Bangalore's surface

What's so interesting about this place, on the surface, is the total architectural anarchy. A modern office building next to an older building that is almost entirely obscured by signage, next to a colonial-era house that looks like it is ready to fall down, next to a huge mall, next to a tiny little "milk" stand. (These are little bitty third-world style food shops, barely more than a counter in front of a trailer-sized room full of wares.) And this is merely a description of the street frontage. Between buildings and through gates, you can glimpse other buildings, hovels, offices, yards, lots, houses, shrines, parked cars. You could pick any single block and, given enough access and courage, spend weeks or months exploring its labryinth.

Just to take a small example: in my search for a wireless access point, I found a listing in a restaurant guide of a "Jet Set Cafe" that was, according to the address, quite near. Since it was lunch time, Debbie and I set out to find it. And even though it was literally right around the corner, it turned out to be in a hotel that is behind an office building -- a four-story hotel she hadn't even known was there, and which doesn't even have a sign on the street.

So I could spend an hour or two, or all day, walking -- which means constantly switching from sidewalk to street, dodging vehicles both moving and parked, as well as other pedestrians, all the time trying to take in and grok my surroundings -- and just get the bare surface impression of what's here. In that sense, this trip to research my book is futile. (But it's also true that my main character is someone who spends months here and finally realizes she hasn't even scratched the surface.) Still, the sense of the city and the impressions I'm getting really are valuable. I can now identify so many mistakes I have made in my manuscript, mistakes even someone who (like me) has spent only 72 hours here can see. There's no way I could have known, for example, how out-of-the-way the Meridien Hotel is without trying to get there myself.

Oh, about that wireless access point in the "Jet Set Cafe." The signal was great. But after I logged on and began uploading pix to Flickr, my virus checking software started giving me messages about how it was defeating a certain virus. Finally it said it wanted to restart to complete the virus-defeating action. Clearly the hotel where the Jet Set Cafe is has a virus in its network. So scratch that idea. I was, however, able to upload a few pictures.