BANGALORE 1

I'm here.

After years of dreaming of this place, watching Bollywood movies, of cooking and dancing and reading and appreciating in order to conjure India in all of my naive Seattle-ness, it thrums right before my eyes.

And if New York is set on 11, this place is turned up to 15. There's no off-switch.

After landing in Bangalore yesterday at 4:45am, it's been hard to sleep. This place is a multi-sensory explosion. Honking horns, overhead fans, clanking dishes, and growling transmissions compete for attention. Cars, trucks, buses, tractors, horse-drawn carts, food carts, auto-taxis, motor scooters, bicyclists, pedestrians, dogs, and cows vie for precious centimeters on the roads. The air is thick with burning trash, incense, exhaust, waste, flowers and trees. The dust from the dry, orange dirt blankets everything.

I can hardly process it all. It's impossible to describe accurately, or with single photos. The whole expanse looks like, at first, an accumulation of things in-process---the exposed rebar of the city's long-overdue elevated train project, the buildings shrouded in bamboo scaffolding, the piles of broken rock and dirt and bricks, mountains of unsold tires and bananas and bottled drinks, and the sporadic rainbow temples tucked inside it all.  The tech industry's presence seems dwarfed by the rest of humanity, but we did drive past Oracle, HP, and Accenture yesterday. Many of the larger firms are on the city's outskirts, where they have more room for their fountains and campus buildings.

People make their way through this cacophony with intent, undeterred. Everyone has a job to do, a place where they fit and can be productive. The fruit vendors slice watermelons and coconuts, the female-clad eunochs wander gracefully between the cars and bat their long eyelashes in the hopes of donations, and every vacant lot is occupied by a street cricket match. (India hosts Sri Lanka tomorrow in the World final, an event of more than biblical proportions here. The betting, analysis, and hero-worship are currently in full swing. The sure-to-be-legendary match starts in four hours.)

Bangalore was once known as The Garden City, and it's no misnomer. The foliage, while patchy from one end of the city to the other, is stunning and thrives where it's been allowed to. Palms and evergreens, flowering trees, and ancient, gnarled branches hang over huge swaths of road. There are botanical gardens (not yet explored by us) and parks, feathery shrubs growing out of pots on balconies, vines choking roadside fences, and flowers so technicolor they hurt your eyes to look at directly.

Andrew is fully acclimated. He's assured and familiar with the people and the basic layout of Bangalore. He can drink the water out of the faucet at home (they have a filter, but we're not ready for that), and he is up on the currency and kind of coffee drink he likes (coffee with vanilla ice cream melted into it). He's morphed into a Bangalorean of sorts. I can tell this has been a great experience for him so far. He and our friend Deepak are like brothers from another mother---they are constantly bantering like relatives, but get along extremely well and respect each other. I'm so glad they've had the chance to spend time talking, thinking, and doing architecture in the same place after so long communicating via Skype and phone and email.

Janet is doing as well as can be expected. We're both tired from our London trip, still not on any one particular time zone, and are happy to enjoy the day at the Gupta's house, with BD Gupta, our friend Deepak's father, who lives here with them. Rashmi, Deepak's wife, and their daughter, Shruti, are in Mumbai for the next week while she takes care of her parents. The elder Mr. Gupta spends most of the day doing puja, or prayers, in his downstairs altar room, and otherwise reads like the lifelong academic and philosopher he is. Right now he's ringing his little bell while he prays, cross-legged with his back turned to the main room.

The young man who cooks for the family is tidying up after our breakfast of curried rice and toast and orange juice, and the maid is sweeping the downstairs floor with a long-bristled broom. Janet is asleep in a chair across from me. As far as a Saturday in Bangalore before the biggest cricket match this country has ever seen since 1983 is concerned (when they last won the World title), I suspect it's fairly typical.

We're staying in a complex of buildings in a neighborhood marked by a large pink gate that delineates the sacredness of the area. There's apparently a temple within walking distance that we're going to see tonight. There are drivers and doormen, the ironers and the house staff. Our alleyway echoes with hammering, conversations, car alarms, and children playing. The following are pictures of where we're living, and using as our home base in Bangalore. It's in what's called, happily, the Ideal Township.

This is a longer post than I'll be able to write consistently, but I needed to ground myself in first impressions. More to come, and hopefully a chance to celebrate with India as it defeats Sri Lanka in cricket this afternoon!