monday

t was the volunteers first day, and as I have (somewhat unwillingly) taken up the mantle of Grizzled Veteran Leader, I told them to show up at 9:30 so they could be inducted into the mysterious world of rickshaws. We tromped up and down Thippasandra for a bit but finally found one and made it to work in good time.

The two new girls settled in nicely to work, and I even got to delegate some tasks regarding the evil Downloads page to them. We went down to Juice Junction for lunch - Flo discovered that "veg" in Indian parlance always means "cheese" although it is entirely true that CHEESE IS NOT A VEGETABLE.

We finished up work at a decent hour, then I rickshawed on home. While walking down Thippasandra, I ran into Chris to my great joy, who has been away for two whole weeks turning into a Feni drinking hippie on the beach in Goa. Well, that's what he said anyway. We walked back and filled each other in on recent happenings - he got me a lovely elephant figurine from Goa while I presented him with a fairly bitching pull-back toy autorickshaw I bought on Thippasandra.

We managed to pull everyone together and left for the Tandoor restaurant around 8:00 - the posh and expensive (by Indian standards) Raj themed place near Brigade Road. The meal was again lovely. We had excellent, smoky tandoor lamb chops, tender and spicy chicken tikka, lightly fried shrimp skewers, and some piquant and interesting saag. (The aloo gobi was a bit greasy.) The ambience was lovely, all wood paneling and silver dining ware, and it was nice to linger for a bit and chat with the new people, who are all proving to be very cool.

The bill was about 5000, which made everyone's eyes pop (including my tightwad own), but then I did the calculations and realized I paid 12 bucks for a huge quantity of delicious, high quality food, wherein 12 bucks in many places in the USA will buy you a high-class sandwich and maybe a bag of chips. So I shut up and paid.

We went back to the Tavern at the Inn on Museum Street, which was unfortunately fairly empty. Still, we enjoyed knocking back Kingfisher and listening to The Who. (Well, I did anyway.) It got on past 11:30 and a security guard began nervously cruising the perimeter as the lights went low and the owners began to glare subtly at us over our drinks - we felt it might be best we depart before the cops came. (Bangalore shuts down at 11:30 sharp and woe befalls the pub that flouts the rules.) I managed to hail a rickshaw for the not half bad price of 120 rupees and we headed on home.

I finished Lonesome Dove. Beautiful, although the ending kind of makes me want to go over and slap Larry McMurtry for throwing me into an evening depression over a literary character which really is quite ridiculous. It's the only 1000 page book I've ever read I wished had a few hundred more pages tacked onto it.