It has been hard to get back to regular posting. To break our mental block, we decided to go through each day in our last trip to South India and find a picture from that day to post.
It took us a full day to get from our home in the US to Bangalore, our first stop in India. Bangalore seems like it might be a good place to live but — from a tourist perspective — the most interesting location seems to be the modern international airport. Bangalore was a capital city in times past which has been renamed Bengaluru to help confuse visitors. Today, it is a modern place known as the “Silicon Valley of India.” If you have ever called customer service in the evening for help with an electronic device, it is likely you have spoken to someone in Bangalore.
The first day of our trip was a drive around to see the few remaining historical sites in Bangalore. Being driven in Bangalore is like riding in an amusement park thrill ride. Two or three inches separate cars, trucks, motorcycles, and pedestrians that are bobbing and weaving while constantly blowing their horns (except for the pedestrians, but they would if they had them).
One site we stopped at, which is really atypical of modern Bangalore, was the Kote Venkataramana Temple. The guide said we’d be seeing a lot of temples in India (he was right) so we saw this one from outside only. It is part of the Tipu Sultan Fort complex. According to an eBook we bought on Amazon, the tower in the left of the photo represents a mountain where gods live. A god comes down the mountain to a sanctuary, representing a cave, that is reached after passing through the tower. In this “cave” there is an idol of a deity that the god inhabits during worship. The worshiper gazes at the idol; the god, through the eyes of the idol, gazes back at the worshiper. In this way, each benefits. (Note: This is probably 100% wrong, but it is enough to get past American tourists.)
iball round the world 