Outside the walled garden....

So now that its daylight - its very obvious - that life within the walled gardens of the Royal Orchid - isn't typical of Bangalore.

From the rooftop pool - you can start to see the poor areas surrounding the hotel:



If you look closely - you'll see several families living in make-shift shacks in the middle of dirt fields. Wild dogs and cows roam freely amongst the streets and dwellings.



And the source of that awful stench? There's a inner-city river a block away from the hotel that truly does smell like death and raw sewage. Jeff took a photo of it -- it smelled so bad - I couldn't bring myself to take a picture so I'll have to get the image from Jeff's camera.

Jeff wakes up!

So Jeff woke up after me, and we ended up eating lunch in the hotel together. Service was soooooo slow. It probably took 40 minutes to get a salad. Jeff waited about 45 minutes for his BLT sandwich.



Near the hotel - there's a golf course - and in the distance you can see two IBM buildings and a Microsoft building. We think this is the place that Thomas Friedman described in his book The World is Flat.


The power goes out repeatedly in the morning like clock-work. The hotel workers don't seem to notice -- it's just one of those things.

So this is Bangalore in the daylight...

I'm trying to get my stomach on Bangalore Time -- so I scheduled a wake-up call for 9am. Now that its daylight, I can see that I have a pretty good view...







The room comes with a complimentary breakfast so I went downstairs. It's a really nice spread -- lots of variety - and great taste -- indian/asian dishes mixed with european and american faire. Nothing like a little spice in the morning to get the brain started.