The Royal Afghan

Tuesday night Kentaro took our group, the Technology for Emerging Markets Team, and a few other interns and visiting researchers to dinner at the Royal Afghan in the Windsor Manor Hotel. The Windsor Manor looks like something the British left behind, but in fact was built in the 1970's and made to look like something the British left behind. The hotel and the grounds are beautiful, but the lighting, while perfect in person, made them impossible to shoot well at all with my Canon PowerShot. It's a big white manor-looking building with lots of plants and a pool in back and the lighting is really cool, and unfortunately that's the best I can do.

There are six restaurants in the Windsor Manor, including a South Indian restaurant, a Chinese restaurant, and an Irish pub. The Royal Afghan serves North Indian cuisine, and we sat poolside. I was among a minority of non-vegetarians, and we picked a few meat dishes. Kentaro took care of the rest of the ordering. The Royal Afghan is shared-dish dining, just like Indian restaurants in the U.S. But instead of putting the serving dishes on the table and letting the guests plate for themselves, the staff keeps all the serving dishes on a side table and comes around serving each guest. Vegetarians wear green aprons and non-vegetarians wear red, so the servers don't serve meat to the vegetarians. We had some pescetarians in our group, but pescetarianism is not common in India, so there's no apron color for that.

North Indian food is eaten with one's hands, so there were no utensils on the table. If you asked for a fork, they'd give you one, but eating with your hands is the style, so we just went with that. Typically, you tear a little piece of bread and scoop up a little food with it, like Ethiopian food. Because our group was so big, we ordered two “Family Naan”. A Family Naan is about 4 or 5 square feet, and they bring it out and show it to everyone before they cut it up and serve it. I don't eat the bread because of my gluten-intolerance, so they brought me a bowl of rice, which isn't on the menu because eating rice with dinner is more South Indian style. It's a little trickier to eat with your hands that way, but manageable, and not nearly as messy as being given an apron at the beginning of a meal might suggest. The seats are somewhat reclined, so I suppose for maximum decadence you could lean back while you eat and let some drippings fall on the apron, but that's a bit much, I think.

The food was outstanding. Best lentils I've ever had, hands down. Braised leg of lamb, served off the bone, of course. Tandoori prawns, juicy seekh kebob with just the right amount of mint, and paneer in an Afghan curry. And there was more. There were so many of us and so many dishes that I don't think anyone tasted everything, but everything was really good. For dessert, we had kolfi, Indian ice cream. After dessert they brought us pan, which is a leaf wrapped around a little rock sugar and “stapled” with a clove. It's normally chewed for a few minutes, but I didn't know that until I had already just eaten it.

Afterward we posed for a photo in the hotel lobby.

Guests of Microsoft Research India stay at Urban Oasis.




We get air-conditioned double rooms (I share with Guy) with private bathrooms,






and the hotel provides bottled water, next-day laundry service, 24-hour security,

and breakfast.

The white things are idli and they're made from rice and de-husked black lentils. The thing that looks like a donut is the same batter as the idli, fried like a donut. The soup is sambar, a lentil-tomato, the juice is mango, and the coffee is sweet with milk. Sometimes there's chutney, but not today.

The staff knocked on our door the first few days to ask us if we wanted breakfast. There are other breakfast options, but we didn't know what to order (there's no printed menu), and the staff don't speak English, so we've been getting the default breakfast. Today we thought we might try ordering dosas, but they showed up with the default breakfast rather than coming once to take an order and returning with the food. It's pretty good. I especially like the soup, even though I wouldn't normally think of lentil soup for breakfast. What's really sweet is that MSRI has a buffet lunch every weekday. More on that another day.

I think they gave us the only key to our room that they have because if we want our room cleaned while we're at work, we have to leave the key at the front desk when we leave. They do a nice job of cleaning the room without messing up our stuff, and they take whatever laundry is in the bin and return it the next day. So far, no matter how I put my underwear in the bin, it always comes back inside out. So maybe Indian underwear is made with the tag on the outside. I don't know.

We have a TV in our room that gets a fair number of channels. About half the channels are in English and half are something else. Probably Hindi. Usually in the morning there's a cricket match, a Bollywood film, an entertainment news show, and a financial news show, among other things.

For some reason, the room reminds me of the room Martin Sheen is in at the beginning of Apocalypse Now, but that's just an aesthetic coincidence, not a knock against the hotel, which is quite nice.

Getting Around in Auto-Rickshaws

Note: I hope to add some pictures and videos to this later.

To get around Bangalore, we've mostly been riding auto-rickshaws (hereinafter, “Mario Karts”). Mario Karts are little scooters with lawn-mower engines and a covered passenger compartment and they operate like taxis. They have meters to calculate fares, but the driver will usually quote a flat rate higher than what the meter to your destination would be. For white people, the markup is even higher, and can in extreme cases be as much as 1000%.

There are several ways to establish what you will pay for a ride in a Mario Kart. The first is to simply accept the quoted fare. For example:

Me (getting ready for some good old-fashioned negotiation): Bashyaham Circle, Sankey Road.
Driver: 50 rupees
Beth: OK.

