Exploring the city!

The past two days I headed out down into the city of Bangalore for some polarizing experiences. The first day, I went out into the city with two Indian guys from outside of Bangalore, and later meeting up with some locals. Rohit, Nitin, and I left for a music store to get Rohit's guitar fixed. To start it off, Rohit decided to make us look like criminals by locking his guitar case, but finding out the key doesn't work. So, we have walk into the music store and ask the guy to break into this case for us. Of course, no questions asked, the guy breaks the zippers right off. While at the store, I grabbed myself a nice Indian flute and am on my way to mastering it.



Throughout the night, I had the chance to learn all sorts of things about Indian culture, which I'll throw together in other posts. We went shopping down in the market streets, ate at a place called Hyderabad Biriyani - biriyani being a sort of masala fried rice, and rode a public bus. Apparently the bus "stops" here are more like roll and go. Throughout the night, if any question or thought came to mind, I just bugged someone around me and got my answer. I learned a lot about the driving culture, foods, eating habits, and music. More important than the raw answers though, learning the culture really came from seeing little nuances and getting a feel for the attitudes when people answer the barrage of questions I throw out at them. It was a ton of fun to learn and experience the differences.

However, the second day was a bit different. This may or may not have been due to the difference in company - I went with four other Americans and two guys from Australia. We look, feel like, and really are a bunch of tourists. Everything was so chaotic - we're just wandering the streets, not too sure what we want to do or where we want to go, and I loved it. Sometimes, it's more fun to learn on your own than having someone more knowledgeable feed you the answers. One of the great, and rather ridiculous, features of the markets here is the deals.


Yup. 1 for 6.

It was great spending some time with westerners, but I was still missing aspects of the night before. Rather than learning about the country I'm in, I sort of fell into a little western culture bubble. We get the comfort of similar backgrounds, lifestyles, etc, but we miss out on a huge part of being here: discovering India. Although, I have to admit, I did learn a lot about Australia today, but I think I'll just have to make that a trip for some other day.