Shopping! Aaaagh!

Today, Saturday, was the day we designated for shopping. We both had some items to get, so armed with suggestions from our friends we had Manju drive us to the jewelry store. Hmmm. Jewelry stores don't open till 11AM. Ok, on to MG road for other things.
Now this was an experience. MG Road on a Saturday is not to be trifled with. The traffic is horrible! and I've seen some traffic that I thought was bad in Bangalore! In any case, we did a bunch of searching around, and Tom had gotten a hint from Ashlesha about a music store called Rhythm Musical, where they might have a certain Indian (electronic) instrument that he wanted. So we took off hiking down Brigade Road to Residency. After some false starts, we actually found the place, a kind of hole-in-the-wall on the street, but obviously with the kind of stuff we were looking for. The guy knew immediately what Tom wanted and took us into a deep dark back room through several (it seemed like) clanging locked doors (remember the intro to "Get Smart"?) Anyway, he had a couple different choices. Tom made his choice, got the price down by a few rupees and we all went back out through the dark corridors to pay. Oops...they would take a credit card but with an added fee of a fair bit. So we searched out and found a nearby ATM from which Tom got cash to pay.
Tom wanted to ride an autorickshaw, so we took one back to MG Road. (They wanted 50 rupees...ha! Not hardly. It should have been 15 or 20, but we ended up paying 30. I don't mind bargaining when I *know* the going rate for something.
We also had quite a time in a silk store and eventually were ready to go. Called Manju, but he had not shown up after 20 minutes. I have to say that I really lost it while waiting. Normally I have not trouble with street hawkers, but Tom and I had to stand still on the corner waiting for him, and were trying to talk to each other to decide the best place to wait. We kept getting rickshaw drivers and sellers of various weird things (maps, toys, heaven-knows-what-else) interrupting. Finally I just freaked and yelled "No!" in about the most angry voice you will hear from me. The poor guy walks backs off, and I walk away. He came back to Tom and said "That guys' really mad, huh?" Sigh.
Anyway, Manju eventually calls me back and we try to figure out where we each are. Unfortunately accents, cell phones, and incredibly loud street noise do not mix for me, but eventually I made out that he wanted us to walk to the corner. We did, and he was walking up the other street to meet us.
After a rest at home to recover, Manju took us to the jewelry store that was closed earlier and we were taken charge of by a woman who was pretty helpful. That experience was not so bad; you'll see a picture of the place on my web site. I wanted to take a picture of the saleswoman with our goods, but she did not want to have her 'snap' taken, so I respected that.
Tonight, we are going out to an *Italian* restaurant for dinner and tomorrow the plan is to go to Mysore. There are new pictures to go with this stuff on the same old web site, http://picasaweb.google.com/burnsfisher/India2008