Weekend trip to Bangalore

This weekend (4 to 6 May) it was: off to Bangalore. Bangalore is a city about 350 km away (7 hours by train), where the IT industry is booming and which is actually fairly Western. We set off on Friday evening and had booked sleeper class. These are trains with bunks stacked three high, so we managed to get some sleep. I had trouble dropping off properly, though, and was pretty worn out the next day.

That didn't stop us from seeing just about every sight in Bangalore listed in the Lonely Planet. We started with the Bull Temple, an old temple with a huge bull statue, then wandered on to the palace, then to the botanical garden, and finally marched along MG Road, the biggest tourist street. To rest a bit, we sat down in one of the many parks and played a round of Wizard. My fellow travellers loved the game, and we had plenty of Indian spectators too.

In the evening we wanted to stay with an AIESEC member, a German called Marcel. Getting hold of him turned out to be tricky at first, because we hadn't considered that we were in a different state and had to dial India's country code to get through. The second difficulty was that Marcel had to work, outside the city, and on the way back his bus broke down, and then the rickshaw driver he hired ran out of petrol. Anyway, after several failed attempts we got the mobile number of Marcel's Korean flatmate. We called him and he let us into the flat. The flat is many times smaller than ours, but the landlord lives right next door. And this landlord is a total bombshell: about 40 years old but behaving like 20. We partied with him all evening (with a detour to a rock bar in between), and believe me, the man is a sly old dog. I'd rather not go into detail in case any minors are reading…

The next day we were a bit exhausted from the party and had a very quiet day in a huge shopping mall. We also watched Spider-Man 3. Good film.