the klog

I made a second trip to Bangalore. Here are the chefs at a fancy restaurant called the Khansama:

Night-time foliage at the Taj West End Hotel:

A couple of pictures of discussions:

And finally, I really liked the smile I caught here:

:)

I went to a craft party and decided to make some meta-craft. Here's an animated GIF of someone else's origami creation:

That's a blue peacock and a white peahen.

The Mysore Zoo was surprisingly huge! There were lions and tigers and giraffes, too, but here are some grooming marmosets:

A lounging gorilla:

And some crows just hanging out on some sambars:

I liked how these workers carried stuff on their heads:

And finally, my one "street photography" style shot of the trip:

I took a day trip to Mysore on my second visit to India. It's about a 3 hour drive from Bangalore. Here are a few shots of fruits and pigments from Devaraja Market:

I only had my US SIM Card with me this trip, so I turned off data roaming. Luckily, Google Maps for Android just released a Labs feature: After enabling Offline Maps in Labs, you can just search for any city, select it, and download the maps within a 10 mile radius. I was able to view the map of the Mysore area without data access! The GPS still worked, too.

So my driver from Bangalore actually got a bit lost. He didn't know where Devaraja Market was, and he just tried to drop me off at some random shopping area. The Offline Maps actually came in handy: I was able to guide my driver to the right place! :D

A few more street scenes:

Here's a rather full van:

A beast of burden:

A women police station:

Airport security lines in India also have separate men and women lines.

Finally, I visited a small Railway Museum, and the most interesting part was this "Austin Rail Motor Car":

It had a fun caption that was full of spelling and capitalization errors and lacked punctuation entirely. I don't feel like making fun of bad English again, so I've cleaned it up a bit here:

My Story

I am an Austin Car. Whenever I watch the speeding vehicles on the road in front of the Rail Museum, I always remember my days: I was born in England in 1925 and brought to India, where I served several owners till I became unserviceable.

A kind-hearted railway man bought me at an auction and resurrected me from the scrap by providing rail wheels. This metamorphosis from a car to a rail motor made me a Super Star, carrying officers on inspection on the railway track. Still I can carry.