Bangalore was an interesting place. The weather was unexpectedly cool. Some people were even wearing sweaters—yeh, like the kind you get for Christmas. Rickshaws had meters…that worked. And drivers used them. Matt and I arrived early, so we had lots of time to explore on our first day. We went to 2 museums, an art gallery, and an aquarium. This took maybe an hour. The aquarium consisted mostly of the same fish my brother had in his tank when we were little, and Matt and I both agreed the seafood section at Ranch 99 is more exciting. At one museum I learned how a sewing machine works…sort of, and in the other was able to see some miniature paintings of various styles. Unfortunately the descriptions stopped there and I still have no idea what story the painting was depicting. After our educational museum hour, we walked on in search of Tipu Sultan’s Palace, supposedly one of the sites to see while in Bangalore. After asking about a dozen people where it was, we finally arrived. After paying the much higher foreigner’s entry fee, we realized why not everyone we asked knew what it was. The entrance looks cool, see:

But that is pretty much it. Look back as far as you can in the picture above. That is about half of the palace. At that point the building is just a mirror image of its front side. Not much of the large palace we were expecting, and it goes without saying that after all our walking and anticipation, we were more than a little disappointed. Anyways, unless you’re already in the area and are an Indian citizen and only have to pay 5 or 10 rupees to get in I wouldn’t recommend visiting. It was about as good as the aquarium.

In the first two restaurants we ate at on our first day, most of the waiters were barefoot. So were the school kids above. Not that there’s a problem with being barefoot, if you can stand hot pavement and such. But this was Bangalore—one of India’s big cities, not small little Hampi where the villagers live in old ruins. It just reminded me that I am not in Kansas—I mean California anymore. I have worked in a few restaurants and later at a culinary school. As a server I had to wear closed-toe shoes, no open back. At the school, the dress code called for steel-toed and grease resistant soles (luckily as admin staff I did not have to adhere to that rule). In Bangalore? Footwear optional. Of course not all the places we ate were that laidback, which brings me to the other reason why Bangalore was an interesting place to visit. Aside from Matt and my first day of somewhat aimless wandering, we had the privilege of meeting up with a friend from UCSB who had returned to India and moved to Bangalore for work. He was a great host and planned a few things for us to do, including taking us to see the GE campus where he works. It was incredible and huge, and even had a pool-sized zen garden. I couldn’t find a rake though…. It was nice to do things that we wouldn’t have known about on our own, but it was also a nice change of pace to talk with someone who wasn’t a tourist or in the tourism industry among other things, about India.