Oh my, here it is already day 4! The trip yesterday to Leela Palace was such a contrast to what we've been experiencing so far. Leela Palace is not a palace at all but it is a 5 star hotel where important people like our President stays when he comes to Bangalore. I've tried like the dickens to post pics both here, on MobileMe, and Facebook to show you all but with very little success. Anyway, Leela Palace was very, very luxurious. Decadent, well manicured grounds, fancy foyers, huge fountains filled with rose petals, and a big beautiful pool were just a few of the incredible things to see. Aside from that, we were there to indulge on their elegant brunch. All the foods we might not be able to get in Bangalore were certainly available at Leela Palace. We had choices from lamb brains to chocolate souffle! I personally passed on the brains, but make it a religion to never turn down chocolate! Anyway, we did a bit of fancy mall shopping as well there and headed home.
The traffic during rush hour is absolutely crazy. There are no established lanes anywhere in the streets. The road is shared without any seemingly rules (at one point our driver was driving the wrong way down a one way road) with cars, buses, mopeds carrying families of 3-4 (complete with side-saddled, sari-wearing moms on the back, child in the middle and baby in front of dad who is driving), cows, pedestrians, and what or who ever needs to use the road. There are no real cross-walks so to say, and pedestrians do not have the right of way, so it's an insane dance and I mean really insane of darting vehicles, animals, and people shooting across the road in all different directions. It is incredible, but it seems to work in an eerie sort of way. It sure looks like somebody will get hit, but in the nick of time they or the vehicle makes a sharp dart out of the way, all preceded by the honk, which I think
translates as a language, an entire dialect of its own. There was not an evening yoga class that night, so we skipped that, went out for dinner and retired around 10am. at about 2am we were roused by barking dogs. The barking literlly went on for hours. We summized somebody must have been in heat and drove all the local male dogs crazy. Oh yeah, and then we couldn't get back to sleep, so it's been a long day today!
Today started with an early morning back-bend class, a little break for chai and veggie biyrani, a late morning class for women only, (what an amazing sequence; and the studio must have has 40 women in class) and then a bus ride to a quaint little bistro called Koshy's (which was like stepping back 50 years but had some really good food including milkshakes and the infamous "thums up," a sweet Indian style cola), and a visit to the Nandi Temple. This temple is situated in a little forest and in addition to having big beautiful statues of 5 goddesses, is a tribute to the Bhagavad Gita. The verses of Gita are carved out in stone tablets and displayed in a beautiful ashram. I could have spent the night there as it was a surreal and spiritual experience to touch and read the tablets in this sort of glory. After that we did some shopping at a fun local place called, "Fab India." And then it was another crazy ride home in commute traffic, back the the hotel (I actually opted to skip dinner, take a shower (India is very dusty and the trip today left me feeling an urgency to wash off the dry, dark, dirt)), and get ready for a long, big, important all day trip tomorrow to Mysore, Mr Iyengar's birthplace.
So it's off to sleep I go in order to be ready to rise at 5am, get on the bus for 3 hours and see more of India! This has really been an amazing experience, truly a different world. Right now, 8:45pm I hear then local Temple chanting prayers and ringing in their puja as the same beeping cars, barking dogs and busy pedestrians travel home and retire for the day. So good
night for now! I promise I will do my best to keep up an the blog tomorrow!!!
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