Week days here are filled with work, and work here is much like it is in Dallas. I did make a second trip to Food World one evening last week to get more water and bought some other things as well. A couple of beggars, women with small children they were carrying, approached me, as well as a sidewalk watch salesman who addressed me as "master". But for the most part it was an uneventful week.

There is a lady with a small desk in the i2 lobby who works for a company called Les Concierges. She will make arrangements for travel, various travel papers like passports, running errands, buying groceries, party planning, and more. She is getting me tickets for a tour of Mysore next Saturday. It will be a long bus trip from 7:15 a.m. leaving Bangalore to the return at 11:00 p.m., but I think it should be well worth it.

I had nothing planned for today other than scouting out some silk prices and buying more water. I'd thought I might walk to a park and look around too, but didn't get there. After my first full night's sleep since arriving a week ago last Wednesday, I went down to the free breakfast that the hotel provides. As I was finishing breakfast another American sat down at the table next to mine and we started talking. His name is Kevin. This is his last day in Bangalore after two months here and another two months here a year ago. What an opportunity to ask questions! That's just what I did. He told me of several things to see, but I'm still a bit leery of travel outside the city by taxi after my friend Rick's horror story about going to Mysore in a taxi. So I asked Kevin what was good to see in Bangalore and he told me Nandi Hill and Bannergada were good. I wished I had a paper and pen to write things down but I didn't. I asked him about silk. He said that The State Emporium on St. Mark's Street was very reasonable and that they sold fabric as well as garments. He also told me that just down Brigade Street, the street that connects Residency Road, where my hotel is, to M.G. Road where Food World is, there was a street called Commercial Street that was just packed with shops and had all sorts of good things at reasonable prices. One store he liked in particular is called Eastern Arts. He was eating French toast for breakfast and it looked like he was putting syrup on it, something I'd not been able to find in the buffet. So I asked him about that too and he said you have to ask for it. It was a very profitable discussion.

[At left, below, a rare street sign in Bangalore.]

So, after a brief stop at my room and a quick look at the map Rohith, a friend at work here, gave me, I set out for St. Mark's Street which I'd found on the map. It looked to be only a couple blocks away, and sure enough it was. None of the intersections have street signs in Bangalore, so I asked a policeman at an intersection where St. Mark's Street was and he said I could keep going southwest on Residency Rd. or take what he said was a shortcut north and then after a block turn west. Out of politeness I took his shortcut and was soon on St. Marks. St., though I didn't know it at first. I decided to walk south toward the center of Bangalore and was looking at the signs in front of stores and other buildings which sometimes give the address and street name, but wasn't having any luck. One big building seemed at first to be a hotel, since it had a sign on it that said that and I was thinking of going in to ask directions, when I saw a sign over one store that said "The State Emporium." What luck! So I went in.

One clerk pulled out a chair for me to sit in while another got silk to show me. The first thing I was shown was silk brocade saris at about $150.00 each. I said I was interested in smaller pieces, more like 1 meter rather than 6.5 meters in length. They showed me the shawls, about a meter by a meter and a half or two meters. They are $50 and came in quite a variety of colors. They didn't have anything smaller, Connie, but I can continue to look around some. The patterns were much more full and "busier" than what we'd bought in China. I asked about plain silk fabric. That comes in various colors at Rs. 200 / meter, which I guess must be $4.00 / meter. Hmm, that seems awfully cheap. That's what I wrote down though so I guess it's right. So if any of you want silk let me know. (Hollie, what colors do you want and how much?)

I left the store and headed back to Brigade Rd. At one corner, while waiting for the light to cross, a young man came up to me and asked where I was from. He obviously wasn't a beggar and we started talking. One of his first questions was if I was familiar with the music of Mozart. His name is Madhu, Sanskrit for Honey, and he is a student working on his masters degree in math, hoping to get a Ph.D. He was carrying a big book on solving integral equations. I asked him about Commerce Street and he said somebody had pointed me in the wrong direction. He said he'd show me where it is and we walked along; he asking questions about the U.S. and me asking questions about Bangalore and India. It was a long walk, for when Kevin had said "down Brigade Street" he had meant north, away from the center of the city and I'd assumed he'd meant south, and I'd gone several long blocks when I met up with Madhu.

On the way to Commerce Street Madhu took me into a department store. If I'd been brought there blindfolded I'd have thought I was in one of the better department stores, though a small one, in the U.S. (Well, the long plane ride might have been a clue otherwise.) Madhu is a very big fan of Mozart. We went to the music section of the store and Madhu pointed to a shelf packed with CDs and said that his Mozart collection was almost that big. He said that he enjoyed looking at the things in the store, and we went to every department. We stopped in the video games department. Schuyler, is there anything you want me to look for?

As we walked north from the department store he asked how long I'd be in Bangalore and I said till the 6th of February. He said that Mozart's birthday is January 27th and that he has a little birthday party for Mozart every year and he invited me to come, have some cake and meet his parents. I told him I was honored to be invited, but I declined. It may be that people are a lot more trustworthy here than in the U.S., but I still didn't feel right about accepting an invitation from a total stranger. We exchanged email addresses though, so if I change my mind I can contact him.

We walked along Commerce St. eventually and it was just as Kevin had described it, packed with small shops of every imaginable kind with alleys branching off with still more small shops. We never did find the Eastern Arts shop, but I only remembered about half way down the street because of the conversation with Madhu. At the end of Commerce Street we turned south and passed more shops.

