Bangalore, and Departing India
Friday July 24, 2015 (Asia, India)
DISCLAIMER: In the spirit of everything in India needing at least two names, Bangalore is officially known as Bengaluru. I'm going to call it Bangalore because I'm a rebel like that.
Bangalore was… fairly uneventful for us! I guess that’s actually nice for a change. We took a fairly short train ride to get ourselves there, and almost avoided a torrential downpour. As luck would have it, we arrived to the Google Maps location of Social Rehab Hostel in Bangalore to discover… nothing! A restaurant? A nearby Baskin Robbins? None of these is a hostel. And then the rain began. One of those rains that starts as a light sprinkle and accelerates within half a minute to apocalyptic status. The good news is we got to make use of our rain covers for the backpacks!
As it turns out, Social Rehab is located up on the third floor, just past an unmarked entrance beside the restaurant. You have to step over cooks and wait staff eating their meals, go up a flight of stairs with a 10ft drop on one side and no railing, and then you arrive at a door with a small printed sign informing you that you’ve made it to the right spot. When we arrived, we were let in by guests because the host was asleep at 4pm in the afternoon. Bizarre.
We enjoyed Bangalore, though. So far, if there was one city we’d pick if we had to choose to live somewhere in India, it would be Bangalore. It’s quite a modern city, and comparatively clean. On our first night, we went to dinner at a MICROBREWERY. No joke! It’s the first one we’ve seen in India. And there was more than one in the area. And Sandra could get a salad with chicken on it. We were both pretty wide-eyed while we perused the menu. Prices were a bit more expensive than in other cities, but… MICROBREWERIES! I can’t stress this enough.
Our time in Bangalore was otherwise fairly uneventful. I had high-minded plans to get to the Museum of Modern Art, but then realized it was Modern art and not Contemporary art. There’s a difference, and I fall squarely on the side of enjoying Contemporary art! Much more entertaining to me. So we ended up skipping it. Instead, we wandered around the city a lot. It’s very spread out, so you can walk for hours and only see a fraction of the metropolitan area.
Yesterday we took a six hour train back to Chennai – our starting point in India. We had one night back at the Savera Hotel, breakfast to the sax cover stylings of “Wind Beneath My Wings”, and one last swim in the pool. At 1am tonight (or the “morning" of the 25th if you want to be technical like that) we depart for Bangkok. Cue change of scenery and a tectonic shift from curry to… Thai curry! Only three days in Bangkok, and then we fly to Vietnam to travel for a couple of weeks with our new friends Joe and Caroline. How exciting!
See you in Siam!