If you're only going to be here for a short while, this is actually a viable option. You'll pay more than you should, but 50 rupees, while twice as much as the meter would have been, is still only a dollar, and that fare was for three people. Or as many as you can fit. Heather, Sunil, Clint, and Charlotte all ride around in one Mario Kart, with one ass sticking out each side.

The second option is to insist on using the meter. This is a good way to get an extra little tour of the city. We've paid 25, 35, and 40 rupees, all for the same trip (our hotel ↔ MSRI), and gone a different way each time. Again, we're being ripped off, but we see more of the city that way, the rides are still a lot of fun for us (surely you've wished you could ride in a Mario Kart for real at times), and the fare is still less than a dollar.

The third option is to negotiate a flat rate. The best way to do that is to be Indian. The second best way is to know what the meter to your destination would be and what the markup, based on supply and demand at that particular time of day and which even Indians have to pay, should be. Neither of those is really feasible for us, so we've been using options one and two most of the time, although I did talk one driver down from 80 to 75 yesterday for a ride to MG Road.

The Mario Karts operate in the same space as all other traffic (buses, cars, motorcycles, bicycles, and even pedestrians), although there is a general custom of faster vehicles on the right (they drive on the left here, British-style). Vehicles may not cross the center line unless they intend to eventually cross back. Lane markings are completely irrelevant. One cross-section of three lanes might contain up to seven or eight vehicles, even more when they stop at a red light and fill in the gaps to try to get a good start when the light turns green.

All vehicles are driven pretty aggressively, and margins are pretty tight, but there don't seem to be any hard feelings. The only times we've heard one driver yell at another (remember, there are a lot of Mario Karts, bicycles, and motorcycles, all of which are open air, and the whole thing, while action-packed, never reaches really high absolute speeds, so the drivers can and occasionally do yell at each other) is when someone blocks traffic. Being cut off is not taken personally.

In fact, it's pretty much anything goes as far as passing. To complete a pass, you simply have to get some part of your vehicle in front of theirs, so that their only options are to accept that you have passed them or run into you. Usually, passing drivers will honk to indicate that that condition is about to come to pass. The drivers are assertive, but no one wants a collision, so the system works pretty well. That each type of vehicle has its own combination of speed, acceleration, maneuverability, and size makes the whole thing really quite fascinating to watch, especially from within.

One or more honks for each pass, combined with all the honking when a driver would like a vehicle in front of him to move faster, makes for a lot of honking. You can hear honking pretty much constantly in most spots, including, of course, my hotel room, from 8 a.m. to well past 10 p.m.

The best part is, I shit you not, Bangalore is considered to have some of the most laid-back traffic in India.

Getting there

Yesterday was the longest day of my life.

I woke up at 7:30. Guy was sleeping in my living room. We drank some coffee and ate some gluten-free toaster waffles and finished packing, and then set out to round up Heather and Charlotte and go to the airport. We checked in and went through security and as we were walking to the gate, saw Beth coming through another security checkpoint. We had lunch and cocktails at the airport bar and boarded. Elapsed time: 6 hrs.

We flew to Amsterdam, watching movies on my laptop on the way. We had a 2 1/2-hour stop in Amsterdam, too tired to do anything, even if there had been anything to do. By the time we got to the pre-boarding security interview, we could barely remember where we had started from. Elapsed time: 18 hrs.

We flew on to Mumbai. Luckily, the flight was less than half full, and I had a bottle of Ambien pills, so I slept for a few hours. At Mumbai, we took a bus from the international terminal that crossed the tarmac and wound its way through the airport buildings to the domestic terminal. There we waited a few more hours to board our last flight to Bangalore. Departure time: 3:15 a.m. IST. Elapsed time: 31 hrs. 15 min.

At Mumbai (and Bangalore) Airport, there are no jetways that connect the planes to the gates. Buses take the passengers from the gate to the bottom of the stairs. Here is the only picture I've taken so far, of my four traveling companions (from left, Heather, Guy, Beth, and Charlotte):

I'll take more, really. We reached Bangalore and met our driver. Then we had to wait about 20 minutes because his van wasn't big enough for all of us and our bags. The drive to the city was great. For one thing, lanes mean nothing here. I don't know why they even bother to paint the lines. I'll try to get some videos of city traffic. For now, just imagine Mario Kart without the banana peels and with a few pedestrians walking across the screen. We got to the guesthouse and checked in. Local time: 6:00 a.m. Elapsed time: 34 hrs.

I showered, sent an e-mail to Elisabeth and my family to let them know I arrived, and then walked to a nearby store to pick up a few things. I slept for a few hours, and then took an auto-rickshaw (definitely more on them to follow) to MSRI for our group’s first meeting. After the meeting, we tried to go to a nearby restaurant, but it was only about 5:30 and they didn’t open until 7. Knowing we wouldn’t last that long, we went back and ate at a café near the guesthouse and slept. Day over. Local time: 7:30 p.m. Elapsed time: 47 hrs. 30 min.