Honk Honk Beep Beep

So Monday was a day of misadventure. To start let me give you some background. In Indian honking is expected when driving. Many trucks have signs on the back that say "Sound Horn." Apparently it is there culture and you can't go more then 2 minutes without hearing honking. So now onto the story...

Well Monday started off normal enough. We had breakfast at XIME. We then packed up our stuff to go on the road to Mysore. We got a new luxury bus, so instead of having the exact amount of seats for our group the bus now fit 18 and had under carriage storage. About an hour into our journey, we get a flat tire. So we pull over to the side of the road and the bus drier and his assistant tell us it will only take about 15-20 minutes to change. Well 15 minutes turned into... 3 HOURS!! It seems that the spare tire was also flat. So the bus driver had to wave down a random truck and hitch a ride to the closest service station. Meanwhile we were stuck on a bus in the middle of the highway. We made the driver's assistant turn the bus off because as much as we appreciated AC we were more afraid of running out of gas and being stuck longer. Around the hour and a half mark we all voted to forgo our site visit to Bangalore University because we really didn't want to drag out the day. Finally the bus driver returned and they changed the tire while Professor Kanti yelled at them for such inefficiency.

Soon we were off and continuing our journey. We stopped at a KFC for lunch, which we were all happy about because most of us our sick of Indian food. We then stopped at a few sightseeing places. We went to this nice old temple for starters. Then we went to a summer palace. We were going to go in but here in India they have two price tags: one price for Indians and one price for foreigners. Kanti was so outraged that the Indian price was 5 rupees but the foreigner price was 100 rupees. He told us it wasn't worth it so we took a few pictures and got back on the bus. We then stopped at a river called "Two Lovers Meet." It was very peaceful.

We then finished out trek to Mysore an got to Infosys around 5. We had to go through crazy security (our luggage was screened, we had to declare cameras and laptops, etc.). Finally we were shown our rooms. they are much nicer then XIME, and more importantly they had a real shower!!!! Most of us skipped dinner (again sick of Indian food) and instead went to the Infosys supermarket and picked up crackers and such. After a nice long shower it was then bed time.

The moral of this story is: never expect a 3 hour journey to take 3 hours. Ours took 8!!!!!

Much love,

KP