“So this is the City of Baked Beans, eh?” Roz said, eye brow raised in her Best Mr. Spock imitation. “Fascinating,” she pronounced. It seems a visiting king or prince or whatever, upon visiting the region like around 100 BC was offered a bowl of beans by an inhabitant and they were so good (the beans, not the resident, although she could have been) declared the place “Bendakaalooru” which turned into Bengalaroo, the way it is known in the local Kannada language (no mention if they were from modern day Canada. It could have happened.) WE didn’t wee any baked beans, but we did see a Bangalore of the IT industry, leader in India, a Westernizing city, where you may not have baked beans but traditional foods and an auto rickshaw blast by with twenty computers lashed to its frame, dodging crazily down the street. You could see these contrasts sitting at the terraces of some of the hotels Bangalore India provides (though we did not see the Baked Bean Hotel, we think there should be one).
We were listening in on the fine Indian fellow leading a tour of Korean tourists at the Palace of Tippi Sultan talking about the history of the region. The Palace is an ornate Mughul designed dream scape of impossibly beautiful and overwrought architecture and styling that is just plain fun to look at , forcing me to wonder, how did they do all this? We got kind of close to the group, listening to his lilting description of the Palace “…the city was founded by Kempa Gowda in 1537 AD…” when he gave us the stink eye for honing in on his talk without paying and so we wondered off our own way.
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