9/2 - Singh is King

After 10pm here, and Maria and I are safely esconsed in our hotel room. Maria has been cruising the 80+ stations on the TV (hell, there was even an aussie station) while I've been adding images to the blog for the last wee-while.

Bangalore is a very different place to either Jaipur or Delhi. Its the most affluent place of the three we've visited (as guaged by the type of cars on the roads, type of stores, lack of visible poverty, etc.), is tropical (its actually green...and other exotic colours; and we even saw water!), and a very vibrant place.

Our hotel is kind of mid-range and in a very active area of the city - not the up-market district but a place frequented by the residents of the city itself. Around 7pm we walked out in search of an ATM and also a place to eat and were overwhelmed by the energy of the place. While Delhi is more frenetic and dog-eat-dog, the energy here is more structured and focussed, as well as being more "vibrant".

We walked the streets for over 30 minutes and were unable to find any sit-down restaurant though there were a number of corner/street food vendors, plus a number of "standup only" food establishments {Aside: As we were walking along Maria got a real start as she failed to notice the extremely large cow that was lying on the sidewalk in front of her - in every city we've visited, we've witnessed cows wandering the streets freely}. Having decided to return to the hotel and use the restaurant there we found one attached to the hotel and had a wonderful meal of Dosai (a southern Indian specialty that Maria has been looking forward to), and even enjoyed a couple of India sweets we've never tried before.

As on a number of previous occasions we got speaking to the waiter and when he learnt that we were aussies the conversation moved inevitably to cricket - "Ricky Ponting" {always mentioned first}, the recent results, etc. There is cricket on TV here all the time - several channels. As examples, when we were in the reception area at Sunder Palace (our Jaipur accomodation) the receiptionists would be watching cricket; when at thr Ganesh restaurant the chef in this tiny hole-in-the-wall (really room-on-the-roof) restaurant was watching cricket, etc.

Time to sign off. By the way, the title of this post is a Bollywood film I watched on the flight today. Despite it being silly nonsense {was set in Australia and a rip-off of the Jackie Chan flick Miracle, which in turn is a rip-off of ...}, it was really funny and I recommend it for some light fun.