This is Donna and Luna getting ready to go out on a cold, raining Thanksgiving evening. (Cold in Bangalore means the temperature is 67F) They both have on their raincoats and Donna has a stick to ward off the street dogs, and to keep from tripping. Donna says "Tell them I haven't gone off the deep end, I'm just not willing to get up in the middle of the night to walk a dog who won't go out in the rain."There is a nasty terrorism attack still being played out in Mumbai. Over 100 people have been killed, even more wounded and some still held hostage. However here in Bangalore all is quiet.
There was heavy security at the hotel were we had Thanksgiving dinner with turkey and many other Indian and American dishes. When we drove in they checked under the car with a mirror and opened the trunk to check there. Coming into the hotel everyone was frisked.
4 comments:
Hi,
I'm Francis Steven Dokka, chief sub-editor in Bangalore Mirror (www.bangaloremirror.com).
Bangalore Mirror is a newspaper from the Times of India Group and is Bangalore's number one tabloid with a circulation of 1.7 lakh copies every day. Our recently launched website is attracting thousands of hits every day.
We have gone through your blog and find it interesting. We have a column called 'Blog Talk' where we feature blogs which we feel could be of interest to our readers. Hence we would like to occasionally use material from your blog for our Blog Talk section (http://www.bangaloremirror.com/index.aspx?page=section§id=21). Kindly let us know if you are okay with it.
Hope to hear from you.
Sincerely,
Francis Steven Dokka (dfsteven@gmail.com)
Hi Donna and Joe,
I'm a Bangalorean and thought your blog was really interesting to read and understand how an American sees and figure out what's going on in your head. I interact with a lot of Americans as part of my job and have always found it amusing that you rarely say what's in your head when you talk to people or even ask the questions you laboriously search answers for on the Internet.
So do enjoy your time in Bangalore and if you are interested in sharing a cup of coffee with me on a lazy saturday morning, I'd love to do that and chat more about your experience and perception of the supposedly silicon valley / garden city of India.
(I guess you can't edit typos, etc., without starting over.)
Vijay,
That's interesting. At times I feel the same about Indian people! Sometimes time constraints and language differences limit how many things we feel comfortable asking. Or how successful we are at getting answers we can understand. We had asked several people about the train schedules, but finally had to figure most of it out on our own. Most of the background information we do include in our blogs comes from asking lots of questions, and someone once commented that we should look things up online instead of asking for other people's input!
All in all, we're generally happy to talk to almost anyone about most anything. I usually keep my most probing questions for the people I know and love best--close friends, my
housefriend, and our driver. We're really just a couple of Americans trying to find out as much as we can about India, make a difference while we're here, and share as much as we can with people who don't have the opportunity to be here. We are traveling a lot in December, but send an email to my address below, and we'll try to work out a time to get together.
Donna
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