Another week in india
This has been a busy but short week. Short because Monday was a holiday: The New Year's day celebrated in Karnataka. I was told that different states celebrate on different days. This upcoming Monday is the day it is celebrated in Maharashtra (I think) for example.
Anyway, I met my colleague Tom at the airport on Saturday night (Sunday morning, actually). For some reason, the same flight I came in on is arriving earlier now. Maybe because of a daylight savings time change in Germany? In any case, the flight was actually early, and on top of the scheduled arrival being earlier anyway, that was an improvement over my own arrival. A slighly odd thing: Manju (our driver) warned me that there were a lot of mosquitos at the airport and that I should wait inside the terminal, not outside. I had noticed that when I arrived so I was prepared with DEET etc. Now you may wonder what is this "wait inside the terminal" thing. The airport is tiny--it is actually owned by Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) (no, not HAL 9000) and meant for test flights for their aircraft. But as B'lore has added more and more high tech companies and people, the airport use has grown tremendously. In any case, there is very little space for the non-flying public in this airport, and in fact, you have to buy a ticket to get into the waiting area. (See the description of the good-bye area for departing passengers in my blog from 2006!) The funny thing is that Manju was not really familiar with the ticket procedure. He wanted to hussle me right into the waiting area; I kept asking about buying the ticket and he kept telling me "inside inside". Well, as I already knew, you don't buy the ticket inside, you buy it outside. He dropped me off at the door to the waiting area and then I had to walk 100 feet outside to get to the window that sells the tickets. Not that big a deal; just odd that he did not know. Anyway, there were a few mosquitoes around but not like a Maine woods in June or July! (Of course the mosquitos in the Maine woods don't potentially carry Malaria either). And the bugs actually seemed worse inside than outside, but hey...I had always meant to be inside. If you wait outside, your passenger has to walk out and face this teeming mass of people waving signs, hawking hotels, rides, porter services and who knows what else. Very indimidating without a guide. As it was, Tom (who had a lot of luggage) succumbed to allowing someone to help load his luggage into the car. I tipped the guy, but he did not seem very happy.
We actually did not do much Sunday and Monday. On top of a certain amount of jet lag, Tom still had a lot of prep to do for his talks at work. Actually, I had some too. We did take a quick (one hour which turned into two) tour of Bangalore on Monday and on Sunday, I was pretty proud of myself for arranging for us to go by the Vidhan Soudha (the Karnataka State government building) at dusk on the way to dinner. They light up the building on Sunday nights for a few hours and it is really beautiful. (See pictures.)
On Monday we went to the Bangalore Palace, the summer home of the Wadiyar kings of Mysore (the kingdom included B'lore). Despite the kingdom's ascession to the central government sometime around independence, the dynasty still continues. They are a lot less wealthy than they used to be. In fact they rent to palace grounds for various functions. It was being set up for a wedding while we were there. Manju left us off and we took some nice pictures of the outside (it may not have been allowed, but we were heading toward the ticket window so the guard did not stop us). We bought tickets to go inside. It would have been an extra charge to take pictures inside, so we did not pay for that privilege. Inside a guide attached himself to us. Knowing full well that he may or may not be good and may or may not be official, we accepted his services and he actually did a good job showing us around. There are a lot of things falling apart, but also a lot of art, statues, photos etc around. It probably would not have been worth getting the photo permit, although it was interesting to go around. The guide got a good tip from us.
We have spent a lot of time at a restaurant across the street called Sunny's. Previous travelers to B'lore from the office who stayed in this same apartment also did that, and I was rather (to myself) scornful. But now I understand...the place is really appealing. It is bright, light, and clean with a lot of interesting non-Indian dishes. And best of all it is close. I like Indian food, but it is also nice to have something more familiar. The biggest problem with Sunny's is that a lot of their dishes are, like in an American restaurant, quite rich. Butter, cream, you name it. And of course when we get home from work pretty late and tired, it's an easy default choice.
Anyway, I'll mention a couple of other places we went to: One is a South Indian restaurant called Daksin (sp?) at the Sheraton Windsor hotel. Extremely expensive and also extremely good to match. They had a different page on the menu for each state whose food they served. I'm not sure I could tell the difference. Tom is not big on hot/spicy so he chose judiciously, but luckily we had a lot of choices. I chose with less regard to hotness; it turned out that we each liked each other's choice.
