We never planned to go to the Indian tech capital of Bangalore, but curiosity and the Lonely Planet led us there. According to the LP, it's one of the few places in India you'll see couples holding hands and young people in jeans. Bangalore was by far the most cosmopolitan place we've been, was great for amenity restocking (lots of Western brand names I haven't seen anywhere else) and had a laid-back atmosphere that Chris and I decided was the closest we were going to get to San Francisco in India. There are even two Starbucks-like coffee chains and a decent number of bars and clubs. Granted they close at 11:30, but it's a start.

There were two theaters showing American films and we saw both in one day. "Master and Commander," which I thought was beautifully shot but entirely too gray and wet, and "Intolerable Cruelty," which I thought George Clooney looked hot in and Chris thought was one of the funniest movies he'd ever seen. On the way home, the auto-rickshaw driver lit up a joint as he drove off.

On the rooftop of a 1960s Acid Rock themed bar called Peco's, we chatted with a group of 20-something locals, including three women. (I stand corrected on blatantly general comment #1 in my previous entry.) Most of them had lived abroad at some point and were clearly well-educated upper class, so their perspectives on Indian society were perhaps just as skewed as anyone else's, but talking to them was a refreshing change of pace.

Yesterday we got to take part in some more Indian bureaucratic fun, this time at the train station. We went to the station at 2 PM. Inexplicably, every single reservation counter closes from 2 - 2:30 for a lunch break. Forgiving the logistical misstep of not having staggered breaks, we sipped a cup of coffee (which took about five minutes to order since Chris wanted his coffee "black," which was seemingly outside the barista's limited range of English) and waited.

We filled out all the requisite BS paperwork to make a reservation, I waited about 1/2 hour under pressure from an old woman impatiently bearing down on me, as if pushing me into the counter would hurry things along. [An aside: Indians appear to have no real need for personal space. Yes, this is a country of one billion and yes, most places are pretty crowded all the time, but really. In a train station where there's *plenty* of space to give your fellow queue-waiters some breathing room, there will invariably be at least two or three other people jockeying for the same square foot of floor space I happen to already be occupying.] I hastily bought two tickets for the only time and class ticket they had available.

After consideration, we decided the seats I'd bought were too expensive and we'd rather take the bus. We waited in the "refund" line for another 20 minutes, only to be told that we'd lose 25% of the ticket price and that we needed to fill out another form and wait in the "foreign tourists" line. This was of course the longest line and moved at a snail's pace. With no tickets in hand, we emerged from the train station 2 hours after we'd arrived, extremely frazzled, harried and disgusted at the way things sometimes get done (or don't) around here.

After the train station, we went to the Botanical Gardens for a little R&R. This was another one of those times when being greatly outnumbered by locals made for a memorable time. There were lots of handshakes, lots of photos taken of us and lots of the usual line of questioning (what is your place? what is your good name? and my all-time fave, what is your purpose? i.e. why are you in India?). I must remind myself that if Chris and I are going to try to pass as husband and wife to minimize harassment, it's probably unwise for me to simultaneously flirt with Indian boys. I am sure it's not helping their already-skewed ideas about American women.

We're now in Hampi, a very quaint, chilled out little holy temple town that's a popular tourist stop on the way to or from Goa. A maze of small dirt roads and alleys winds through white adobe buildings that appear to have just one continuous, uneven roof-line. Families of monkeys swing from trees to powerlines to rooftops and according to the guesthouse owner, create quite a nuisance.

There's a Full Moon party going on in a nearby cave tonight, but the locals predict it will last less than an hour before getting busted by the police. This is a dry town. The town is split by a river. We'd heard from other travelers that one side of the river is alcohol and drug free, but on the other side, the alcohol and drugs are free. Who knows. We're staying on the dry side because oddly, that seems to be where all the action is. Not that I'd know sitting here in the internet cafe at 10 PM on a Friday night. Oh my god, I think India is turning me into a geek.