BANGALORE

 

Bangalore, official name is now Bengaluru (it keeps changing!), is a large city located in the lower-center of India. It is a capital of Karnataka, and has a population of 8.5 million! It is a modern city attracting many young talents, and many multinational companies have offices here. The city is often referred as San Francisco of India – many tech-related companies and start-ups are born in Bangalore. The city is large but not too difficult to get around, yet since it does not have many cultural things to offer, most of the visitors are there for pure business.

 

My first visit to Bangalore was in the winter of 2012, and I still remember when I first arrived at the airport.

 

The airport was small but new and clean, and had a lot of ads for tall, modern apartments. As I went out the gate, it was almost midnight, so the first thing I saw was a few building without any lights, right outside the gate. They were probably 3 buildings with 5-6 floors. I thought the airport was surrounded by tall buildings, which may look like those ones from the ads I saw at the airport. Then as I got into the taxi, I saw the reality - there was nothing on both sides of these 3 buildings. The road was very nicely maintained, until you get out of the airport property, then it got very bumpy. VERY, VERY bumpy. It was pitch black, just a few car lights passing, that's all - no buildings on either side of the road. The road was straight and had a space for 3-4 lanes, but they were not marked, and cars were going right to left in order to avoid the big holes and bumps that appeared every few seconds. Oh, and they go very fast – probably more than 100km/h when passing these bumps.

 

Sure, I lived in Ecuador and know what is like to live in a developing world, but I did not imagine that the company I worked for - one of the largest financial companies in the world - would build an office in a place where the ride from the airport was like this.

 

And the worst thing was, that the driver of my taxi (arranged by my company), was honking every second. Literally, EVERY SECOND. He sees a car, he honks. He sees a hole, he honks. He sees a bump, he honks. He honks, he honks, he honks.

 

I nicely told him to stop honking as it is very annoying, but he did not care. He continued for the whole hour I was in the car.

 

After 30 minutes driving the straight road, I started to see some buildings - most of them very old, with very little lights. I noticed there were small housed behind these buildings, which didn't have any lights at all.

 

Then I started to see some nice hotels, tall buildings (maybe 4 floors maximum), and some commercial facilities. My hotel was located next to a commercial mall, which looked similar to the ones in Ecuador. A big building with big commercial logos. There was a guarded gate to enter the hotel facility, and they checked the trunk of the car as well as underneath the car, to check if there was anything suspicious - such as a bomb. India suffered a series of bombings at hotels and commercial facilities not long time ago, so the security is a big concern there.

 

The hotel was quite comfortable, and the room was spacious and clean. It was late at night, so I went to bed quickly - I was very excited about what was going to come in my life in India (even for a short time), as the first few hours in Bangalore has already provided me a lot of cultural surprises.

 

(When I revisited Bangalore after a year, the roads were significantly improved and had less bumps. The city is in the middle of developing really quickly!)