Byung Kyu Park's Personal Website

After some false starts and mishaps, I finally got an organized tour of Bangalore last Sunday. I hope to go on a Mysore tour next weekend. Here are some pictures from the tour.

One of the “false starts” was that the full-day tour I was originally booked for got cancelled because of some local election last Sunday. So, I booked myself on the afternoon half-day tour instead (that actually turned out to be better, because when I looked at the stops for the full-day tour, the half-day tour actually looked better; the full-day tour was filled with museums and planetariums, i.e. places that have little to do with Bangalore). So I had to kill some time from 7 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., and I stumbled upon this statue of Queen Victoria.
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The first stop was this museum (and thankfully, the only museum in the list of stops):
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Frankly, the outside of the museum looks better than anything else inside. Inside, you could find things like lathes and micrometers (huh, I didn’t know these common items at my lab in Berkeley were museum-worthy). There was one interesting exhibit though:
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To figure out where the water is coming from, it’s important to note that here the water appears to drop straight down in a cylinder of constant diameter. But the physics of laminar flow of incompressible fluid under gravitational pull (in particular, the fluid velocity increases under gravitational pull, but the flow rate (area times fluid velocity) must stay constant) dictates the diameter must become narrower as water falls downward. I think they could’ve made this exhibit more tricky by fashioning the transparent pipe into the shape water would naturally have, and picking the right material with the index of refraction similar to water so that the underwater portion of the pipe won’t be so transparent. Then it is only through process of elimination that one can arrive at where the water must be coming from.

And we stopped by at Tippu’s summer palace,
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which was fairly unimpressive, except perhaps this monument:
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I really liked our next stop, Lalbagh Botanical Garden though.
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It was a beautiful garden with beautiful paths
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and lake.
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As we had only one short hour there, not nearly enough time to look at everything I want to see in the garden,
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not to mention map some unmapped sections of the footpaths, I plan on coming back later, perhaps next Saturday.

The tour ended at some Hindu temples, including the Bull Temple.
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I felt a lot of ambivalence at these places, you know, first and second commandment and all that (especially at the Bull Temple, where I had a guide who encouraged me to touch the bull “for good luck” and where I also got a little red dot on my forehead, for whatever that meant). Well. I just remembered what Paul said about meat sacrificed to Greek idols: these Hindu idols also do not exist, and these gestures which could be interpreted as worship do not matter—if I do not mistake them for worship.

(If anyone asks why it took me 2 days to write this, I’m claiming that it’s taken me that long to recover from the trip.)

Last Saturday was my first weekend in Bangalore; no one else was coming to the lab (and I’m not … supposed to touch the equipments without a chaperon); so I decided to take a short tour around the city. There were some organized tours advertised on the Internet, but this being my first week (and my not being too familiar with the city’s public transportation system), I decided to venture out alone.

After a quick Google search, I had my primary objective: Vidhana Soudha. Well, long story short, I didn’t do much touring of the place (the gates looked so forbidding; I wasn’t sure if tourists were welcome in that place), and this picture was all I could take away:
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But I did take a walk around the parks, both near the city center
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and near the Raman Research Institute
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which was nice. And I also sampled the local drinks, including one moosambi juice (bars weren’t open in the morning, unfortunately).

If I had to pick one striking difference in India so far (what some other people have been calling “culture shock”, although I wouldn’t call it that—let’s call it … a vague nostalgia, for me at least) is the different … character of road signs. I’ve been warned about lanes well before I came to India, but I wasn’t told about these:
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Oh. And here’s one traffic rule I found out while walking around:
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P.S. I got around this time on bus—both to the city center and back—despite the fact that I couldn’t find good information on the bus system online (or on the supposed route map at some bus stops). It turns out when you have a GPS (that instantly lets you know when the bus has taken a “wrong turn”), taking a random bus going in the approximately right direction works out fairly well. Also, it helped that I was willing to walk a fair distance (and the day pass was fairly cheap; only 32 rupees).

P.S. Oh, and haggling is very much … in fashion here. I was able to haggle a map of Bangalore down from 150 rupees to 100 rupees, and a hat from 100 rupees to 80 rupees by simply saying that original price was “too much”. Of course, the map was rather imprecise (and not as useful as my GPS) and the hat was cheaply made, but well, I bought them as souvenirs, not practical purpose (which was why any price was too much).