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roneThe room setup at the President Hotel is pretty sweet; the room key is a smart card which, when placed in a slot at the room's entrance, will kick in the power for your room.
There's a campaign being promoted by The Times of India: "Refresh Bangalore: Put the bang back in Bangalore". I'm guessing that they'll ignore the impending name change. Gotta dig the IE Refresh icon.
Bangalore's traffic is fucking insane. But it's a consistent sort of insanity; you know that lanes are a joke, and that people will drive across the flow of traffic on a regular basis. So you're working with a different set of assumptions than in the US (well, except maybe Boston), where things look great, except in the back of your mind you know that some fuckhead on his phone will suddenly plow into your car as they try to punch the Call Waiting button with their earlobe. You're also dealing with a sea of subcompacts, three-wheeled autorickshaws and motorcycles, so traffic is very fluid because every available space is taken up. In the US, Captain Earlobe is probably driving a hulking monstrosity that wouldn't even fit the street here.
I noticed while at work today that blogspot sites were giving me a 500 error; the last time i saw a sitewide failure like that was MySpace when their colo lost power, so i hit blogsearch.google.com and put in 'blogspot'. The first hit was a BoingBoing report of Indian government censorship. Strangely enough, i can hit blogspot fine from my hotel's network.
I got majorly played today by some extremely persuasive salespeople. First, i went to Mysore Silk Emporium to find the missus a nice sari. And i did. Many of them. However, it turns out they cost a lot of money, so i had to pick one. Naturally, i picked the most expensive one (Kim always picks the most expensive thing when we go shopping, which is a testament to her refined sense of taste, and also a compliment to me, i hope). Then, my driver, Gowda, took me to the Lal Bagh Botanical Garden; he tried to warn me not to get roped into a guided tour, but i was ambushed as soon as i got out of my car. Raji did a good job, but he also roped me into buying some seed packets, which sounded like a good idea, but he tried pushing all sorts of seeds on me when all i wanted was some lotus seeds. In the end i agreed to take some jasmine seeds as well. Then he asked me to pay for the tour, which of course he didn't mention at the start. Punk. As i was in an almost entirely non-liquid state, we agreed that he'd deliver the seeds to my hotel on Thursday afternoon, whereupon i would pay him for the seeds and the tour. The lesson, as ever: i'm a sucker and a pushover.
You know what i miss the most, after my wife? Pork. I could murder for some bacon. I miss pizza, too, but all they have here is Pizza Hut and Domino's, and i think i can handle a few more days of pizzalessness rather than subject myself to their almost-but-not-entirely-unlike-pizza.
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Date: 2006-08-29 04:14 pm (UTC)In fact, it's where I learned to appreciate the joys of pizza topped with green pepper (capsicum!) and onion.
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Date: 2006-08-29 04:15 pm (UTC)I used to have this book (http://www.amazon.com/-Sheep-Lal-Bagh/dp/B000BY5CXK), which had some very cute sheep in it.
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Date: 2006-08-29 05:27 pm (UTC)Ronebofh, is the grass in the gardens shaped interestingly? Mown into star patterns or anything like that? *crosses fingers* *hopes it is*
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Date: 2006-08-30 02:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-30 03:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-29 04:30 pm (UTC)Probably, the government figures only those damned foreigners would be using hotel connections, so they may get an exemption.
Also, I'd like to ppoint out that MySore will probably never equal the popularity of MySpace.
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Date: 2006-08-29 04:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-29 05:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-30 02:54 am (UTC)I could go for an odd pizza if i could FIND ONE.
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Date: 2006-08-29 06:04 pm (UTC)And I can see you have your priorities straight. First Kimmy, then pork. ;)
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Date: 2006-08-29 07:01 pm (UTC)If you want pork, go to Goa: it's just about the only part of India where you can get it. Failing that, enjoy the real Indian food... in that respect, I envy you.
