What you always wanted to know, but never asked...apart from Cow Road that is.

As I mentioned in my last post, I have had some questions from Cow Road and I promised to answer them this week. Easier said than done. Of course I can write about our house, shopping, the weather and other details of our life in Bangalore, but what? How to mould it into a readable blog?

The weather is lovely at the moment. It is in it's low 20's C, and we have had some rain in the last few weeks. I have been assured by Baburaj (our driver) that the rains will stop before Diwali. We are very lucky, weather-wise, in Bangalore. Most of the year the temperatures are in the low 20's C, only April and May tend to be in the low 30's. The monsoon season is very mild, with some showers, but no days-on-end-kind-of-rain. We can sit outside for most of the day and if it wasn't for the mosquito's, we could sit outside all night too.
Bangalore was known as The Garden City for a long time and it still very green, with lots of trees, but unfortunately it is expanding rapidly so a lot of green areas are disappearing. Our gated community, Adarsh Vista in Basavanagar (in case you want to look it up on Google maps), was build on an orchard and most of the fruit trees have been saved, so the houses have fruit trees in their gardens. Mango's, coconuts, pommelo's, bananas, papayas, jack fruit etc. We have only a very small garden on the side of the house and only one fruit tree at the front. It is a sapota- or cheeko tree and we had never heard of it before. The fruit looks a bit like a hairless kiwi. It has to be picked when it is still hard and then you have to keep it wrapped in a news paper for a few days till it goes soft. It is very sweet with a hint of coffee.

The house is finally starting to feel like a home. We have most of the furniture now, bought a carpet for the living room and one to hang on the wall. It was a daunting task to buy everything again after we had lost it all in Tripoli. It is big, but well designed. I will post some photos soon.

Shopping is both easy and hard here. Easy because there are lots of shops, I can buy basically everything in the main street just outside the gate, and hard because good quality is sometimes hard to find.
For the fresh produce I stay in our neighbourhood, with fruit and vegetables galore, for meat I have found a Catholic butcher where I can buy pork (not available at Muslim shops), beef (not at Hindu shops) and chicken at a good price and good quality. For the day to day groceries I can choose from many different super markets. After 2 months I have found my favourite shops and I am getting used to different names for some things. Because of the traffic it can take some time before I have bought everything on the shopping list, so I try to do the big shopping only a few times a week.
One thing I really had to get used to was fresh milk in a plastic bag. Only the long life milk comes in packs.

We have had a driver since day 1, Baburaj, and as much as I disliked having a driver in Tripoli (only the first 3 months till I had my license) I am happy to have a driver here. Bangalore is huge and somehow Baburaj knows everything, even if I only have a vague description of a shop or an area.
Traffic is chaos. Tripoli-traffic was bad, but it were only cars and after a while the "rules" were obvious. Here there are so many different vehicles and pedestrians, besides the fact that they drive on the left hand side of the road, that make it a challenge to navigate the roads. We did get (read buy) our drivers licenses, just in case, but we don't plan to drive.

Since the beginning of October I also have a maid, Kavitha. It took me a while to decide if I wanted a maid or not, but I am very happy I did. She comes 5 days a week, cleans the house, irons, cooks when I ask her to and makes beautiful Rangolis and flower arrangements.

So what do I do with all my free time? Besides shopping and blogging I have an active social life with coffee's and lunches and I will start volunteering soon for a project in a slum.
Life isn't too bad ;-)