Annie had business to attend to in India. Sadly, she hasn’t received a call back about the Bollywood role, but Yahoo still wanted her to go do some marketing/strategy stuff.
First stop – Bangalore. Our friends Rebekah and James have been living in Bangalore for the past 6 months and they gave us the royal treatment (car, driver, palatial house, high-end mountain bikes, and awesome restaurants). If Bangalore is in your future travel plans, I highly recommend mooching off an expat family.
We took over James’ office and worked on Friday, but we sneaked out for some great meals. The place with the swinging chairs was a nice choice James!
On Saturday, after commandeering one of their cars and Augustine, one of their drivers, Annie and I headed out for a long day trip to Mysore. The short story on Mysore is that it used to be the center of power in India. The English eventually put an end to that. A bullet through the head of Tippu, a powerful ruler who fought the British on numerous occasions, allowed the Brits to do some reshuffling and designate Dehli as the new center of power.
Annie and I knocked out as many palaces and temples as we could. One tour guide looked rather puzzled when I interrupted our negotiation over a price and said “Rs. 250 sounds fine. Now can you give us the entire tour within 30 minutes?” We like our history in short, concise bites.
The 1,000 year-old, but still very active, Hindu temple that we visited was amazing. I don’t know how much of a social faux pas it is to cut the line in front for 50 or more Hindus waiting to be blessed by Ganesh, but we did. Our guide simply unclasped some ropes, skirted us around a few corners and then had us “rejoin” the line at the front. Are you curious about what the Hindu version of hell is like? We’ll send you a postcard.
We got pulled into pictures with numerous locals. I’m guessing there is an Indian website that encourages this kind of thing (www.mewithwhitepeeps.in)
Augustine, thanks for fighting 5 solid hours of traffic, full of carts, buses, and bad roads. (watch video)
