The Blog of Gord

I read in the Times of India this past weekend that bloggers are “mostly self-indulgent diarists interested in one topic above all others– themselves”. Shameful. Well, back to my experiences in Bangalore…

On Saturday, I took an auto-rickshaw to Bull Temple. That was my first auto-rickshaw ride, which is hard to believe considering I’ve been here over a month. After breakfast I walked over to Richmond Road, flagged one down, and said I wanted to go to “Bull Temple”. It’s supposed to be a major landmark, so I didn’t expect any confusion. I got a blank look, though, so I tried again. Still nothing, so I got out my map and showed him. “Ah, Bool Tempooluh!” I guess I need to work on my accent, and meanwhile, keep the map handy.

Bull Temple was one of the few Bangalore sights mentioned in my guide books that I hadn’t seen yet. It’s open to non-Hindus, so I took off my shoes and went in. As you might expect, the temple has a statue of a reclining bull (“Nandi”, ridden by Shiva) inside, in this case 4.5m tall. The bull is over 200 years old, and the temple goes back to the 1500’s. A priest gave me the “blessings of the bull”. It seemed like a pretty quiet afternoon at the temple, as there were only a few people there, far outnumbered by the trinket vendors lining the path outside. Perhaps the crowds come later in the afternoon.

The temple is set in a nice park with a couple of other temples, so I strolled around there for a bit, enjoying the quiet, before going back out on the street to walk to Lal Bagh, about a kilometre away.

Lal Bagh is the big park I’d seen briefly on my first weekend tour, when I didn’t have time to properly explore it. The park is about 240 acres, including a large lake, hills, forests, gardens, and has a lot of different landscape arrangements to see.

It was laid out in the 1700’s by Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan, the guys you met in my Srirangapatnam blog entry from last weekend. I spent a good three hours hiking around the park, but I still don’t think I saw the whole thing. It’s a friendly, quiet place, probably in part because of the number of uniformed and rather tough-looking security guards patrolling. No beggars at all. I was stopped repeatedly, though, by people who just wanted to say hello, find out what country I’m from, my job, marital status, etc, in other words, typical casual small talk here. That happens to me a lot: in parks, temples, stores, on the street, everywhere.

After a good walk, I found a shady bench by the lake where I could read a book. That lasted about half an hour, when I suddenly heard a noise above me. I looked up, and there was a monkey looking straight down at me from a light pole four feet overhead. Then there was one on the bench beside me, and after a couple of minutes, there were about twenty surrounding me, including some with babies, all hoping for a treat. Of course that attracted lots of people who wanted to feed them bits of mango or nuts (there are people selling snacks all over the park), so that was the end of my quiet reading. Monkeys are more fun to watch than a book anyway.

My second auto-rickshaw trip was more eventful than the first. I ran into one of those aggressive auto-rickshaw drivers who have their own agenda, wanting to take you places where they’ll get a commission (or, in some cases, rob you). He was waiting at the park entrance, hoping for someone he could take sight-seeing or shopping, and wouldn’t take “home” for an answer. After a couple of minutes of polite arguing, I realized this wasn’t going to work, so I got out and flagged down an auto-rickshaw who was just driving by. That’s usually the safer bet anyway.

On Sunday, I walked to Brigade Road, the major shopping/partying area to do some shopping, and believe it or not, I ran into that same auto-rickshaw driver from my first weekend walk, the one who walks through the crowd trying to convince people to go to his rickshaw to go sightseeing or to another shopping area. This was actually our third meeting, since I also met him last weekend, and he remembered me both times. Bangalore has over 7 million people… how can I keep running into the same guy??? His schtick is that if I’ll go with him to one place for free, he’ll get a t-shirt for his kid. The more common line is “ten rupees only suh, one hour”. To give you an idea of how dodgy this is, the base fare in an auto-rickshaw is Rs 12 for the first 2 km, plus Rs 6 per km after that, so for it to make sense for these guys to spend so much time not driving, the commission they get for delivering marks must be appreciable.

In between spiels for chess sets, articulated wooden cobras, Rolex clones, sunglasses, posters, and people offering to pray for me for money, I checked out various handicraft stores. The ones with the best selection seem to be the ones run by the governments of India or Karnataka. These are fixed price stores with some assurance of quality, so while I might be able to bargain for a better deal elsewhere (theoretically), I find this sort of browsing a lot more pleasant. Then I visited Planet M, a big music store, to see what it was like. It’s like any big music store in North America, except that it’s divided primarily by language rather than genre, with many separate sections, each dedicated to a language, some of which I hadn’t heard of before. Compare that to Canada, where French-Canadian music is filed under “International”, mixed in with Scottish bagpipe bands and Tuvan throat music. “Pop” here seems to mean western pop. CD’s are typically Rs 150 (C$3.50), DVD movies about Rs 400 (C$10.00).

With a couple of hours left to kill before dark, and being in the entertainment district, I decided to try one of Bangalore’s famous pubs. “Pub World” sounded promising, so I stepped around the cow on the sidewalk (I’m not making this up! I also had to avoid a donkey around the corner from my house earlier), and the white-gloved doorman ushered me in. It was dark, freezing cold (at least it felt that way since my shirt was soaked), and looked almost exactly like any upscale bar back home. It wasn’t busy, especially considering the crowd outside and the temperature in the high 20’s. The clientele, what there was of it, seemed to be mostly westerners, including a couple of half-tanked ex-pat Brits complaining about “tourists”.

For me, “Pub World” conjurs up images of banks of taps with exotic brands attached. I sat at the bar, asked what was on tap, and the bartender pointed at The Tap, singular. Kingfisher. Guess I’ll have a pint of that! You’ve probably had Kingfisher at an Indian restaurant before, so you know it’s an OK beer, but this was like walking into a pub in Canada and seeing only a Labatt’s Blue tap. After a nearly beer-less month, and a day of walking around in the sun, the first Kingfisher went down pretty good. So did the second. The third wasn’t too bad either. I was in my happy place, not even minding watching golf highlights (“golf highlights”; see: “oxymoron“) on ESPN.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 26th, 2006 at 12:53 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.