Bangalore - The Indian Bay Area

Getting to Bangalore was somewhat of a relief.  We still have a condo there, so it was a nice chance to relax and reboot.  Plus, the weather in Bangalore is amazing! It’s very much like the Bay Area.  I think it was around 70 or 75 degrees every day that I was there, so I pulled my jeans (that I had been lugging around Asia) out of my backpack for the first time.  I was also super excited at the prospect of eating lots and lots and lots of delicious Indian food.  This started with breakfast the day after I arrived: idli and sambar.  This is a traditional South Indian breakfast.  Idli is kind of hard to describe if you’ve never had it, but it is a bit like a small, fat pancake with a rice-like consistency.  It is, in fact, made of a kind of bean, so it’s full of protein.  It has a soft consistency, and you eat it with chutney and sambar.  I think that it is typically eaten with mint chutney, of which I am not a fan, so I tend to opt for the coconut and spicy chutneys.  Sambar is a kind of soup.  It is normally a bit spicy and sometimes has a bit of a tart flavor (which matches the mildy tart flavor of the idli itself), and it normally has vegetables in it as well.  Typically, you would spread some chutney on the idli and then dip it in the sambar.  It’s so so good, and it was a common breakfast over the course of the next two weeks. 

Now, being half Indian, I have always been exposed to Indian food, but as a child, I was perhaps a little on the pickier side, and as a result, I have tended to have a 10-year-old perspective of what kinds of Indian foods I like.  On this trip, I decided to throw my presumed preferences to the wind and try anything and everything.  My first amazing discovery was chaat.  Now, what exactly is chaat? It’s a bit difficult to explain, because even when I asked my dad what it was, he did not have a specific answer for me.  A translation of sorts would define chaat as a snack.  And indeed, chaat tends to be eaten as a snack in the late afternoon or as an appetizer at dinner.  Chaat itself can be made up of many different kinds of things, but it almost universally contains some kind of chickpea related item, whether it be actual chickpeas, or these shell-like things made from chickpea powder.  Sometimes there are tomatoes and red onions, and there is often parsley as well.  It can come mixed, like a salad, or stuffed, like a mini pita.  Oh, and it always has tamarind sauce, which is maybe the most amazing thing in the world! Yum. Love that stuff.  So, my first night in Bangalore, we went over to my dad’s cousin’s place for dinner, and we had chaat as an appetizer.  And she added apples, which is apparently not generally done and somewhat exotic, but it was tasty.  Honestly, I don’t think my jumbled description does chaat justice, but you’ll just have to trust me that it’s awesome and you should try it some time.

A chaat stand, if you will.  See all the different options?!?!

My dad, his cousin, my second cousin, and me

 Because I had told my dad that I wanted to get a sari, since I don’t have one, the next day, we went sari shopping.  My dad took me to Deepam Silks, which is actually where my mom got her wedding sari.  When we walked into the store, there weren’t very many customers – maybe one or two others – but there were TONS of staff eagerly waiting to help.  Although, I guess they didn’t really wait.  Mostly, they swarmed.  We were shuttled up to the third floor, where the walls were covered from floor to ceiling with saris.  For those of you not familiar with saris, they are the traditional women’s garb in India.  There are levels of fancyness, if you will, such that saris are worn on a day-to-day basis, as well as for special occasions.  Saris now come in many different materials and different weights to accommodate different occasions and different climates, but we were just looking for a nice, but not too nice, sari.  The sari, itself, is simply and long piece of fabric, which is tied around your body.  As such, you typically wear a petticoat on the bottom, into which you tuck your sari, and a choli on top, which is basically a sort of short shirt, which tends to be short-sleeved. The art of sari tying is something that I have not yet mastered, but here’s hoping!

An older woman came over to me and kind of took charge.  She started pulling saris out from the wall, telling me to put any aside that I liked.  Now, it’s very difficult to separate saris that I like (based, for example, on some of my favorite colors), and saris that will look good on me.  At some point, I told the woman that I liked purple, but somehow the saris that she started pulling out at that point became more and more unattractive!  In the end, I had put aside four saris.  The next step was for me to stand in front of a mirror while a woman, less than half my size (seriously, she was on tiptoes to reach my shoulder!) draped each sari over my shoulder so that I could see what the colors would look like on me.  Well, the first sari was an immediate no.  It was probably the pink-purple combo, I don’t really know, but it was no good.  And I think Dad agreed.  I loved sari number two, which was a gorgeous deep blue and deep red combo, where the colors changed depending on from which angle you were looking, but the overall effect was too dark.  Maybe in 30 years I’ll be ready to settle down into a darker color palette, but not right now! So, that left numbers three and four.  I was leaning towards number four, but the saleswoman kept trying to push number three on me.  Three was fine, but not amazing.  Dad told me later that he had seen the saleswoman sneak a peak at the prices before recommending number three – i.e. she was trying to get me to buy the more expensive one.  So not cool!  Anyway, in the end I picked number four which, according to my dad, was the very first one I had put aside when the woman was initially showing me saris.  My sari is a combination of yellow and green, with a purple border.  Normally, these colors wouldn’t necessarily appeal to me, but again, there is an interesting effect when you look at the sari from different angles, and it matches my skin tone well.  I’m just concerned that it matches my super-tan skin tone.  Not sure what it will look like once I return to my pasty, relative-whiteness that will surely intensify once I move up to Michigan.  

