking to restaurant food! Coming home in the dark was naturally slower than daylight driving, so we didn’t get back until 22h30.

On Sunday I went for what turned out to be a five-hour walk. It was about time, since I’ve been in Bangalore two weeks and still didn’t have a clear idea where I was in the city, or which direction to go to get anywhere. Usually when I go to a new place, the first thing I do to orient myself is to get lost, then figure out how to get un-lost. Being driven around doesn’t help; I have to do the navigating myself before I get a good picture in my head. Since my only maps were the high-level maps from my “Lonely Planet South India” and “Rough Guide to South India” guide books, and since I always come home in the dark, I had only a vague idea of where I was relative to the few landmarks I’d been to. It was time to fix that!

So, after breakfast I packed my camera and water bottle, took a last look at the guide book maps, and struck out in the direction I thought was toward the main tourist shopping area, around Mahatma Gandhi Road (MG Road) and Brigade Road. After fifteen or twenty minutes of walking, though, I happened to look back and saw a sign indicating MG Road was in the exact opposite direction. I suppose if I’m going to be wrong, I might as well be dead wrong.

You might think that now that I had a road sign in sight, it would be relatively straightforward to get there by following directions. That would be true, except for three factors:

1) Road names are generally not marked, and if they are, there are often two different names for the same road, and even then the marker (if there is one) is often merely a painted stone sitting out of sight on the sidewalk at one corner. About the only way to tell the street name is to walk along and hope that some business puts their address on display (and not the address of their head office!).

2) Direction signs are rare, and usually serve only to confirm that this is the right general direction, not useful to figure out what course corrections might be needed. Roads tend to meander anyway, so a given road may or may not continue in the direction it’s currently going. If you like driving in Boston, you’ll love Bangalore.

3) Even on a Sunday, the roads here are busy, and without the benefit of traffic lights or any traffic rules whatsoever, it can be quite a chore crossing a road. What might be a four-lane, easily crossed road at home, in Bangalore is a river of weaving, dodging, speeding motorbikes, auto-rickshaws (three-wheeled taxis), cars, buses, trucks, and farm tractors, all blasting their horns to warn others to get out of the way. Only the ox-carts and the cows are easy to avoid. That means crossing a road sometimes involves quite a long detour down unnamed, wandering streets to find a place where a crossing might be possible without first writing up a suicide note.

One such detour down a meandering street actually deposited me at the west end of MG Road, much to my surprise, because I had thought I had a much longer walk ahead of me.

Getting utterly lost, by the way, was never a concern. There was always an auto-rickshaw nearby, hoping for a fare from that wealthy-looking westerner. In fact, some were quite persistent, following me down the street insisting that for Rs 10 (about 25 cents) they’d take me anywhere I wanted for an hour. By their standards I suppose I was crazy, walking when I could ride, but I wanted to walk!

Many businesses here are closed on Sunday, but one of the larger bookstores, Higginbothams (mentioned in my guidebooks) was open, so I went in to buy a map and see what else they had. They seemed to have some of everything, much of it in English. Most of the books, even western books, were very cheap, perhaps up to 10% of what they’d cost in Canada, though of course marked for sale only in India. Only major western bestsellers were expensive, perhaps 50% of what they’d cost at home.

Further down was Brigade Road. This is the area you read about when you hear about how westernized Bangalore is. Actually, it reminded me mainly of Tokyo, with less neon. The sidewalks were packed with people, and there was lots of noise (besides the ubiquitous traffic noise, of course). Unlike Tokyo, though, very aggressive sidewalk vendors everywhere. Several people selling watches, with a dozen on each arm, some selling maps, some sunglasses, some toys, some who knows what.

One fellow decided I must be a chess fanatic, and tried hard to sell me a carved wooden travel chess set, even showing me the “Made in India” sticker to verify its authenticity. Actually he thought my brother must be a chess nut, because he kept explaining what a great gift it would make for him (actually he’s more of a Go player). As we walked, the price progressively dropped, but even at the final price before I finally convinced him I wasn’t buying, it was still too much. At one point, he had to compete for my attention with a particularly enterprising auto-rickshaw driver who was drumming up business by convincing potential customers to go for a flat-rate sight-seeing trip while walking with them.

Finally I got rid of them, and ended up in a handicraft shop with a nice selection of statues, silk, and wool items. I wasn’t buying anything, but the prices weren’t bad, and came down the longer I stayed. I don’t have much experience with haggling, so not wanting to buy anything seemed to be good practice for learning how to feign disinterest.

