Elaine in Bangalore!

Hey all,

I've been doing a miserable job of updating this blog since Elaine got here, but I'm going to try to catch up all in one big push. As a result I'm going to try to keep the entries a little more terse than usual (we shall see if I have any luck on that front).

OK, so we left off last Sunday the 29th of July with a wonderful day wandering around Bangalore. Well, on Monday Elaine and I headed down to City Market to see the flower market down there that we had heard so much about from Tracy and Rebecca. After some initial wandering around in the wrong direction and in some sketchy areas (and having a kid throw a stick at Elaine! >:-( ) we managed to find our way to the right area. It was fantastic. There is a huge building that is completely surrounded by vegetable sellers and all sorts of other colorful goods. Inside this building is the flower market. The entire building is filled with small stalls, each of which is *overflowing* with all sorts of beautiful flowers. It was amazing. There were two particularly remarkable things to me. First was the smell. This is definitely not as well off of an area of town, and the smell would fluctuate from *wonderful* when you were in the midst of flowers to sewage-ish when you walked in certain areas farther from the flowers. I've never before experience a mixture of flower fragrances and raw sewage smells.

The other really cool things was how *nice* people were. I'm used to very aggressive merchants that I cannot trust. In the flower market we had every other person asking us where we were from and trying to engage us in friendly banter. There was a random guy there, I think he was another shopper, that took the time to tell us how to get around, then took a video of us saying our names using his cell phone (lots of people wanted pictures). The main indication of this incredible niceness was that no fewer than *6* different people reached out as we walked back to hand a free red rose to Elaine. She had a whole gaggle of them by the time we left! (We walked all the way to Cubbon Park and a little beyond on the way back and found "The Sports Authority of India" which has a *huge* climbing wall!).

After City Market we ate dinner at the flat and then watched the movie "Princess Mononke", which is by the same people as "My Neighbor Totoro" and was really quite good ^_^.

All, right Tuesday. It was basically a long expedition though Commercial Street (and lots of stimulation of the local economy). We got earrings, earrings, silk pillows, and a few other goodies. We ended up far too tired to go downtown for dinner like we had planned so just indulged ourself in Pizza Hut (so tempting and easy. It was fantastic) for dinner and then watched "School of Rock" ^_^.

Wow, that was a quick one. Wednesday is going to be a little more detailed. There were actually two parts to the day. We woke up early in the morning to walk to Malleshwaram with Tracy & Nels to meet Prasad and Pavol. We then went to one of the best idly stands in the city (I've hated the idly [little rice cakes] that I've had at the flat to the point that I refuse to eat any more of them, but these were hot, had butter, and were *amazing*. My mouth is watering just thinking of them.), then walked a little farther and went to a *fantastic* dosa place. A good morning ^_^. I went to work for a few hours and Elaine took a nap.

In the afternoon we went to Tipu Sultan's summer palace, which is a really pretty, and fairly small, palace in the middle of Bangalore. We took some fun pictures there and admired what we could see of a beautiful temple next door (unfortunately we were unable to get into the temple because it was closed). From there walked over to a nearby castle-looking fort, which was unfortunately closed :-(. We tried to walk around it a little ways to see if there was another entrance and we ended up in City Market!

From there we walked to Cubbon Park, which I was attacked by a random person on the street! I'll tell the whole story in a separate blog post, but it was a bizarre and somewhat scary experience. Cubbon Park was really nice, and while we were there we noticed some really big and pretty buildings in the distance. We headed toward them and ended up walking down a road with tons of massive, beautiful capital buildings (the courthouse, and what looked like a several *very* central government buildings). From there we ended up walking back to the house, as we found ourselves part of the way along the route back from MG road.

Now Thursday, which was the last day in Bangalore before Tracy, Elaine, and I left for Delhi. Elaine and I didn't do too much, just went down to the "Musical Foutain" park we had seen on the way to MG road, and played in its 'solar energy' playground. There was a slide with an endless conveyor belt to generate energy for light up a sign in front of the slide and make it play music. There was a similar hamster-wheel like thing, but it was jammed so we couldn't get it to generate anything. We looked at the fountain, but shows are at night so we didn't see anything special. The park was about worth the 5Rs. entrance ^_^.

We then went across street to Nehru planetarium and payed 25Rs. to see a show in the planetarium about the Hubble space telescope and saw lots of pictures from Hubble (it was nice but, unfortunately not full resolution on the pictures :-(). After the show we played in the science playground outside. All the signs list the wavelenghts of the colors of the equipment, which we thought was really cute (for instance, the whisper dishes we painted blue and the sign that explained how they worked also mentioned that blue light is 430-470nm). The playground had whisper dishes (parabolic dishes that allowed you to whisper and still be heard 50 meters away, provided you were int he right spot), a cool mirrors/kaleidescope thing, lots of spinning things like you would see in any playground (Elaine likes these, but even watching someone on one can make me nauseated), and resonant swings which would cause each other to swing more energetically. We were actually fairly tired after these places, so we came back to the flat, were lazy and had Pizza Hut again, and then packed for the Delhi trip and went to bed!!!

Ok, that was last week up until Delhi. I think I'm going to post the details of the story of my assault by the random guy on the street, and the Delhi trip in new posts.

Cheers,
Jason