After the sari was purchased, it was onto our next adventure: finding a tailor to make my choli.  The sari comes with a fabric attachment in a similar/complimentary design/color scheme that can be fashioned into a choli.  The woman at Deepam Silks recommended a tailor who was at the cross of Dispensary Road.  Well, once we got to Dispensary Road, we discovered that there were lots of “crosses,” and all of the crosses, which were just tiny alleyways, housed lots and lots of tailors. Great. So we walked up and Dispensary Road, asking auto-rickshaw drivers and policemen where we were supposed to be going.  This resulted in at least twenty minutes of aimless wandering.  The whole time, my dad had been trying to reach the tailor on his cell phone to get directions.  Finally, after our epic wandering, he tried one last time and the guy answered and gave us directions.  Turns out we had been walking past it over and over again and just never quite finding it. Figures.  Anyway, he took my measurements and promised it would be ready in a week.  Dad was quite skeptical because apparently service providers aren’t very trustworthy in terms of finishing something on time or showing up when they say they will (case in point, the day before, we had sat around the house all day waiting for the computer guy to come fix the computer – and he just never showed up! – although this sounds an awful lot like my experience with the movers that never showed up in DC).  Regardless, in the end, everything was done on time.

Our epic trek up and down Dispensary Road had pressed us for time, and so we had to rush to meet my dad’s other cousin, and her husband for lunch.  To drink, we all had fresh lime.  This is a pretty popular drink in India that is a combination of fresh squeezed lime juice and water (either fizzy or flat).  I always get it with fizzy – super refreshing.  You can also get it with sugar and/or salt.  I generally prefer it plain, but it’s really good sweet too.  Not so sure how I would feel about the salty version – I guess it’s kind of like a margarita without the tequila? But then, what’s the point? Haha.  For our actual lunch, we had a Mangalore thali.  Now, Mangalore is another place in Southern India (rhymes with Bangalore!), and a thali is kind of like a sampler plate that includes bread, and then lots of different dishes from dals to curries to vegetables.  I think you can get the thali in both veg and non-veg versions, but I generally always prefer to stick to veg.  Anyway, it was super good and lots of it was nice and spicy.  It was a great way for me to, once again, step outside of my Indian food box and discover that there are very few Indian dishes that I wouldn’t eat or wouldn’t enjoy.  And then lunch was followed by a glorious cup of coffee.  One thing I didn’t know about India was about the quality of its coffee, although according to my dad (and evidenced by the overall trip), coffee is better in the South than in the North.  But WOW was that ever an amazing cup of joe. Mmm.

After lunch, we rushed home and packed for our trip up to the North.  Dad wanted to leave at 4 for a 7:30 flight, which seemed like overkill but turned out to just right.  Bangalore’s new airport is an hour and fifteen minutes away from our house (which is in the heart of Bangalore) without traffic.  Of course, 4pm is rush hour, and so it took us over two hours just to get to the airport!  But thanks to Dad’s planning, we had no trouble making our flight.  Now, you might ask, why would you ever build an airport so far away from the middle of the city that it is supposed to serve? The answer, as is frequently the answer in India, is corruption.  At the time the new airport location was being planned, the Finance Minister owned property out in the area that now surrounds the Bangalore airport.  It was in his interest to build the airport out there to increase the value of his land and spur its development (with airport hotels and the like).  So now, Bangalore is stuck with a horribly inconveniently located airport.  But at least this one time was the only time I had to make the commute during rush hour, or during the daytime at all.  Our flight to Delhi was anything but uneventful, but that’s a story for the next post.

Urinating on the side of the road? This was a problem in all of the countries I visited.

Over and Out.

-- Priya/Pri/P/Preesh/Pixi/LPJ/P-Money/Baibiya