Immo and Diana, Sonampthpur
From Jodhpur we flew back to South India where we spent a few days in Bangalore before heading to Mysore on a train, then back to Bangalore for a couple nights, then Immo and Diana departed for the US.
Our return to Bangalore coincided with a bout of stomach flu that I naturally assumed meant that we'd gotten bad water, but since a new one of us fell to it every day or two I finally realized that it wasn't something we'd eaten. it put a bit of a damper on our South India time but it luckily passed pretty quickly so no one "lost" more than a day of touristing.
We had enough time to find a beautiful kurtha for Diana (Fabindia, of course) and Immo even put together an invited speach at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research.
Our return to Bangalore coincided with a bout of stomach flu that I naturally assumed meant that we'd gotten bad water, but since a new one of us fell to it every day or two I finally realized that it wasn't something we'd eaten. it put a bit of a damper on our South India time but it luckily passed pretty quickly so no one "lost" more than a day of touristing.
We had enough time to find a beautiful kurtha for Diana (Fabindia, of course) and Immo even put together an invited speach at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research.
We lived it up on our weekend in Mysore, staying at the Lalitha Mahal Palace, an actual palace built by the Maharaja of Mysore to entertain the viceroy when he visited. It was a grand place and a lot of fun to stay at. We, of course, also went to see the Mysore palace (where the Maharaja, himself, lived) and, for the first time went to see it on a Sunday night when they light the whole thing up for an hour. Pretty impressive!
One of the craziest coincidences in Mysore was that within 10 minutes of leaving the train station, we saw Firoz -- the same autorick driver that took us around Mysore when Glen and Sasha were here. We merrily waved to him through the windows of the taxi we were in, but then, the next day while walking through Mysore, ran into him again. After that we hired him to take us to Chamundi Hill and surrounds for our second day.
In addition to the Palace, we went to Sonampthur and to various Tipu Sultan palaces and memorials
Our train didn't leave until the afternoon so on the last day Tim and his folks decided to rest at the hotel/palace and I took the boys to the zoo:
Then the 2 hour train ride back to Bangalore (First class!):
Where Diana finally got her bangles (you can't leave India without bangles!)
And we got to see typical downtown Bangalore traffic: