About town

The last few weeks this guy has been set up right across from the entrance to our Layout. I had to capture this for my US readers. I had to think of Obama. My suggestion for him is that we put all the congressmen who don't vote for real healthcare reform on a new congressional health plan. We can park this guy on the lawn outside the capitol building and he can provide for everything that ails them!!


One of my observations about India, is that not everything is so clearly demarcated. Many official items are personalized or done by hand or there is some mix of public and private. For instance one of our nearby police stations has a sign on it that it was provided by some fabric or apparel company. The sign for that is larger than the sign for the police station. If it wasn't for the gun toting policeman guarding the front door, you might not notice right away that it is the local police station. Many of the police now have motorbikes with a special pattern painted on them. They have a leopard print. I assume this was the predecessor to the leopard print. I spotted it on MG road last weekend.


We happened to be going through an intersection we don't normally go through to get to Garuda mall, but because of the construction on MG road, they have made it one way.

On New B.E.L. Road, the main road to our house, on one corner, there is this store. I guess it's a small world after all, but I do wonder what Walt would think of the dolls?


And I won't comment much on this, but those of you who read about it a year ago will recognize the festival. I did really enjoy the Ganesha in the Auto.
And here are people selling the necessaries to go with the Ganesha for the festival.

And an army of Ganeshas, both painted and unpainted, waiting to be blessed and 'drowned' until melted away.

Bannerghatta Park

Yesterday we went to Bannerghatta Park. Bannerghatta is a wildlife park an zoo south of Bangalore. It took us about 1.5 hours to reach there from our house. We had been invited by Linda(a friend through the OWC), who was organizing an outing for some persons who live at a home for mentally disturbed, or delayed people. This is again one of the Charities that the OWC supports. We were going along to escort these residents, though in the end, I don't think they needed too much escorting as they pretty much kept together by themselves.

The first thing we did after we arrived there, was to take the safari tour. Here you can see out of the bus front windows. They had screens over all of the windows, presumably to protect us and to keep people from sticking things out of the bus.
I had heard bad stories about these buses and how crowded they can get. Fortunately we were with this group, so we got our own bus and it wasn't too bad. The driver did take us down this dirt road very quickly, I thought we must look like a car in a cartoon, where when it hits a bump, it flies up in the air and the wheels jump off. Unfortunately this caused the young man behind me to get car sick, so he didn't enjoy the trip so much.

Lions and Tigers and Bears Oh My !!!

Some of the bears we even roaming on the road and able to come up to the bus--you can just see the outline of the bear behind the glass of the door in this picture.

The Safari takes you through several sections. One of which is herbivores, so there is a section of deer, antelope, wild cows etc. Then you get into the section with the bears, where some are behind wire, and others are free to roam the road. We were able to get pretty close to the animals, especially the White tigers. Although you can tell they are still 'caged' animals, but it is nicer than the zoo where the cages are really not much to speak of. You can see one of the other buses in the background. They aren't that big.

After the bus ride, we went for lunch. And after lunch, we walked down the hill to the zoo. They had all kinds of signage about not teasing, feeding or yelling at the animals. It didn't work, but some of the signs were amusing.

At some point we were almost all collected for a group photo. I took this one while they were getting everyone in position for Cindy to take the official photo.

And then we put the group on their bus, and headed home. Conner and Maya seemed to have enjoyed the trip--we did let them wander during the zoo part as the rest of the part moved fairly slowly.