After that, I went for a long walk around the perimeter of Cubbon Park. I can’t find any online maps of Bangalore to show you, but it’s a good hike. A lot of government buildings are around there, so eventually I stumbled across the Vidhana Soudha (the Karnataka state legislature) and the High Court again, which I’d seen the day before, after dark (see previous blog entry).

Vidhana Soudha:

High Court:

At this point, a few minutes of light rain fell. The sky had been overcast for the past few days, the tail-end of the monsoon hammering Mumbai, but no rain here so far, so I thought my luck had run out. Fortunately, it cleared up, because I’d left my umbrella at home.

I continued walking, and eventually convinced myself that I had no idea where I was headed, so I got directions from a couple of traffic cops. It turned out I was already pointed back where I wanted to be (MG Road).

Back on MG Road, I suddenly had a new companion, a well-dressed fellow in his 60’s apparently out looking for people to practice his English on while he took his Sunday walk. We walked for 10 minutes or so, and had a pleasant conversation before he turned off to cross the street. Next came a deaf/dumb highschool-aged kid, also well-dressed; I never did figure out what he was after. Then a beggar with two small children tried to get me to stop, and required some effort to avoid. I had stayed on the “park” side of the street to avoid the crowd on the “shopping” side, but maybe the crowd and sunglasses salesmen would have been easier to deal with.

By this time, I needed some lunch, so went into a Subway in a mall on Brigade Road for my first western-style food in two weeks. It was just like home, including the price: about 70% of the same sub in Canada, in other words very expensive by Indian standards.

After another 15 or 20 minutes of walking, plus a short detour to walk past the office, I was home. It turns out I’m staying in a very convenient location, close to work, and also to all those pubs I’d heard about before I came. I’m sure there will be a blog entry about that at some point…

Saturday was a busy day. On Friday, the admin assistant at the office put together an itinerary for me and arranged for a cab for the day. Since I’m still not trusted out by myself, the team leader was assigned to come along. I hated to cut into his weekend, but at least he was able to bring his six-year-old nephew along.

The day was supposed to start at 07h00 when the cab was supposed to pick me up. After making some phone calls, he eventually arrive at 08h15 and we proceeded to the south end of town where the team leader lives, so we could pick him up.

The first stop was breakfast, at a small “hotel”, a “Veg Fast Food Restaurant”. We sat in the “service area” and had idli (steamed cakes) with sauces and some other dishes. Including tea, the bill came to Rs 67, or about C$1.35.

After breakfast, we drove south of town to Bannerghatta National Park. On the way, the six-year-old nephew wanted to know if I saw many penguins in Canada. I had to disappoint him, explaining that right now back home, the weather was just the same as Bangalore, and that penguins lived at the south pole anyway, while I live closer to the north pole.

At the park (links here, here, and here), we lined up for the “Grand Safari”. While we waited, several small monkeys (some type of macaque? or one of these?) entertained us.

I recalled my conversation with the travel doctor back home, who was considering giving me a rabies shot until I assured her I wouldn’t go near any stray dogs or monkeys. Now here I am face-to-face with a bunch of monkeys, and in the city I can’t walk without constantly dodging street dogs or stepping over sleeping ones. The doctor said 20% of the dogs are rabid (which seems a bit hard to believe, but there you go), so I’m going to try not to get bit.

The safari took place in a bus with a steel grill on the windows. As soon as we got on the bus, though, I was directed to the front seat, no doubt since I was the only paleface present.

The safari was pretty good, considering it only took an hour; we saw “bison” (actually water buffalo, I think), sambar deer, some strange-looking shaggy black bears (Himalayan black bears, I think), elephants, lions, tigers, and white tigers. These weren’t all roaming around together, of course, they were carefully segregated. As we went from domain to domain, the bus would go through a double-gated enclosure to make sure some enterprising tiger doesn’t make it into the herbivore area. They seemed to have a lot of tigers.

When we got back, we roamed around the zoo and saw the jackals, various snakes, quite a few varieties of crocodile, the “leopard or panther” (they were leopards), various fish, many of which you’d find in an aquarium back home, except for the piranha. There was a cage full of rabbits, and while it looked like a typical animal display, I had to wonder if maybe the excess rabbit population might be feeding some of the other inmates. They had a lot of elephants, too, and it was possible to go on an elephant ride. I declined that! Maybe it’s not the Calgary Zoo, but it was interesting.

