I have a lot of catching up to do. Here it is more than a week later and I haven't even had a chance to finish describing the trip to Bangalore. I really wanted to finish it while things were fresh in my mind, but China has blocked Blogspot and I couldn't do an update. So I'll just have to do some late posting.

Saturday was our one last day of sightseeing in and around the city. We started out by going to Lal Bagh. We had hoped to see some monkeys there as we had heard that they are all over the city, but the best place to see them is in this park. We got the car around 10 in the morning and went directly there. First thing we see is that there is some sort of stage being built for a festival or presentation. Turns out there was some dance festival planned in a short time. I couldn't get exactly when from the driver, his English wasn't too good.

We walked in a ways and I spotted some groups of men who looked like they were preparing for dancing or something like that. There was a variety of music coming from several directions. Then suddenly one of them starts drumming and the noise level goes way up. It was awesome how the drumming reverberated through the park. Then several more started up practicing and the noise was something ferocious. It was fun watching them practice the drumming and the dancing.
We must have stayed and watched the drumming and dancing for 15 mins or longer.

I could have stayed for hours, if it hadn't been our last day and we wanted to see some other things too.

We wandered on. On the way into the Japanese garden we were approached by this lovely young girl who first went to Anna and said "hello auntie", then she shook Cindy's hand and mine and asked if she could have her picture taken with us. She was utterly charming. You can see her picture on Cindy's blog.
After seeing the Japanese Garden, we went on and saw Snow White and her 7 Dwarves.
Kind of a crazy site in the middle of a nice park in Bangalore. Apparently this is a fairly famous location, never heard of it myself before. We went on and saw more of the park, including many sleeping stray dogs, several kinds of birds, as well as a variety of flowers and trees. See my Flickr site for all of the photos. Just for comparison though, we saw a small Tank (lake) which was partially covered by water lillies.


After seeing the park, we went to Commercial street. I didn't take any pictures there, but it is a veritable visual, as well as auditory, cacophony. Signs for and stores with just about anything you could want or need. We did a bit of browsing for clothing with Anna who was very concerned about what she might find to wear in India. I got very tired of standing around clothing stores. We did buy a couple more scarves and nicnacks for gifts. Then we got tired and returned to the hotel to pack up.

Somewhere during the day, Cindy had heard from Sensei Ganesh and we went to see a class. It was very interesting, I would guess about 30 students, and they practiced outside in the courtyard of a school. He wasn't there at the start, he has several classes throughout the city, and is involved in the India Karate Do federation. He met with us, and then had Anna show him her moves. He seemed to feel she could do well and suggested a private lesson.

Then it was off to the hotel to collect our bags and head for the airport. I had to leave at about 11:15, and Cindy and Anna had a 1:50 flight. They came with me. We arrived there very quickly (last time it took me about 20 mins to get into the parking lot, but this time we just drove right in). I could check in and run my bags through the scanner, but they could not. So we waited about an hour. They put their bags through the scanner and went to stand in the Checkin line while I went upstairs to go through immigration and customs and Security. They managed to get through it all before I had to leave on the plane, but I did get to say goodbye there in the waiting room. Then I got on my flight--destined for Singapore at 6:20am. Yes I got about 4 hours sleep. More on that in my next post.