Day 27, Bangalore [Sunday 30th December 2007]
Previous day: Day 26, Panjim, Goa [Saturday 29th December 2007]
Next day: Day 28, Bangalore [Monday 31st December 2007 - New Year's Eve]
Arrive in Bangalore after an uncomfortable night. We drove on rickety little roads through tiny villages for hours, passing tractors overburdened with enormous bundles of hay. We stopped for chai at about 6am at one of the big truck stop dhabas, a dustbowl with stalls clustered at the edges selling VCDs, paan and music. Bollywood music is already blaring out of some speakers, everyone gets out for a stretch. One young guy who was sleeping in a compartment says to his friend
"Dude, I got an all over body massage, it was sooo uncomfortable!"Bangalore is big. Even our rickshaw journey from the bus stand to our hotel on Brigade Road is long. Brigade Road, the commercial centre of Bangalore, reminds me of the arse end of Oxford Street. It's full of fast food places and crappy clothes shops. We find a good chaat stand in a corridor behind a shop - good bhelpuri.
MG Road is a mess - stalls selling tat, shops selling tat. It doesn't help that most of the road is currently ripped up while they develop an underground system, causing huge amounts of traffic both vehicular and pedestrian. There's little evidence of the 'lounge bars' Bangalore seems to be famous for, but we have an incredible lunch in the busy Shelton Grand Hotel.
We got to the Bull Temple, which has a huge granite statue of Nandi the bull. It has been oiled for years with peanut oil, preserving it and turning it shiny and black. We get tapped up for payment for a 'tour' and a 'blessing' - we'll have to learn to say no in the future as the tour is neither informative nor interesting. The grounds of the temple are pretty and well kept, and full of young couple seeking whatever privacy they can get.
Every single rickshaw in the city refuses to put their meter on, preferring instead to demand three or four times what the journey should cost. They must be used to rich American businessmen and increasingly rich Indian software professionals turning up. We didn't even have this much trouble in Mumbai. As one of a tourist's first interactions with a city, rickshaw drivers give a valuable and lasting impression of that city. The rickshaw drivers here are greedy and arrogant.
On the walk back from the temple we see a woman buying yellow milk from a man with a churn at the side of the road. It's badam milk - icy cold milk, mixed with sugar, saffron and almonds. It's delicious.
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Next day: Day 28, Bangalore [Monday 31st December 2007 - New Year's Eve]
Previous day: Day 26, Panjim, Goa [Saturday 29th December 2007]