It cost Rs 2 to enter the “toilet complex”, basically three stalls over a trough in the ground, and an asian toilet. Not sure what was over on the girls’ side.

Back in Bangalore, we went to the MTR restaurant, an apparently very popular place a couple of blocks from Lal Bagh park. We were a bit late, so there was a huge crowd of people waiting. We paid, took a number, and then went for a walk in the park.

Lal Bagh (“Red Garden”) was pleasant after spending so much time in noisy traffic and with so many people around. Inside, the traffic noise fades, and the exhaust smell is replaced by the scent of growing things. I expect I’ll spend some more time there before I’m done. It’s vast, 240 acres, with a lake, greenhouses, and various sub-parks within. Looks like a nice place to go with a book for an afternoon.

We couldn’t stay long, though, because lunch was waiting at the restaurant. When we got back to MTR, we discovered the doors to the restaurant had closed for the day three minutes earlier, so we had to go in through the kitchen, in the back. It was still another 30 minutes before we were seated, though.

This place was a new experience for me. The restaurant is broken into a couple of areas, each with maybe 100 seats. People are allowed in by number until an area is full, and then the meal begins. First, they brought out a compartmented steel tray and a spoon. Then everyone got a steel cup of grape juice (real grape juice, more like wine syrup) and a glass of water. After that, the waiters, barefoot and wearing dhotis folded into a short skirt (this is very common to see on the street, though not in my office), started serving. Serving meant coming around with a bucket of food and a ladle, one dish after another, filling and refilling the compartments in the tray.

Everybody gets the same thing. As usual, I haven’t got the foggiest idea what to call any of it, but it was delicious. My palate is probably becoming more refined, because I could tell the difference between this and the office food (which is still very good). After lunch was betel nut wrapped in a leaf, not the fennel or anise seeds I usually have here.

Next stop was the Shiva Temple. It’s an open air temple with a 65-foot tall statue of Shiva. Photography wasn’t allowed, but this wikipedia article uses a photo of the statue to illustrate its Shiva page. For some reason, the temple is built into the back of a large department store, but once you take your shoes off and go down the stairs, the department store disappears. There’s a lot of sandalwood incense burning, and a hypnotic soundtrack playing, while people snaked through the temple. First there are stairs to climb up to a large statue of Ganesha, then down again and through a dark passage where there are displays of the various Shiva linghams in India and Nepal. There are some incongruous animatronics set up along the way. Out of the grotto, it’s face to face with Shiva. Then people can buy “coins” to use to fill 108 buckets (like a Catholic rosary, I think), and then sit on the marble floor in front of the pond and the statue to meditate.

Back in the department store, shoes back on, I bought a CD of music which is supposed to be from the temple soundtrack. Buying it involved a curious procedure. First, a boy in a store uniform saw I was interested in the CD, and when I decided to buy it, he carried it to the front desk. There, someone rang up the purchase, and handed the receipt to the boy, who proceeded to another counter with me where I paid. Finally, someone else put it in a bag, and I was finally allowed to leave. That’s a lot of rigamarole for a Rs 100 (about C$2.50) CD. This was a fixed-price store, no haggling.

After we found the driver again (good thing my companion has a cellphone!) we drove out to the Iskcon temple. This is a temple of the International Society for Krisha Consciousness, the Hare Krishnas. It’s quite a place, and not what I was expecting due to my main contact with this group being in airports and street festivals. It’s an enormous glass and marble palace built on a hill, floodlit and gleaming. No shoes again, and no cameras allowed either; there’s a metal detector on the way in. After washing our hands (something that’s done constantly here), again we snaked past various displays and opportunities for donations, or for purchasing books (a vast array of these, in various languages), trinkets, and food. The centerpiece is a Krishna idol. As onlookers shuffle past, there’s a large hall where people can sit and meditate. At the end of the procession, everyone is served a helping of hot mango mush in a dried banana leaf, tasty, but difficult to eat without a spoon; I somehow managed it without using my fingers. In spite of the heavy commercialization, we didn’t pay to get in, only to park.

By this time, it was getting dark. This is the tropics, and the sun goes down around 18h00 or so. With the floodlights, the Iskcon temple looked even more flashy and impressive, but the darkness also meant that further sightseeing was going to be difficult. For our last stop, we went to the Vidhana Soudha (Karnataka state legislature, a gigantic building) and the High Court, which face each other across a wide street. Although both were floodlit, picture-taking was difficult, so I decided I’d have to come back and see them in the daylight. It’s supposed to be only a kilometre or so from the office, so that shouldn’t be hard. There were still several items on the itinerary that we didn’t see, so those will have to wait for another day.