Among them was a very small temple to Shiva. This was not the Hollywood version like the one behind Saree Kemp Fort, where I was last Saturday, but just a small neighborhood temple - the real thing. Madhu asked if I'd like to go in. I asked if that was OK, and he said it was. So we went in, leaving our shoes in the entryway. We had to step around a young man who was lying motionless near the entry on his stomach and appeared to have his lips to the floor. There were maybe 15 people there including a priest (I don't know his actual title.) Madhu told me that the idol in the center was Shiva in the form of a lion. Many Hindu gods, if not all, can assume any desired form, and this assumption of a lion's form was in order to fight a beast. Shiva's wife was on his lap. Actually the face of Shiva didn't look a lot like a lion to me, but it did have a lot of mean looking teeth. To the left was a statue of Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth. That name should be familiar to listeners of National Public Radio who hear Lakshmi Singh's news stories.

As at Kemp Fort we walked around behind Shiva. There wasn't anything to see there, but Madhu said that it was supposed to be good to do that. He touched his chest in a pattern as we came out and commented to me that just as we westerners did this, and he crossed himself as Catholics do, they did this, and he made similar movements but in the other pattern he had made previously. The people in the temple were lined up in two rows down the center at this point, side by side, and Madhu joined them. I stayed a few feet back by the side wall. The priest walked down between them pouring something into their hands, and they drank this and I saw a couple of the men wipe the remains across the tops of their hair. Next the priest gave each person a couple tablespoons worth of something to eat. It looked much like something we had in here at i2 Friday, a sweet and very tasty combination of grated carrots cooked in milk with sugar till the milk and sugar are thick enough to hold the carrots together. The result is good and doesn't particularly taste like carrots at all. Madhu offered me some but I declined since it would have to be eaten with my hands and I knew they were dirty. I had waterless hand cleaner with me, but that didn't seem like an appropriate thing to get out and use in the temple and I wasn't sure whether the food would be safe to eat even so for someone not accustomed to the local germs. He ate the food and then we put on our shoes and left.

Madhu asked if he could buy me a cup of coffee. In the U.S. I'm not a coffee drinker, but the coffee at i2 here is sweet and full of milk. Of course I accepted, and would have even if it had been U.S. coffee, but I told him that I would pay since I was so glad for his company and assistance, and students need to save their money for their books and such. We went upstairs in a small building and there were tables each for two, only one of which was empty. We took it. He ordered two coffees and they were just like at i2, very good. There was a picture of Shiva as a lion with his wife on his lap hanging in the coffee shop. I pointed it out to Madhu. In the picture he looked like a picture I saw of Aslan in the Narnia stories, very much lion but with a very human distortion to the face. Two coffees cost Rs. 12, or about 25 cents.

We left the coffee shop and walked down to a big road that leads west to a gigantic cricket stadium and also to Madhu's college. At that point we said good-bye and he went off to a Saturday class, I think, and I went toward my hotel. I walked a very long block east past a park with a wall around it. There didn't seem to be any way in, other than over the meter high wall or I would have gone in. It was an odd looking park really, rather sparse in vegetation. I finally came to an entrance where the park ended and what appeared to be a military parade ground began. There was a guard at the entry, there was no vegetation form this point on, even grass, and there didn't appear to be a way out on the other side, so I wasn't tempted to go in. I continued on to Brigade Street and walked south along it to M.G. Road.

I was only a block or so from Food World at this point, so I turned west and walked there. I bought 6 liters of water, a Cadbury bar with fig and apricot specks in it, and a tupperware-like container with a lid that would be about right to hold a sandwich. It was listed on the cash register receipt, I noticed later, as "Asian l/ box". I guess that's a lunch box. Then I walked back to the hotel. I'd been out for 3 or 4 hours and was concerned that I had no sun screen. I don't know if it's the density of the smog or what, but sitting here typing this I don't feel burnt, and Jayanta, whose cubicle I share, says that I only look slightly pink in the face. I was lucky.

[At right, below, an auto rikshaw. Note the starter lever on the floor with a bottle of oil leaning on it. The red sign on the meter says "FOR HIRE" when right side up. There's a single front wheel and motorcycle-like handle bars in front of the drivers seat. In the back there's room for two, or three if you squeeze.]

After a quick, spice free lunch of tuna from home, leechi nectar from Food World, and a couple squares of Cadbury chocolate, I gathered up some things to bring to work and caught an auto rikshaw near the hotel and took it to work. It's about half the price of a taxi, but the drivers are less reliable to get you to where you're going. At this point I know the way, so I figured I'd try an "auto" today. Since you have gotten this email you can assume that I arrived at work successfully. The cost of the 5.3 km. trip was Rs. 24, under 50 cents. Money does go farther here.

And that concludes my adventures for the day. I'm hoping to get a little work done for my talk Monday. With several emails to answer though, that may have to wait for tomorrow. I plan to go out with the camera tomorrow morning. The shops and the sidewalks and the horse statues in front of a bank that I hope I can find again, will all be good subjects for pictures of Bangalore. So will be the traffic and the auto rikshaws and the intersections. It's an interesting place, and not at all what I'd expected or understood from the descriptions.

I really enjoy email from friends and family, so if anyone feels like writing please do. Sorry I can't write everyone a long personal note, but at least I'm writing long impersonal notes. Feel free to cancel your subscription if these are too boring.

Garr

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