Mee-sore!

---

Our second placement weekend was spent in the beautiful city of Mysore, (mistakenly pronounced by Ali as ‘Mee-sore’ much to the amusement of our Indian housemates) a three hour bus ride away from Ashwini. We stayed in a hotel 3km outside the centre claimed by the Lonely Planet as ‘the nicest hostel in all of India’. Not convinced by this statement but if nothing else it definitely has a shot at being the most hilarious. We were staying in the women’s dorm which contained about 20 bunk-beds and at least another 20 mattresses strewn on any available floor surface. The other guests were exclusively Indian, my particular bunk-mate made her irritation at our presence very clearly known-after enquiring of me suspiciously several times ‘why are you here?’, she tried to oust Ali and I to the other side of the room and then insisted Ali move her rucksack as it was in, I quote, ‘the place for my soap’. I also got a very stern yelling for rolling over in the night. The bathrooms are also an adventure as queuing is not a concept which India has adopted. In fact the exact opposite. The shower etiquette goes as follows: barge in when you can and if someone dares to take more than 5 minutes, attempt to knock the door down. Is an interesting approach. The sign stating check-in is from ‘10am to 10am’ (just below the sign that bans ‘all gambling and playing cards’) is clearly not a strict rule as a literal bus-load of women rolled into the room at 6am and, mid full-blast singing, threw a bag onto Cat’s head thinking her bed was empty. One way to start the day!



We found an excellent local restaurant which we quickly made our regular lunch venue-highlight was a HUGE thali for the grand price of 80p including curry, poppadum, family sized portion of rice, various non-descript but fantastic sauces and poori, a kind of puffed up bread which is delicious. The food situation only got better as we decided to splash out for our Saturday dinner and go to a beautiful hotel for an afternoon and evening of fruit platters, masala peanuts, cocktails and (for me) pasta in their courtyard, candle-lit restaurant. I visited the toilets approximately 55 times to make full use of the toilet roll. Speaking of toilets we also found a mall in the middle of Mysore which is half built (health and safety not on the radar) but very much open and contained, much to our delight, air-conditioning, the most impressive selection of ice-cream flavours I have ever seen, escalators and, the crowning glory, a set of loos with not only toilet roll but soap dispensers and an actual hand drier. You have never seen 6 people so excited. So much so that we visited again on the Sunday. In my haste I managed to fall over the doorway and slice my toe at which point the very lovely security man leapt at the opportunity to christen his first aid kit and doused my wound with not one, not two, not three, but FOUR types of antiseptic. It is still the cleanest wound in the history of time.

The palace is one of the most impressive buildings I have ever seen from stunning green-pillared wedding room (dad-get saving I have found my future marriage venue) to very British-style stained glass windowed courtyards. We returned in the evening for the promised light spectacular display of the 42000 bulbs lining the palace. After a few tepid flashes we gave up and went to drink some beer instead. Equally cultural. On the Sunday morning we got a bus to Chamundi Hill to visit the temple which at first read I am sure sounds incredibly serene. Think again. The temple itself is a beautiful white building perched on top of a hill with an incredible view of Mysore. However the rest of India decided they also wanted to witness its beauty on the same day. There was a queue (which actually seemed to function as a queue) looping round the entire building. We naturally had to pay the 3x increased foreigner price which did mean that we got fast tracked through the throngs straight into the temple, past the ‘coconut breaking place’, into the Goddess chamber where you are instructed to stick your hand in fire and drink holy water which looked so dubious we threw it on our heads instead. And then 30 seconds later we were out! And into the market next to the temple which includes the most bizarre selection of toys you could possibly imagine. Am still baffled by the thought process that went into making some of these things:

‘OK boss, I have an idea. For our next big seller how about a plastic man with a cone shaped head pushing a plastic cart full of tiny white balls’

‘Not bad, let’s make 500 in 10 different colours, but I was thinking more along the lines of a plastic baby in basket called “Titoo”’.

‘Brilliant boss. But I have an even better idea. Take the same plastic baby, surround it by neon pink fluff and make it into a rucksack.’

‘We have a winner’.

We spent what we thought would be our final few Mysore hours in a rooftop café overlooking the palace as a parade drummed away below us punctuated with the occasional cannon boom. No-one seemed too alarmed by this though we did see several birds literally drop out of the tree opposite us. Afterwards we headed to the bus station in plenty of time for our 17:30 bus home. I resist the urge to use the ‘physically challenged toilet’. 17:30 came and went. Turned out our bus had crashed on the way and was cancelled. Ah. After a fun half hour of shoving in the refund ‘queue’ we found out there is another bus at 11.30pm that we were about to book when we realised it wouldn’t arrive until 7am. Ah. Why? Turns out that the forest roads close overnight as this is when the elephants presumably get their rage on so the bus simply stops for a few hours. In the middle of the forest. We quickly vetoed this option and found a hotel near the bus station which for the grand price of £10 a night (we decided it was justified as we had spent £1.20 at the hostel of dreams). We were rewarded by a rooftop pool; lady kit containing essentials such as toothpaste, bindis and tongue scrubber; fan AND air conditioning AND TV, all of which I turned on immediately, just because I could-Harry Potter in Hindi is a fascinating experience; mirror which helpfully asks ‘am I smart’; and the best shower head I have seen in a month. It. Is. Heaven. We reluctantly left the next morning and our 7am bus mercifully appeared. After an hour-long tyre change we are finally on our way. Clearly the little boy in front of us was caught short as his mother dangled him out the window to do his business. Unfortunately we had all the windows open and Ali and Alex received a lovely face-full of toddler pee to finish off our very eventful weekend! As Han (wrongly but very accurately) read from the guide book: ‘If you haven’t been to Mysore, you just haven’t been’.

---