Another place is the buffet (yes! I even like it) at Le Meridien hotel. This hotel has a pool out in front with what appears to be statues of birds at regular intervals around the outside. If you look more closely, you see they are alive and they do move around, but for some reason the frequently set themselves around at this regular interval. Anyway, the buffet is really nice; lots of choices and best of all a chef in the middle who makes "Flying Roti". Roti as sort of generic for flatbread, and this guy does quite an act. Think of a guy in a pizza store tossing the crust around to stretch it out; that's what he does except that he gets it so thin that in the end it seems to just float back down after he tosses it. The final toss is onto a hemispherical and very hot gridle. The bread cooks in only a matter of seconds and then he quickly folds it and puts it on the delighted watcher's plate. Cool! And the desserts here were wonderful! I'm blanking on the names, but one is a fried dough ball soaked in sweet syrup and another is a cooked sweet carrot mixture. Fabulous!
And finally, we went out to lunch with Mandar (one of the managers). He took us a few km from the office to a place called "Roomali with a View". I know "Room with a View" is a famous movie, but all *I* could think of was Peter Sellers in "The Pink Panther" in his horrible fake French accent asking for the same. Anyway, Roomali is another type of bread, also cooked on a hemispherical griddle. They had several varieties (butter, spinich, and other names that I could not translate). They also had a buffet which was pretty good. The highlight here were the costumes of the waiters and the guards (btw, every establishment that a westerner might go to has at least one
guard-cum-door-opener, including our apartment building. Not to be taken as a statement of any problems, though maybe they head off problems. I think the main point may be to keep street people out). Anyway, you can see the pictures on my web site, but they were quite ornate. And btw, RWAV was on the 5th floor so you did get a view; not of anything in particular though.
Today we hope to go shopping. We have a few commissions to fulfill :-) and tomorrow we head to Mysore for a day trip. I'm told the road has been improved since Ellen and I went in '06. We'll see.
Oh, one more maybe amusing thing. Since before we came to India Tom and I, along with Vijay the administrator at work, have been attempting to get a tour set up for when we leave Bangalore, going to Delhi, Agra (the Taj Mahal) and Jaipur. We have been having a hard time communicating with the guy at Thomas Cook who should be arranging it. First Tom and I did not have time to talk about details. Then the Thomas Cook guy was really slow responding to emails. Finally I phoned him and the room where he was was so noisy that I could not carry on a conversation. Eventually we decided to book our flight to Delhi separately; we could not wait any longer and since our flight home starts there we NEED to be there! Hopefully the Thomas Cook guy will come through with a "land tour" but even if he does not, I suspect that there are other choices. I also suspect that we can find hotels if we are willing to pay enough. We won't wait too long on that end either.
That's it for now...pictures are at http://picasaweb.google.com/burnsfisher/India2008
Anyway, I met my colleague Tom at the airport on Saturday night (Sunday morning, actually). For some reason, the same flight I came in on is arriving earlier now. Maybe because of a daylight savings time change in Germany? In any case, the flight was actually early, and on top of the scheduled arrival being earlier anyway, that was an improvement over my own arrival. A slighly odd thing: Manju (our driver) warned me that there were a lot of mosquitos at the airport and that I should wait inside the terminal, not outside. I had noticed that when I arrived so I was prepared with DEET etc. Now you may wonder what is this "wait inside the terminal" thing. The airport is tiny--it is actually owned by Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) (no, not HAL 9000) and meant for test flights for their aircraft. But as B'lore has added more and more high tech companies and people, the airport use has grown tremendously. In any case, there is very little space for the non-flying public in this airport, and in fact, you have to buy a ticket to get into the waiting area. (See the description of the good-bye area for departing passengers in my blog from 2006!) The funny thing is that Manju was not really familiar with the ticket procedure. He wanted to hussle me right into the waiting area; I kept asking about buying the ticket and he kept telling me "inside inside". Well, as I already knew, you don't buy the ticket inside, you buy it outside. He dropped me off at the door to the waiting area and then I had to walk 100 feet outside to get to the window that sells the tickets. Not that big a deal; just odd that he did not know. Anyway, there were a few mosquitoes around but not like a Maine woods in June or July! (Of course the mosquitos in the Maine woods don't potentially carry Malaria either). And the bugs actually seemed worse inside than outside, but hey...I had always meant to be inside. If you wait outside, your passenger has to walk out and face this teeming mass of people waving signs, hawking hotels, rides, porter services and who knows what else. Very indimidating without a guide. As it was, Tom (who had a lot of luggage) succumbed to allowing someone to help load his luggage into the car. I tipped the guy, but he did not seem very happy.
