here, there, everywhere

Silly as it sounds, one of the reasons I chose to visit Mysore was Devaraja Market, which, though touristy and full of some seriously pushy salespeople, is still a really fun place to wander around taking photos. Julian the Rickshaw Guy also took me to anther, smaller market whose name I never caught, so many of the photos are actually from there as well.












The next day, I went from Mysore to Bangalore to Mumbai, where I somehow made an insanely tight connection in an insanely huge airport without any incident, to London, where they lost my bag (I always loose my bag!), to meet up with Iain in Aberdeen. Like I said earlier, I wish I'd had more time in India because ten days is not nearly enough, but I'm mainly just happy to have gotten a tiny glimpse of such a vast (and vastly interesting) place.  Even though I was exhausted and sick of lugging a huge backpack around, I had a great time. Without hopefully sounding too greedy, I hope I can go back someday and see more of it. 

My favorite animal in the zoo was actually this wild monkey baby. I think he looks so sad because he wishes he had a sign of some sort too. Or maybe the signs are really up to discourage the wild monkeys from taunting their captive monkey brethren, who knows. 

After being drenched by the rains in Kerala, I headed to Mysore in Karnataka State for a few days. Karataka isn't that far from Kerala, but it felt like a completely different country - much less besieged by the monsoon, much, much more crowded. I was a bit overwhelmed the first morning when I wandered outside, but fortunately was immediately adopted by a friendly auto rickshaw driver named Julian, whose photo I unfortunately forgot to take; usually I prefer doing things on my own, but Mysore seemed hectic enough after the lazy Fort Cochin alleyways that I took Julian up on his offer of a city tour.

The first stop was Chamundi Hill, a small hill in the middle of town that has great views of the city and some truly awesome statues.

Laundry 'drying' in the rain. Notice anything missing? (I didn't, and the guy in the corner there pointed out to me that there are no clothespins holding the clothes up - the line's made from a sticky fiber that holds the clothes up on it)














So that's about it for chilled out, monsoon drenched Kerala; the next day I was off to Mysore with a backpack full of slightly damp clothes. In retrospect, I wish I'd planned a slightly more ambitious itinerary for my six days there, instead of just staying based in the same town - there's definitely so much more to see that I just didn't, but I think I was exhausted by the time I got to India in the first place, having been living out of an overstuffed backpack since leaving Japan in March. So, mostly I'm just happy I got to see any of India, albiet in a slightly lazy way, and hopefully I'll go back someday for longer, possibly during drier times.