Garden city of India

unsuspecting travellers from being cheated. Most railway stations have "prepaid taxis". For the sum of 20 rupees, a man in a kiosk calculates, with the use of a  computer, how much your ride should cost. With the receipt he doles out, you go to a participating taxi and the driver takes you to your destination for an acceptable price. With rickshaws these days, we also always agree on the price in advance. If we don't agree with the proposed price, we can always haggle or find another mode of transport. But the cheapest still remains Uber.
   By two o'clock we were checked in to our room. We indulged ourselves again in this city, having a hotel with a rooftop pool. When we opened the room curtains, the view did make us gulp. Right next to our 4-star hotel is a slum. One might wonder why hotels have those big windows put in the facades anyway. In practice, the curtains are always drawn to keep out the heat of the sun.

   As it was lunchtime, we decided to go for a walk. Right next to the hotel, there is a mall. The obvious choice was to walk in there, and get something to eat. We leisurely strolled around all the floors, until we reached the food court. By then, it was almost four o'clock and we were past being hungry. We decided to stick to a snack. The unusual script of the local language, Kannada on the shop fronts did stand out clearly, alongside the well-known brand names. Kannada (ಕನ್ನಡ), like Tamil and Malayalam, is a Dravidian language, and is spoken as a mother tongue by some 38 million people in a variety of dialects. Those enormously large Kannada names on facades is the result of a law stipulating that 60% of a company's name must be visible in Kannada. If not, sanctions will follow.

   As we walked on, we reached the cinema on the top floor. We have not been watching television or movies for weeks, as no hotel had English-language or English-subtitled television. And we do both love films. We were in luck: there were several films playing that we could watch. We opted for The Boy and the Heron, a Japanese anime that I had very good reviews. Unfortunately, the best seats were already taken, so we decided to go the next day. Museums etc. tend to be closed on Sundays, but the cinema is not. On top of that: sitting in a cool cinema on a hot day is very pleasurable.

Palaces and a fort

   There really is plenty to see in this huge city . For a start, there was the Bangalore Palace. The maharaja of Mysore had been in England visiting Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle. He was so impressed that he had a similar castle built for himself, as a summer palace, in Bangalore. It is indeed a beautiful palace, with many turrets and courtyards with seats and fountains.

   The palace is still privately owned by the royal family. To maintain it, it is opened to the public. It also has an attached (party) hall, which can be rented. This was also the case when we visited the palace. Decorations were just being put up to welcome wedding guests.

   Not all rooms of the palace are open to the public. Quite a few of them still need to be taken care of. In the rooms we could enter,  many pictures of the different generations of Maharajas could be found. The floors with tiles in colourful patterns are already 140 years old. The walls are not papered, but hand-painted with fine motifs. The ceilings, however, have already been (partly) taken care of and re-plastered and painted. Taking photos inside the palace was not allowed, but in one of the courtyards we quickly took out the camera anyway, with the permission of our guide.

   Much older than the palace, is Bangalore Fort, built in the 15th century as a fort of clay. Later, in the 17th century, the fort was fortified with stone masonry, by Hyder Ali, the mogul ruler of the time. Only a small piece of the original fort, which was over a kilometre in diameter, still stands. With imposing walls metres thick and at least 10 metres high. Yet in 1791, when conquering Bangalore, the British had managed to bomb a hole in the wall, taking over the fort from Tipu Sultan, Hyder Ali's son. This Tipu Sultan we have encountered in many different places already. First at the fort in Palakkad, in Vellore and now here again. He was quite a busy little man! He fought a lot of local (Hindu) kings, and won quite often too. But in the end, he lost against the British.

   Not far from the fort is Sultan Tipu's summer palace. It is just a small palace, and visiting it was made almost impossible by the fact that you can only buy tickets online. As per ususal, we weren't able do that, having a foreign bank. But while standing at the gate trying to do it, I also saw several groups of Indians drop off because they couldn't manage to complete the transaction. But we are now creative enough to still be able to take a few pictures of the palace and the garden in front. Next to the palace is a temple, which had also once stood inside the fort, before most of it was torn down. In Mysore we will have a chance to see more of Tipu Sultan.

Garden City