Finally, it was time to go home. At 19h30 on a Saturday, traffic was still as heavy and noisy as ever. On the way home in the dark, it looked like fog in our headlights, but it was just thick exhaust smoke covering the road.

I’ll start with the events of the past week, then follow up later with another post about my adventures this weekend.

This week went past very quickly. As in the first week, I spent most of my office time presenting information, talking nearly non-stop with a couple of 5-minute breaks and half an hour for lunch. I think my throat is starting to develop calluses from all this talking; at least it’s not feeling as raw at the end of the day. I go through quite a bit of water, and of course the tea guy drops by two or three times a day.

The company changed lunch caterers on Monday. Everyone says it’s better, and they’ve been asking me if I’ve noticed the difference, but my palate isn’t refined enough to tell. I can tell the variety is different than the previous caterer, but the only quality difference I’ve noticed is that the yoghurt isn’t as runny.

My first and only spicy-hot food experience was on Monday, when I happened to chew a particulary virulent chili pepper. There are supposed to be five tastes: sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami, but it was at least ten minutes before I could taste anything but “pain”. Someone brought me a couple of dishes of sweets (mango paste, I think), and that dispersed the acid. I was reminded of a joke about judging a chili contest.

I thought I’d conquered my weekend digestive upset by Monday, but I believe that run-in with the chili pepper triggered another bout. Since then, I’ve made a deal with my gut: I’ll take it easy on the pickles and eat more rice, and in return it will let me spend less time with the products of Hindware Ltd. So far the truce is holding, more or less, but several breakfast items (onion&pepper pancakes, and various pastries) just demand curd and pickle. Pickle, by the way, isn’t what you might be thinking… it’s actually fruit (mango or lime seems common) mixed with chili paste and then, I guess, fermented. Hot, but delicious. I’ll definitely be looking for a source for that stuff when I get home.

This week I discovered that afternoon “snacks” are available, and I learned that in Hindi, “snacks” is… “snacks”. Now around 17h00, the tea guy drops by again with some kind of filled pastry (different one every day so far) and sauces, and of course another round of spiced tea.

As usual, I’ve talked mostly about food. Let’s see, what else happened this week…

I saw my first and (so far) only cat on the way home from work Wednesday. I’ve done some reading and found that cats aren’t very popular in India. Apparently there are some superstitions about them being unlucky, and probably more importantly lifestyles are different here, so dogs outnumber them as pets by 5 or 6 to 1 (according to pet food manufacturer links I didn’t save), unlike in North America, where pet cats have overtaken pet dogs in number. I don’t think the Indian ratio includes the many mangy-looking street dogs, either, which could explain why that cat looked so nervous as it darted out from under a parked car. Street dogs, by the way, seem to come in only one variety, and basically one colour scheme.

One day on the way home from work, my driver said before I leave, he wanted to see me drive a car. Ha ha! I can’t count the number of times that we’ve almost been killed, bouncing around in that seatbeltless 800cc Maruti Suzuki Omni van, and so getting behind a wheel here would be the last thing I’d do (probably literally!). Twice I’ve seen cars with “Driving School” signs on the roof, and I have to shake my head. I can’t imagine what there is to teach a driver here, except the location of the horn button, and domination of fear.

I say “my” driver, but of course he doesn’t sit around just waiting for me to travel the couple of kilometres between home and office twice a day. I see him a little before 09h00 when he picks me up at home, and again at 19h00 when he picks me up at work (and sometimes at lunch outside on the terrace). He says he works from 06h00 to midnight or later, six days a week, just driving company people around. His English skills are excellent, so we’ve even managed to delve into topics like geopolitics on our brief trips.
Finally, some pictures! Click on the thumbnail for a larger version. Here’s a picture of my room at the guest house.

Here’s the living room.

This is the dining room, with the wireless router in the corner on the right.

Here’s a typical weekend lunch for one at the guest house. Am I supposed to eat all this???

As far as I could tell, nobody here was out celebrating, even though the major language of the state of Karnataka is “Kannada”. Unfortunately, speaking Kannada isn’t as simple as tacking “eh?” on the end of everything and saying “aboot”.