Greetings from Bangaluru. Or Bangalore. I’m still not sure. So many of these Indian cities have two names.
We arrived late at night, and processed through an ultra-modern passenger terminal to our bus waiting to drive us the 40 minutes to our downtown hotel. Bengaluru was a swampy Indian backwater until the 1990s, when tech industries moved in and transformed the region into the subcontinent’s Silicon Valley. Now it’s a swampy Indian frontwater. If there ever were such a thing.
We stayed at the luxurious ITC Windsor, a British themed palatial hotel about a mile north of the city center. I always thought the Indians resented their colonial overlords, but the Windsor was basically a shrine to the Union Jack, complete with nautical artowork, a dark-paneled lounge, an Irish Pub, and breakfast baked beans I could order to my room with a cup of English tea.
I elected to walk down to the breakfast buffet instead. For some reason, the Indians decided to rival the British for the worst breakfast food known to man. I don’t mind rice for breakfast in tropical countries, but my mouth flatly rejected the spicy rice I served myself from the buffet. I also took one bite of what looked like a classic cake donut before leaving the rest on my plate because it contained whatever spices the British failed to bring back to their kingdom and exactly zero grams of sugar.
The hotel pool was the highlight, although I could only enjoy about 30 minutes in the sun before getting burned by the exceedingly high UV daylight. It still beat the mounds of snow I left behind in D.C.
Next to the pool, we took up a table at the Royal Afghan restaurant for lunch. Upon sitting down, our waiters promptly tied bibs around each of our necks as though we were about to embark on a Maryland crab feast. Luckily, Afghani food involves less manual labor to reach the edible portions and significantly less fecal matter than the Chesepeake favorite. I’m sensing a fecal theme to these Indian writeups.
We were suckered into ordering the three-course set menu, which featured one serving of each appetizer and entrée, which were all variations of chicken and lamb, some minced, some chunked, some pulled, some sauced, all spiced, and certainly all more than my poor boy Morgan could handle. He survived the week off naan and self-deprecating humor. Man does not live on bread alone, unless it’s garlic butter naan on a DoD-directed India trip. It helped that our Afghani friends served us a portion of naan roughly the size of a manta ray that we all broke apart with our recently chlorinated hands.
Good thing I’m not trying to write an actual postcard. I’d need several.
I did find postcards at the National Gallery of Modern Art, just a few blocks from our hotel. We braved the cracked, narrow sidewalks and sagging power lines for the half-mile walk to the gallery. The hedgework around the pool muffled the true volume of honking drivers, who seemed more ornery here than in northern Delhi. I’m convinced that each vehicle’s horn is just connected to the gas pedal.
We perused the gallery for about an hour. I enjoyed the landscapes of rural India and turned an eyebrow at the frequent depictions of copulation among various species. It’s a horny country in more ways than one. I need to propose a book call “The Carmasutra: A sociological exploration of Indian driving habits.”
In the morning, I trekked down to Cubbon Park with my friend Levi. He’d picked out a jogging route through the city’s central park. We had to navigate a few crosswalks, but unlike Kathamandu, Bengaluru’s crosswalks featured functioning red and green signals. I feared for my life significantly less.
Cubbon Park is big enough to run a 5K without doubling back, so that’s essentially what we did. Near the end of the run, we stopped in front of the State Central Library, a reddish-brown edifice with an impressive garden. And around the corner, along the main street, the state legislature building extended with notable breadth and bulbous domes that gave it the look of an eastern capitol.
Levi and I both wanted to ride a motorized rickshaw while we had the chance, so we summoned one in front of the legislature. The man spoke no English and seemed confused when I said “ITC Windsor.”
I pulled up the directions on my phone. He took the phone and zoomed in and out to examine the route. He handed the phone back and gave me an expressionless head shake, along the z-axis if you will, which to my American sensibilities more resembled a y-axis no than an x-axis yes.
“No? You can’t take us?” I asked.
He then switched to the western x-axis head nod to affirm that he could, indeed drive us.
On the 10-minute trip, I had to remind myself to keep my arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times given the fearless proximity to which the drivers would encroach on other cars. Our driver honked several times, none too aggressively, mostly just to alert the line of cars that a stoplight had turned green. It seems the reaction here is for everybody to honk as soon as the light changes, rather than the American method of waiting a cursory two sections before aggressively laying on the horn as though you’re stuffing your oversized carryon into an undersized bin.
At the hotel, I asked the driver how much the trip cost. He said “one” and held up his index finger. At first, I thought 1000 rupees. I had about 1500 in cash, so that was fair. But then I remembered my 40-minute Delhi Uber cost just $5, which would be roughly 500 rupees. If Bengaluru’s economy were comparable to Delhi’s, our 10-minute rickshaw trip should probably only cost 100 rupees.
Turns out it did. Or at least, that’s what I paid him.
Now that I’ve been back in the states for a month, I look back fondly on this trip for everything except the wretched jet lag it inflicted on me. I was waking up at 1 a.m. for a solid week after we returned. I’ll take that over food poisoning any day.
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