To Malleswaram

When I was trying to research my book using the internet, and before I found Flickr, some of the first photos of Bangalore I was able to find on the web was a series of photographs of the Bangalore neighborhood called Malleswaram (or Mallesvaram -- spellings vary). I latched onto this and made it the location of the apartment house where my main character lives. I did this without knowing anything about the neighborhood, really, except for those photographs. But I had to have a place for my character to call home. One of the main goals of this trip, then, was to see where my character lives -- if possible, to find the apartment house -- and where she works, and to get to know the parts of the city she would traverse from one to the other.

Today I got to Malleswaram for the first time. I got there with Debbie, one of my hosts, in the car which she and her partner have the full use of. They tell me it is pretty standard for overseas employees living in Bangalore to have the use of a car and driver -- a nice Japanese sedan and a driver whose entire job it is to be on call 12 hours a day. Unfortunately the driver either did not know where Malleswaram was, or he could not understand our pronunciation of it. He also had no use for our map -- apparently drivers here do not read maps, or at least that's what Debbie said. It seems a little counter-intuitive but I suppose they simply depend upon their knowledge of the city. In any case, we got to Sampige Road, one of the main north-south streets in Malleswaram, by looking at the map ourselves and telling him to turn left or right.

When we finally got there, we found Sampige Road gratifyingly choked with traffic -- I say it was gratifying because I talk all the time in my book about the bad traffic, and it was good to see that part come true, even if the roads were amazingly pothole free.

We walked around there a little -- this is part of the car-and-driver thing, you say "Let us out here, we will come back in 30 minutes," and the guy just finds somewhere to wit for you. We bought an electric shaver for me, something I badly need since I didn't bring a razor, and walked around the "New Market" which looked old enough. Lots of flowers and vegetables on display, along with other things -- tropical fish, for instance. I took only a couple of pictures. Then just beyond there we found a Cafe Coffee Day.

Cafe Coffee Day is a chain in Bangalore. This one was the first place I'd been that you could really call air conditioned to American standards. It was slick and modern and had loud music on the stereo. The service was very slow, but because of the A/C it was nice to sit there.

On the way back I tried to cash some travellers checks. This is not something you can do at just any bank, it turns out. You can really only do it at a foreign exchange place. So after stopping at home, I went back out again, and caught an "auto" (i.e., an autorickshaw) to the tourist center of Brigade Road, and found a Thomas Cook foreign exchange office on Church Street. It was relief to get that taken care of, as I was running low on rupees after having been overcharged for practically everything I've done, including getting the rupees in the first place at San Francisco Int'l Airport.

So I didn't really get a break this afternoon from the heat, aside from the Cafe Coffee Day. There's another one near here (I'm in an internet joint on Brigade Road) and I think I'm going to seek refuge there -- either that or the cinema showing that Bruce Willis - Hallie Berry movie.