A Day on the Town!

Today was our first free day since we got to India. We all went in to the city of Bangalore together and then spread out from there. It was great to finally feel some autonomy over my own actions.

We started out at a relatively expensive but very clean and organized Indian clothing store on Commercial Street called Fabindia. I bought a couple of things from there. I realized that things were expensive there, but they were also pretty high quality and had the sleeves already attached. Sreet places sell the shirts with the sleeves pinned inside, and you have to go to the tailor to get them sewn on, so at least I saved a step.

A group of us went to lunch at a place called Shilpa's. The food looked great, but it's still Ramadan, so I'm still fasting. After lunch, Katie and I headed over to a market/plaza area. A lot of different vendors have set up little stalls inside to sell clothing, tapestries, handicrafts, jewelry, wall-hangings, incense, dried fruit and more. I got a nice scarf to go with the outfit I had purchased earlier in the day. Really it's something I could have gotten at Old Navy, but it's authentically Indian. The man originally told me the scarf would cost 150 rupees (3 dollars). I bargained with him but was only able to get the price down to 120 and even this price he seemed very unhappy to grant me. This is something I'm not at all used to in bargaining. Most of my bargaining experience comes from Cairo I suppose, and in Cairo, paying 4/5 of the originally quoted price would be getting ripped off big time. I don't think I got ripped off necessarily. A man on the other side of the plaza/market area had tried to sell me a similar scarf for 300 rupees. Perhaps the man who I bought the scarf from was nice and just quoted me a more reasonable price to begin with. I also bought some dried mango and some dried fruit-I've-never-seen-before. The guy selling the dried fruit and other little snacks insisted that I try everything that he was selling. I kept telling him I didn't want to try things like "spicy mango", "rose dates" or "tamarind coated strawberry and mango sauce dipped in apple juice" because I was sure I wouldn't end up buying them, but he absolutely insisted. In the end, I only tried a few things of the many that he insisted I try, but he didn't seem angry at all that I didn't buy more. I was a little worried that he would say something about how I owed him a larger purchase after trying the 12 different items he had insisted I try, but that wasn't at all the case.

After this market area, Katie and I headed to Mahatma Gandhi (MG) road. I stopped by an ATM to get more cash. The ATM was in a little air-conditioned room and to get inside you had to swipe an ATM card. It was interesting. Are ATMs inside banks in the US like that? We went to a grocery store to look around and pick up some essentials like peanut butter. I picked up some biscuit things with creme filling. 16 cookie/biscuits for 10 rupees (20 cents). Cheaper than oreos...I also got some lime soda because every time we've gone out so far people have gotten some, but I haven't gotten the chance to taste it yet since I'm fasting during the day when we're out. The bottle was 15 rupees/30 cents. I like.

After shopping, Katie and I headed over to the cricket stadium. Neither of us had ever seen cricket before and we had absolutely no idea how it works/what the rules are. The only two things that came to mind when I heard the word cricket were men in turbans and Hayley practicing her "cricket throw" this summer at camp. Do sikhs play a lot of cricket? Because I definitely associated Sikhs and cricket very strongly. Despite our clear lack of knowledge of the game, we paid our 49 rupees (1 dollar) to go watch the Bangalore Brigadiers battle it out against the Malnad Gladiators. We watched people run back and forth between two lines, listened to people cheer at seemingly random intervals and gave each other confused glances for a while before deciding to ask the man sitting next to us how cricket works. He told us that this game was part of the inter-Karnataka league, so both teams were from within the state and the game wasn't really important and then turned away from us again. Katie asked something about scoring and told the man we really knew nothing about cricket. He told us to watch and learn because explaining the game would take too long and would make him "lose the match". Oops. It was worth a try...

2 hours later we knew that the batters can earn 1, 4 or 6 points on each bat, we knew that cricket somehow involves something called 'overs', we knew that the live band plays very excitedly when good things happen to the batting team and we knew that cricket games take a loong time to complete. Yeah...definitely going to wikipedia cricket when I'm done with this post. During the game, vendors were going around selling all sorts of food items: lays potato chips, ice cream bars, samosas, popcorn, real corn. There was a short intermission when the teams were switching from batting to bowling (that's what they call the pitching action!) and vice versa. During that break, many people went out and got big plates of rice and stuff. It was interesting. I guess samosas are the hotdogs of Indian cricket games. The family next to us bought a few bags of chips. When they finished with them, they tossed them casually behind them. Classic. The young boy sitting on the other side of us had had dyed-orange hair. He was probably five or six, and I'm thinking his mother probably was going for a light brown color. Definitely orange though. There was a group of about 12 or so elementary-aged boys sitting in front of us. They seemed pretty proud to be there on their own. Incidentally, there were no turban-wearing men on the field today.

We came back to Visthar after the game. There was dinner waiting for us, and it was actually Indian food. Here there is normally Indian food for lunch and American or Chinese food for dinner. That's nice of them, but, since I haven't eaten many lunches here, that means not much Indian food for me. It was great to have some today. I also got to drink my lime soda although it turns out it's lime juice: no carbonation. Still delicious though!

Overall, a very good day. It made me reminisce about the many days last summer that I spent walking around downtown Cairo. I wish I could do the same every day here, but that's not what I'm in India for...

Oo...somehow that reminded me! My mom is in Turkey now, and it sounds amazing! She says that it's a lot like Egypt too. In her e-mail to me she said that the air somehow smells like Egypt which is exactly what I feel about India. I hope to go Turkey someday too.

On Monday we leave for a week-long field visit to Koppal. There we will be helping to construct a school. I'm nervous but excited. It will be good to be doing something different and seeing a new part of India.

Sleepy time for me! I'm so excited to get to sleep in tomorrow.