Bangalore, our gateway to India

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India was quite an interesting and wonderful place. I think we both braced ourselves for the most extreme place we'd ever thought we would see. We pictured the most extreme of poverty, rampant begging and who knows what else. We arrived so late, but we found the metered taxi line and it was the usual developing world scenario where someone was trying to get you in another unmarked overpriced cab, but of course we were smarter than that. So far nothing out of the ordinary for Steve and I. After checking in, a bit of a sleep before being woken up by the most sobering of a door buzzer at 8 am, after falling asleep at 3 am to tell us we could move to the super deluxe room we had been upgraded to, we kindly told both the 3 guys waiting to move us and the follow up phone call two seconds later that we would sleep in till 10 since we had to be down for breakfast by then. I will say one thing, in India people are persistent and as a team.

We had a choice between a western continental breakfast in our room, or a typical south Indian breakfast in the restaurant, we choose south Indian in the restaurant. We were each given a voucher worth 80 rupees or about $1.80 and trust me, this was plenty for two breakfasts, trying something else that we shared and coffee and a 1 liter bottle of water. We had two types of Dosa's which is a southern Indian pancake stuffed with potatoes and other goodies, and this other dish which just a bit thicker than the consistency of oatmeal but good, it had nuts and other spices and all were accompanied by a series of chutneys.

We decided it would be good to just 'immerse' ourselves which we typically do first think in any new country. So we walked towards a market, we didn't know this at first but that is what it was. There were a series of people selling everything from vegetables, to plastic containers, to underwear, right on the sidewalk. There were motor cycles and Tuk Tuk's (3 wheeled taxis) everywhere. People kept saying to us Mr. Mr. and per usual that means Mr. can you spare a rupee, Mr. I have a cab for you or Mr. come into my store. Eyes forward and acting like we never heard a thing we charged on.

We decided we had enough of the market, but did see some cool temples and average Benagli life and decided to try our luck at haggling for an auto rickshaw to go see the Bull Temple. He wanted 100, we settled on 80 ($1.80) and 25 minutes later we arrived at our destination.

Bangalore was a great place but a day was enough. We had some great food for our first meal at a roof top restaurant whose theme was street foods of India (prepared in a proper kitchen of course). We went to a bar called Nasa and it was just like being seated in a space ship and we continued to learn the auto rickshaw bartering system. We had to be to bed early as we had to be up by 3 to catch a flight to Goa.

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