19 January 2010

Bright lights big city Bangalore

In total we'd not even spent 24 hours in Bangalore but it felt like it had been a lot longer. It was slightly disorientating and felt a little surreal to be somewhere that was so much like home but still very much in India. Bangalore felt even more developed and westernised than Mumbai and Delhi, there was even an M&S!

The strangeness was probably amplified by the hotel that we stayed in, a place called the Silver Square. They'd tried to set it up like an ultra modern boutique hotel, all the ingredients where there but they somehow got it completely wrong. Adding to the general feeling of wrongness was the fact that the hotel had been built above a nightclub which was so loud it shook the entire fabric of the building. The night we were there it was a Thai, Mongolian hip hop night! No . . . we never knew such a genre existed either.

Thankfully they had an 11 o'clock curfew so we escaped to the cinema to catch the new Sherlock Holmes film (well worth a watch) whilst the hip hop heads where shaking the furniture across our bedroom.

One of the consequences of Einstein's theory of relativity is a phenomenon whereby the faster you move the slower time goes. Normally you can't perceive the effects of this as it is minuscule unless you are traveling close to the speed of light. However; thanks to the insane speed that our tuk-tuk driver blasted us through the streets of Bangalore to Yesvantpur train station we experienced this effect at first hand! The distance from our hotel to the train station was only about 8km but it felt like the journey was never going to end. We never knew that it was possible for a three wheeled rickshaw to travel so fast . . . or so dangerously. We lost track of the amount near misses that we had but some of the more notable ones included: a near head on smash into the front of a bus, a near miss with a crowd of guys that were trying to push start a van (which we also narrowly missed) and the near flattening of a school girl who was crossing the road. The insane driving is one of the few things we're not going to miss when we get back home.

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