Bangalore

I arrived at 7am to Bangalore city station feeling absolutely knackered.  All I wanted was to find a nice place to stay for a couple of days so that I could finally get some sleep.  I arrived to utter chaos.  This was my first experience of a big city and I didn’t like it one little bit.   If you want to feel like a freak then you should go to an Indian city in the middle of monsoon season.  People either look at you like you have 5 heads (there must be a god with 5 heads.  There’s about a million of ‘em) or they become worryingly excitable and feel the need to come and talk to you.   

I was desperate to get rid of my rucksack as I felt like a sweaty, overweight, tortoise carrying that fucking thing about.  In my head, this mid life crisis was going to be a whole lot more glamorous.  In reality I smell, look like a bag of shite and haven’t the first clue what i’m playing at. 

I only had about 100 rupees on me, so went out to get money.  After trying, unsuccessfully to get money out at 5 different ATM’s (I’m nothing if not persistent), I realised that there was a problem with my card (there’s no flies on me!).  It’s fair to say that at that moment I wanted the world to stop so that I could just get off.  I was close to having a full on breakdown.  I couldn’t have wanted to get out of a place more.  To say that I felt hopeless and shit scared would be putting it mildly.  The thought of sleeping rough in India isn’t something I want to think about too much.

After 5 hours of sitting on the floor in a train station (having almost lost the will to live), with people, taking pictures of me, wanting to take me to various places (including an offer from an old boy, who must have been pushing 90, wanting to take me horse racing), trying to sell me things, or wanting me to sponsor tigers/people/tea plantations, Barclays finally pulled their finger out of their arse and sorted things out.  Hallefuckinglujah.

I still had over 6 hours before my train to Mysore arrived and now with money in my hand I was able to go to Cubbon Park.  This was the only place the girls on the train had said was worth seeing.  I didn’t really care what it was like, I was just grateful to be out of the train station.  There’s no such thing as peace and quiet though in India.  It wears you down.  Sometimes it would be nice if everyone just fucked right off!  I know I sound mean but it really is relentless. 

Two hours in the park, feeding the squirrels calmed me down and let me get things back into perspective.  I felt really grateful that everything had sorted itself out and actually felt relatively happy.  With my new found enthusiasm for life I decided to go to the Government run aquarium (it’s a non stop roller coaster of fun, this travelling lark).  Alarm bells really should have started ringing when I was asked for an entrance fee of 5 rupees.  Now, if you’re paying about 6p for to see something, I’m guessing its always going to be a little bit shite.  This aquarium did not break that rule.    It was so bad that I actually loved it a little bit.  It honestly took about 35 seconds to walk around.  The star attraction was some googly eyed goldfish.  God bless the Indian Government Aquarium. 

Here’s a bit of travel advice.   Don’t go to Bangalore.