The last week in India

 

On the weekend, my first job was to catch up on sleep and relaxation! I probably did not sleep THAT late on Saturday; just nice not to have the alarm clock on. As I recall, I spent most of the day reading and writing, both mail and blog. I also took a walk away from the hotel to a different hotel for lunch. Let me try to describe the area where this hotel is: It is deep in the middle of a high tech park area where there are buildings going up like crazy. So there is a road (1 km or so) from the main road past both complete and incomplete high-tech company buildings. The incomplete ones are a construction site that extends up to and often into the road. There is a friendly neighborhood cow that seems to browse around looking for food to munch. She has a rope around her neck, so that probably means someone owns her, but she is free to wander around so you have to watch where you step. There are lots of roadside stands that have sprung up to service at least the drivers and construction workers, and probably the employees somewhat. Tea, fruit, coconuts, beans, nuts lots of other things that I could not identify. Anyway, I struck out in probably 95 degree heat to reach the other hotel (at the other end of this road). Unfortunately, the restaurant in that hotel (Ginger) was not very good in my opinion. The buffet was the only thing available to people not staying there, and it was small, kind of cold, and not very tasty. They *did* have coke, and they did have ice-cream, both of which made it more bearable ;-) So after eating my pathetic lunch, I went back in did some more resting, writing, etc. The evening and dinner was a much different story. I got a driver and car from the hotel to take me to the home of my friends Asha and Deepak and their daughter Panu. I think I mentioned them last year as well. Panu is a real charmer...I have so much fun with her. Last year we spent a lot of time telling each other riddles, so this year I brought here a book with some maze puzzles. Anyway, we went to a place called "The Kabob Factory" where they had a charcoal burner in the center of the table and they bring out skewers and skewers of stuff to eat. It was pretty neat, and very delicious! After dinner Deepak drove me back to the hotel. We got to the general vicinity (i.e. my work location) and he said "can you tell me how to get there?" Ulp. Amazingly, I was able to figure out the 3 or 4 turns required, so I have now had the experience of giving an Indian driver directions in his own home town (and not messing it up!). By the way, I knew the general way from being driving from the hotel to work and back 6 or 8 times by now, and I also knew some landmarks. So I used the GPS on my iPhone to "look ahead" of where we were on the road to find familiar looking road configurations (a Y) and a landmark that appeared on the iPhone map and let me know that we had to turn to reach it. ------- I'm now on my way home, sitting in the Frankfurt, Germany airport with a lot of time to spare and waiting (3 more hours) for the flight to Boston. So I'll continue writing about last weekend, although I won't be posting it until I am back home. One brief side comment: If Chuck R is reading this, the restaurant above is in "The Goldfinch" hotel which you told me about several years ago. This is the first time I've seen it...seems very nice! The next day (Sunday) I had booked a place in a guided walk of the Bangalore botanical garden, Lal Bagh. There is a company called "Bangalore Walks (Bangalorewalks.com) which organizes this walk and several others. I had taken the "Victorian Walk" a few years ago...it goes along a historic area in Bangalore where the British "cantonment" was located and the guide talked about the history of the area and pointed out the place where Winston Churchill stayed while he was posted in India as a young man. All the walks end up at a restaurant for breakfast. In the case this year, the restaurant was MTR, a real old restaurant institution in Bangalore. You can walk through the kitchen to see how clean it is, I was told. We had several things, including two kinds of dosa (a large pancake-like bread but usually made with rice). These were particularly delicious. Vijay, the guide, talked long, and people asked questions, and we took our time at MTR, so we ended up a lot later than planned, but lucky for mobile phones. Friend and co-worker Shyam picked me up after it was all over. A couple interesting things about the walk: Vijay was very down on the government in some ways (it was election day, and he told us he never voted..."Give me a choice of 3 crooks and it is no choice at all") And yet he was also talking about the efforts made on preservation, and lots of other wonderful things that had happened in India. Interestingly, an Indian guy on the walk hung around with me while I was waiting for Shyam and we were talking; he has quite a different thought. He feels that the Bangalore government especially is pretty responsive to people. He asked the government for more bicycle support, for example, and he seemed satisfied with the response. Anyway, we went to Shyam's house for a while, had some snacks, a beer or 2, just talking. His wife and son (10ish) were also there and his wife also joined the conversation. I don't remember anything specific, but it was pleasant. After a while, Shyam and his son and I went to a restaurant for lunch. The place that Shyam had in mind had closed, but there was a different one nearby. What a cool place! 

 

 It had an Arabian theme, with dishes from several different middle-eastern and otherwise exotic countries served. I had Shyarma, which I think is Morrocan. Or is it Lebanese? Anyway, it was chicken spiced in a non-Indian way and wrapped in a tortilla (don't know the Morrocan word, but you know what I mean, maybe). Walking in, you went through an outside section to the restaurant which was a giant sand-box with tables and chairs set in the sand. I thought of the beach, but of course I'm sure it was intended to be desert. We then walked inside where there were conventional floors, but the walls were covered with mirrors, sparkly decorations, rich colors. It was gorgeous! And there were private booths, where one of the services you could buy was use of a hookah (those enormous smoking devices that sit on the floor, and you smoke through a long tube).

No, we did not try it. I'm not entirely sure what the substance creating the smoke was either :-) After all that, I got to direct Shyam to my hotel, this time with great confidence. On Monday after work, a different set of 3 old friends (Clarete and Alol, who are also newlyweds!, and Sandeep) and a "new friend" whom I have talked to on phone, email, and IM, and met briefly last year (Karthika) took me to yet another restaurant (Barbeque Nation on 100 Foot Road). For this place, you get skewers for stuff as "starters" and they just keep bringing them until you lower a little flag that is on your table. Then you go to a buffet for the "main course". Of course the real draw of the place is the skewers. But aside from the food, I had a lot of fun. Just as with the folks that I visited in Pune, I really felt a nice friendship and we were interacting in that way with jokes, jibes, etc as well as sharing more serious thoughts about various and sundry.