A Saturday at Cubbon Park

Hey all,

I had a pretty cool day on Saturday. Tracy and I toured around Bangalore a bit, starting in a park in the middle of the town called Cubbon Park. I think it was established while the British ruled, as parts of it are very English style and there are statues of Queen Victoria and some King. It is definitely still a park in India though, the dirt is an iron rich red and there is a bamboo forest!!!! It is really cool timber bamboo, maybe 20 meters high. When the wind blows it all starts swaying around and the stalks knock into each other and make a terrific noise (that I hopefully got video of).

We got to Cubbon park at about noon, and missed dieing on the way by about 3 mintues. Yes, thats right, we almost died. We got to the park, grabbed a delicious snack of fresh corn cooked on coals, and started wandering. This is when we noticed a big crowd of people at the edge of the park looking at the road we had just driven up along. We walked over and found that a MASSIVE tree had fallen onto the road that we had JUST driven up. This tree branch damaged a car and killed a driver of an auto-rickshaw (incidentally, the type of vehicle we had been in on the ride to the park!). I'm just glad we didn't leave for the park any later in the day ^_^. We watched the scene for a while and took some pictures. Also, on the way back home later in the day we walked up that road, and people had taken vengeance on the trees. Trees all along the road had branches chopped off and the tree that had dropped the branch that killed the rickshaw driver was being cut down! Crazy times.

So, after that excitement we wandered about the park some more, walked along a little amusement park there, and went into an aquarium on the park grounds. The entrance fee was 5 Rupees a person (about 12.5 cents) which was pretty sweet. The aquarium was kinda neat, but it wasn't much more than you can see in any pet store. Afterwards we wandered over to MG road so that I could by batteries from my camera and we stopped at a delicious restaurant for lunch. I'm really learning how to eat and appreciate Indian food. I had Alu Gobi with Butter Naan, and it was *delicious*. Oh, and on the way to MG road I almost got on TV! I was taking a picture of a statue/artwork thingy and a guy came up to me, told me he was from a TV station and asked me what I though of it. I basically told him that I though it was interesting, and he asked me to get on camera for an interview! I declined, but I had the opportunity ^_^.

Once we sated ourselves on MG Road we started walking to City Market, which is fairly long walk away, most of which is through Cubbon Park (which, as mentioned, is very nice). It started raining (its getting to monsoon season here) part of the way through the park and we ducked in to a big red building that turned out to be the Government of Karnataka (the state Bangalore is in) museum. Again it was only 5Rs. to get in, and it was definitely worth it. There was lots of really ancient pottery, a cool weapons display, fantastic paintings (with *lots* of gold on them!), displays of musical instruments (something I've never really seen before), and lots of fantastic sculptures. I actually managed to take a couple of pictures, tough I got hissed at by a lady (who worked there) and clapped at by a guard in the process of it. The most shocking thing that I saw while I was there was people just walking up to the statues and *touching* them!!!!! This is of course something that you never see back in the states, and apparently it is just fine here for people to go up and push, prod, and rub the statues with their hands not at all gently! Once I saw people doing that I actually noticed places on the statues that were worn smooth from so much touching! Crazy stuff.

Once we were done with the museum we kept walking for a *long* time, and started getting into a little bit more uncomfortable part of town. You could defintiely tell that it was more traditional and there was less money there. Every single person we saw on the street did a double take and then stared when they saw us. We saw a *massive* while Mosque, and realized that we were in the middle of city market. What with all the stares (some of which looked less than friendly, which we put down to not being dressed 100% appropriately for such a traditional area) we got pretty uncomfortable and came home by rickshaw before really touring around the area much. I felt kinda lame bailing like that, but I figured feeling lame is better than feeling scared and worried (best to trust those feelings). That was definitely the most out of place, foreign, and "oh man I'm in a different country" that I have felt since I've been to India and I did not particularly enjoy the feeling. I will, however, make another attempt to go to to city market during the summer!

Thats all for now folks.

Cheers,
Jason