We've found Bryan Adams!
Trip Start
Oct 12, 2005
1
37
48
Trip End
Mar 31, 2006
Bangalore,
India
Monday, February 6, 2006
Outside of being a place where formerly popular US musicians go to take life a bit easier, you may have heard of Bangalore as one of the places where all those American outsourced jobs have gone. Or maybe as the place that picks up the phone when you need tech support for your washing machine. As a result of heavy investment in technology infrastructure and education, Bangalore is known as the Silicon Valley of India. We're not too sure about that but it is a pretty nice city to spend a couple of days in.
We began our journey to Bangalore from the Vasco de Gama train station in Goa. While wandering up and down the train looking for the first class air conditioned sleeper car (not too easy because there aren't any train conductors in nice uniforms to ask), we were amused by the site of a woman loading her goat on to the baggage car next to pallets of flat screen televisions
01 Motorbikes
. Ahhh....India. With a little help from some fellow passengers, we finally found the "first class" compartment which we had earlier mistaken for steerage class. We boarded the train and confirmed that this was indeed our first class a/c accommodations and braced ourselves for a long fifteen hour night journey. Somehow he had it in our heads that we would have a little private compartment just for the two of us. It actually turned out to be a space for four people that was separated from the passage by a curtain. We were joined by two nice women from Goa who had a business providing AV equipment for hotels and nightclub events. We must be getting used to night trains because we both slept well and woke up only a few hours before reaching Bangalore. We've spent most of our time in Bangalore browsing the shops and eating some really good food. We went to a typical Indian theater to see Chronicles of Narnia yesterday. We bought the balcony tickets instead of the floor seats because they were a bit more expensive and in India that means it will smell less. The theater had seen better days and the projection was a bit blurry and quite dark, though we think they tried to make up for it by turning the sound up to a deafening level. Despite our overall disappointment in the film it was fun to see a real Indian theater and Tilda Swinton was pretty good. Matt also liked the final battle scenes
02 Autorickshaw Negotiator
. It will be nice to get back to the U.S. where criteria for selecting a movie will be more than just that the movie is in English. We started our morning today with some hard core haggling with the local auto-rickshaw drivers. Although we simply wanted a driver to drop us off at the ISKOR temple (big, impressive Hare Krishna temple and cultural center), the drivers seemed unwilling to give us a price for just one way. We explained that we would pick up another rickshaw after we were finished at the temple but they kept trying to get us to hire them for multiple stops in between which they would wait for us for "free". Knowing that there is no such thing as free in India, we quickly moved on to the government pre-paid auto rickshaw stand on MG Road. The pre-paid place was very helpful in arranging a fair priced journey with a wait at the temple. Our driver even used the meter on the way back! I think that's a first for us since Thailand. We are still a little stunned.
Tomorrow, it's on to Mysore by bus. Wish us luck.