We actually did not do much Sunday and Monday. On top of a certain amount of jet lag, Tom still had a lot of prep to do for his talks at work. Actually, I had some too. We did take a quick (one hour which turned into two) tour of Bangalore on Monday and on Sunday, I was pretty proud of myself for arranging for us to go by the Vidhan Soudha (the Karnataka State government building) at dusk on the way to dinner. They light up the building on Sunday nights for a few hours and it is really beautiful. (See pictures.)
On Monday we went to the Bangalore Palace, the summer home of the Wadiyar kings of Mysore (the kingdom included B'lore). Despite the kingdom's ascession to the central government sometime around independence, the dynasty still continues. They are a lot less wealthy than they used to be. In fact they rent to palace grounds for various functions. It was being set up for a wedding while we were there. Manju left us off and we took some nice pictures of the outside (it may not have been allowed, but we were heading toward the ticket window so the guard did not stop us). We bought tickets to go inside. It would have been an extra charge to take pictures inside, so we did not pay for that privilege. Inside a guide attached himself to us. Knowing full well that he may or may not be good and may or may not be official, we accepted his services and he actually did a good job showing us around. There are a lot of things falling apart, but also a lot of art, statues, photos etc around. It probably would not have been worth getting the photo permit, although it was interesting to go around. The guide got a good tip from us.
We have spent a lot of time at a restaurant across the street called Sunny's. Previous travelers to B'lore from the office who stayed in this same apartment also did that, and I was rather (to myself) scornful. But now I understand...the place is really appealing. It is bright, light, and clean with a lot of interesting non-Indian dishes. And best of all it is close. I like Indian food, but it is also nice to have something more familiar. The biggest problem with Sunny's is that a lot of their dishes are, like in an American restaurant, quite rich. Butter, cream, you name it. And of course when we get home from work pretty late and tired, it's an easy default choice.
Anyway, I'll mention a couple of other places we went to: One is a South Indian restaurant called Daksin (sp?) at the Sheraton Windsor hotel. Extremely expensive and also extremely good to match. They had a different page on the menu for each state whose food they served. I'm not sure I could tell the difference. Tom is not big on hot/spicy so he chose judiciously, but luckily we had a lot of choices. I chose with less regard to hotness; it turned out that we each liked each other's choice.
Another place is the buffet (yes! I even like it) at Le Meridien hotel. This hotel has a pool out in front with what appears to be statues of birds at regular intervals around the outside. If you look more closely, you see they are alive and they do move around, but for some reason the frequently set themselves around at this regular interval. Anyway, the buffet is really nice; lots of choices and best of all a chef in the middle who makes "Flying Roti". Roti as sort of generic for flatbread, and this guy does quite an act. Think of a guy in a pizza store tossing the crust around to stretch it out; that's what he does except that he gets it so thin that in the end it seems to just float back down after he tosses it. The final toss is onto a hemispherical and very hot gridle. The bread cooks in only a matter of seconds and then he quickly folds it and puts it on the delighted watcher's plate. Cool! And the desserts here were wonderful! I'm blanking on the names, but one is a fried dough ball soaked in sweet syrup and another is a cooked sweet carrot mixture. Fabulous!
And finally, we went out to lunch with Mandar (one of the managers). He took us a few km from the office to a place called "Roomali with a View". I know "Room with a View" is a famous movie, but all *I* could think of was Peter Sellers in "The Pink Panther" in his horrible fake French accent asking for the same. Anyway, Roomali is another type of bread, also cooked on a hemispherical griddle. They had several varieties (butter, spinich, and other names that I could not translate). They also had a buffet which was pretty good. The highlight here were the costumes of the waiters and the guards (btw, every establishment that a westerner might go to has at least one
Today we hope to go shopping. We have a few commissions to fulfill :-) and tomorrow we head to Mysore for a day trip. I'm told the road has been improved since Ellen and I went in '06. We'll see.
Oh, one more maybe amusing thing. Since before we came to India Tom and I, along with Vijay the administrator at work, have been attempting to get a tour set up for when we leave Bangalore, going to Delhi, Agra (the Taj Mahal) and Jaipur. We have been having a hard time communicating with the guy at Thomas Cook who should be arranging it. First Tom and I did not have time to talk about details. Then the Thomas Cook guy was really slow responding to emails. Finally I phoned him and the room where he was was so noisy that I could not carry on a conversation. Eventually we decided to book our flight to Delhi separately; we could not wait any longer and since our flight home starts there we NEED to be there! Hopefully the Thomas Cook guy will come through with a "land tour" but even if he does not, I suspect that there are other choices. I also suspect that we can find hotels if we are willing to pay enough. We won't wait too long on that end either.
That's it for now...pictures are at http://picasaweb.google.com/burnsfisher/India2008
posted by Burns Fisher | 9:00 AM
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