The final afternoon and evening

As I wrote in my last post, we spent my last day driving around doing some errands. We visited a large, well-stocked (albeit somewhat disorganized) bookstore on M.G. Road where I got a couple of souvenirs, had coffee at a place called 92 degrees, and got pulled over by a traffic cop. (Our fault: we had told the driver to drive down what turned out to be a one-day street. We got out and handled the matter in a manner you might guess.)

Then we drove through a neighborhood called Chickpete. This is the oldest part of Bangalore, so it is a highly intense, extremely crowded commercial area. Take everything I've said about the traffic, congestion, noise, pollution and general ruckus, and square it -- that's Chickpete. We merely had our driver drive up the main drag. It was late in the day and I decided I did not want to experience it on foot, so I took photos only from the car, and most of them didn't turn out so hot. This is the best one. For better and more varied photos, look on Flickr for photos tagged Chickpet (which seems to be the preferred local spelling, through it says Chickpete on my map). Here is a good one.

Finally we went to a restaurant on C.H.M Road called Shiok which had a mix of Asian cuisines. A couple of my host's co-workers from Ogle, who had joined us on Thursday, also came. Charles had met the restaurant owner in an online foodie discussion forum, and had visited many times, so we got VIP treatment. Very nice ambiance with high quality food -- a great place to relax from the pressured and bustling experience of Bangalore.

And after that it was off to the airport.

One last round of thanks to my wonderful hosts Charles and Debbie.