Someone told me that when you go South from Goa, you will find the true India...  that was so true.  I have a lot of catching up to do - this is going back almost a month!!

 

Mysore is a medium sized city (about 1.5mm) in southern India; there is no airport, and media (like news and TV) is out of Bangalore.  Kind of like Akron's relationship to Cleveland.  This made it a perfect place to stay - not too big, not too small.

 

I was ready for a break - I was doing too much too fast.  I would take a 12 hour train or car, followed by two days running around, then repeat...  So, Mysore is where I decided to "soak" for a while.

 

I went on a day long tour of temples that are about two hours away and met a German woman named Gaby who was also traveling alone.  We spent a few days together sightseeing and running around the city.  Aside from that, I met a couple of guys who make all kinds of instruments and I arranged sitar lessons through them.  I took a week of sitar lessons from a "master" who must have been 65 years old...  He would make fun of how I play the sitar (he held it up like David Van Halen and started banging the shit out of it), and I guess that served as instruction to me.  We would end each lesson with Chai (Indian spiced tea) and a conversation in broken English.  It was quite an experience!  His salesmanship was good as I shipped a sitar home to CFO.  We can have sitar silent-night singing next Christmas if you can stand my playing (or if I can stand it).

 

I did start to feel a little lonely in this town after Gaby left; there are not so many tourists and there are very few places to meet people.  So, I practiced my sitar and did a lot of reading.  That is also where the last batch of pictures on-line came from!!

 

This was quite an economical town, even by Indian standards - $150 total for eight days bought:

    Room

    Three meals a day

    Lots of bottled water

    Ice cream almost every day (despite warnings in my guidebooks!!!)

    Private guide for full day with car

    Separate all-day group tours to monuments hours away

    Three custom made shirts

    Pants

    Rickshaws

 

South Indian meals are delicious.  They are very spicy and cheap; one drawback for some would be that the meals are almost always vegetarian - IF you find meat it will invariably be chicken or fish or egg (yes, eggs count as meat here). 

 

I ate a very good place every day.  For $0.60 they put a big banana leaf in front of you, then serve a 7 course meal on it.  As soon as you finish one delicious treat, they scoop  more of it on your banana leaf!  Vegetarian food never filled me up so much!  Needless to say, this place was constantly packed.

 

steve