The Blog of Gord

Saturday was a busy day. On Friday, the admin assistant at the office put together an itinerary for me and arranged for a cab for the day. Since I’m still not trusted out by myself, the team leader was assigned to come along. I hated to cut into his weekend, but at least he was able to bring his six-year-old nephew along.

The day was supposed to start at 07h00 when the cab was supposed to pick me up. After making some phone calls, he eventually arrive at 08h15 and we proceeded to the south end of town where the team leader lives, so we could pick him up.

The first stop was breakfast, at a small “hotel”, a “Veg Fast Food Restaurant”. We sat in the “service area” and had idli (steamed cakes) with sauces and some other dishes. Including tea, the bill came to Rs 67, or about C$1.35.

After breakfast, we drove south of town to Bannerghatta National Park. On the way, the six-year-old nephew wanted to know if I saw many penguins in Canada. I had to disappoint him, explaining that right now back home, the weather was just the same as Bangalore, and that penguins lived at the south pole anyway, while I live closer to the north pole.

At the park (links here, here, and here), we lined up for the “Grand Safari”. While we waited, several small monkeys (some type of macaque? or one of these?) entertained us.

I recalled my conversation with the travel doctor back home, who was considering giving me a rabies shot until I assured her I wouldn’t go near any stray dogs or monkeys. Now here I am face-to-face with a bunch of monkeys, and in the city I can’t walk without constantly dodging street dogs or stepping over sleeping ones. The doctor said 20% of the dogs are rabid (which seems a bit hard to believe, but there you go), so I’m going to try not to get bit.

The safari took place in a bus with a steel grill on the windows. As soon as we got on the bus, though, I was directed to the front seat, no doubt since I was the only paleface present.

The safari was pretty good, considering it only took an hour; we saw “bison” (actually water buffalo, I think), sambar deer, some strange-looking shaggy black bears (Himalayan black bears, I think), elephants, lions, tigers, and white tigers. These weren’t all roaming around together, of course, they were carefully segregated. As we went from domain to domain, the bus would go through a double-gated enclosure to make sure some enterprising tiger doesn’t make it into the herbivore area. They seemed to have a lot of tigers.

When we got back, we roamed around the zoo and saw the jackals, various snakes, quite a few varieties of crocodile, the “leopard or panther” (they were leopards), various fish, many of which you’d find in an aquarium back home, except for the piranha. There was a cage full of rabbits, and while it looked like a typical animal display, I had to wonder if maybe the excess rabbit population might be feeding some of the other inmates. They had a lot of elephants, too, and it was possible to go on an elephant ride. I declined that! Maybe it’s not the Calgary Zoo, but it was interesting.

It cost Rs 2 to enter the “toilet complex”, basically three stalls over a trough in the ground, and an asian toilet. Not sure what was over on the girls’ side.

Back in Bangalore, we went to the MTR restaurant, an apparently very popular place a couple of blocks from Lal Bagh park. We were a bit late, so there was a huge crowd of people waiting. We paid, took a number, and then went for a walk in the park.

Lal Bagh (“Red Garden”) was pleasant after spending so much time in noisy traffic and with so many people around. Inside, the traffic noise fades, and the exhaust smell is replaced by the scent of growing things. I expect I’ll spend some more time there before I’m done. It’s vast, 240 acres, with a lake, greenhouses, and various sub-parks within. Looks like a nice place to go with a book for an afternoon.

We couldn’t stay long, though, because lunch was waiting at the restaurant. When we got back to MTR, we discovered the doors to the restaurant had closed for the day three minutes earlier, so we had to go in through the kitchen, in the back. It was still another 30 minutes before we were seated, though.

This place was a new experience for me. The restaurant is broken into a couple of areas, each with maybe 100 seats. People are allowed in by number until an area is full, and then the meal begins. First, they brought out a compartmented steel tray and a spoon. Then everyone got a steel cup of grape juice (real grape juice, more like wine syrup) and a glass of water. After that, the waiters, barefoot and wearing dhotis folded into a short skirt (this is very common to see on the street, though not in my office), started serving. Serving meant coming around with a bucket of food and a ladle, one dish after another, filling and refilling the compartments in the tray.

Everybody gets the same thing. As usual, I haven’t got the foggiest idea what to call any of it, but it was delicious. My palate is probably becoming more refined, because I could tell the difference between this and the office food (which is still very good). After lunch was betel nut wrapped in a leaf, not the fennel or anise seeds I usually have here.

Next stop was the Shiva Temple. It’s an open air temple with a 65-foot tall statue of Shiva. Photography wasn’t allowed, but this wikipedia article uses a photo of the statue to illustrate its Shiva page. For some reason, the temple is built into the back of a large department store, but once you take your shoes off and go down the stairs, the department store disappears. There’s a lot of sandalwood incense burning, and a hypnotic soundtrack playing, while people snaked through the temple. First there are stairs to climb up to a large statue of Ganesha, then down again and through a dark passage where there are displays of the various Shiva linghams in India and Nepal. There are some incongruous animatronics set up along the way. Out of the grotto, it’s face to face with Shiva. Then people can buy “coins” to use to fill 108 buckets (like a Catholic rosary, I think), and then sit on the marble floor in front of the pond and the statue to meditate.

Back in the department store, shoes back on, I bought a CD of music which is supposed to be from the temple soundtrack. Buying it involved a curious procedure. First, a boy in a store uniform saw I was interested in the CD, and when I decided to buy it, he carried it to the front desk. There, someone rang up the purchase, and handed the receipt to the boy, who proceeded to another counter with me where I paid. Finally, someone else put it in a bag, and I was finally allowed to leave. That’s a lot of rigamarole for a Rs 100 (about C$2.50) CD. This was a fixed-price store, no haggling.

After we found the driver again (good thing my companion has a cellphone!) we drove out to the Iskcon temple. This is a temple of the International Society for Krisha Consciousness, the Hare Krishnas. It’s quite a place, and not what I was expecting due to my main contact with this group being in airports and street festivals. It’s an enormous glass and marble palace built on a hill, floodlit and gleaming. No shoes again, and no cameras allowed either; there’s a metal detector on the way in. After washing our hands (something that’s done constantly here), again we snaked past various displays and opportunities for donations, or for purchasing books (a vast array of these, in various languages), trinkets, and food. The centerpiece is a Krishna idol. As onlookers shuffle past, there’s a large hall where people can sit and meditate. At the end of the procession, everyone is served a helping of hot mango mush in a dried banana leaf, tasty, but difficult to eat without a spoon; I somehow managed it without using my fingers. In spite of the heavy commercialization, we didn’t pay to get in, only to park.

By this time, it was getting dark. This is the tropics, and the sun goes down around 18h00 or so. With the floodlights, the Iskcon temple looked even more flashy and impressive, but the darkness also meant that further sightseeing was going to be difficult. For our last stop, we went to the Vidhana Soudha (Karnataka state legislature, a gigantic building) and the High Court, which face each other across a wide street. Although both were floodlit, picture-taking was difficult, so I decided I’d have to come back and see them in the daylight. It’s supposed to be only a kilometre or so from the office, so that shouldn’t be hard. There were still several items on the itinerary that we didn’t see, so those will have to wait for another day.

Finally, it was time to go home. At 19h30 on a Saturday, traffic was still as heavy and noisy as ever. On the way home in the dark, it looked like fog in our headlights, but it was just thick exhaust smoke covering the road.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 2nd, 2006 at 1:39 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.