First time out of Palm Meadows

Well, our first trip out of Palm Meadows was for a 7:30pm dinner reservation at The Park Hotel on the MG road in Bangalore. The culture here in Bangalore is for a much later evening. Most restaurants don't even open for dinner until 7pm!! The average work day here is 9 or 10 am until 7 or 8 pm. The kids here are up until at least 11 at night!! This is an adjustment for us, but at least they sleep in late. Let's see what happens when school starts and the bus picks them up at 7:20 am!!


Anyway, we drove out of the hotel gates at sunset and headed on the 8 mile (that's about 45 minutes with traffic!) journey through the streets of Bangalore. It hard to describe the scene, but I will try...


The "traffic" is sort of organized chaos... on all roads, there is in equal mix of motorcycles, mopeds, auto rickshaws, cars (mostly all vans and SUVs), animals and people!! The traffic is at least 4 wide at all times, and everyone just darts in and out randomly. The streets are lined with shoulder to shoulder people, just going about their business of shopping and socializing. I did not see any people not of Indian descent at all on this drive. It's a buzz of beeping horns and at first glance it does seem like insanity. My Mom would not fare well here! Once we reached the MG Road (Mahatma Gandhi Road ) I was surprised to see the large number of brand new establishments around the city here. We pulled up in front of the 5 star Park Hotel and went in to i-t ALIA for dinner. The service here in India is unparalleled. The kids are treated like Princes and Princesses, really. Andrew was served a cranberry /strawberry frozen drink in a big cosmopolitan sugar rimmed glass and promptly spilled the entire thing all over their chic lime green upholstered bench seat (surprise!!). "No problem, sir... no problem at all, sir" The food was perfect, especially the dessert (see photo) and I had a double espresso which was the first coffee I'd had since Dubai (this will need to be a seperate blog subject!). The entire meal, including Australian wine, apps, lobster dinners and dessert, came to under $200 US for the 5 of us including gratuity!! We exited the restauant, our driver pulled right around for us and loaded Lauren into the car and off we went. Back to the hotel. Our first outing was a hit!