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Date: 2006-08-29 08:55 pm (UTC)According to my friend Leia, who is from Norway, the only country in Europe who had US style Pizza is Norway. Which is why she eats pizza at pizza hut a lot, though it's crap; it's far more like pizza than what you get at a pizza place. Which is not a parlor, it's... it's jut a pizza place here in Finland.
Oh, and 'American' pizza, that's the one with bleu cheese.
(working for Little Ceasars ... what, 20 years ago? Heh. 20 years ago. Right, anyway, when I did that, the "Kenmore Special" was pepperoni and sausage. We sold 90% of the pizzas that way in Kenmore. We never sold any with anchovies. We only went through anchovies because I learned that if I put them on my pizza, no one else would eat it. Which, when you've had an 8 hour shift at Little Ceasars, is basically your only reward. So it helps to be able to have it, rather than, oh, someone else eating it.)
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Date: 2006-08-30 07:25 am (UTC)That's blue cheese, you wannabe pretentious lackwit. Not only is blue cheese English, not French, but if it were actually French, it'd be fromage bleu, not "bleu cheese".
"Bleu cheese" is a recent abomination that needs to be STAMPED OUT BEFORE IT CAN SPREAD ANY FURTHER.
This has been a note from The Spelling Prescriptivist.
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Date: 2006-08-30 12:45 pm (UTC)1. In FINNISH pizza restraunts, "AMERICAN" pizza is the pizza that has "BLEU" cheese on it.
Notice 3 capitalized areas: A> Finnish, indicating this is in Finland; B> American, indicating the pizza is labeled "American" - NOT French, not British, not Chinese, but indeed, American; C> the exact spelling of the word describing the cheese: "BLEU."
Now, I could have called it a "FRENCH" pizza, one with "BLUE" cheese, but you see, that wouldn't contain A> any bits of truth B> the actual silliness of the situation. For it is silly. American pizza, containing blue cheese. I'm sure you've seen that on the menu at your local pizza establishment. It's quite common, in America, you see. 'Bleu' cheese. On pizza. Really, I'm sure it's on the menu SOMEWHERE. I've asked the pizza people about it, they INSIST it's that way! Everywhere! In America! "Bleu" cheese!
Oh, and before you fly over here and start screaming to the natives about how they spell it incorrectly?
It's 'sinihomejuusto.' I could have used that, but you see, it wasn't written on the menu that way. It was, instead, written "Bleu." As in, "Bleu cheese." Along with the "American" part, of the pizza. The one that had "bleu cheese."
In Finland, there's no need for spelling corrections, spelling bees, spelling... in general. All the letters are ALWAYS pronounced the same way, so, you see, by age 5, everyone in Finland can spell every word they hear. And if you spell it incorrectly, it's pronounced differently, so it would be a different word. 'Bleu' sounds entirely different than 'Blue' here. Then again, they don't have a 'B' sound in suomi; only from adopted words from other languages. Like, oh, Bleu.
speling, o yaa, rite
Date: 2006-08-30 03:27 pm (UTC)I've seen how those people who grow up in countries with exactly phonetic spelling write! Georgian doesn't even have syllable stress or any assimilation, so reading and spelling it is completely trivial for us foreigners once we get the alphabet down and learn to distinguish the glottal and aspirated consonants. But on our first trip to Georgia, we saw block-printed posters across the country with dozens of different spellings of the most popular movie of the moment, ღვიძლიშვილი (ghvidzlishvili, literally "liver child," idiomatically something more like "native son," and pardon the two-letter transliterations gh, dz, and sh). Some didn't even have the shvili part right, despite its being the most common ending of Georgian surnames. My favorite one, though, did get that part right but not a single other consonant (except in transliteration!): დგიზდგიშვილი (dgizdgishvili).
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Date: 2006-08-29 09:08 pm (UTC)So maybe the Bangalore Pizza Hut is worth checking out.
happy journey
Date: 2006-08-30 01:51 am (UTC)Beh-nam S.
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Date: 2006-08-30 05:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-31 02:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-03 02:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-03 05:09 pm (UTC)