The Bombs,The Driver, The Taxi and The Museum.

Yesterday there were 3 small bombs placed near the local cricket stadium. The newspapers, today, said that 2 went off and the 3rd was defused before it could go off. 17 people were injured, but the match went ahead- starting an hour late. These were not aimed at foreigners, since few go to the cricket games. Of course, today we received a warning of potential attacks on foreigners.
Joseph, our driver is away at a wedding for a couple weeks, so we managed to get a temporary driver starting yesterday (Sat. the 17th). Suresh is a more cautious driver and he seems good, though his English needs work. Unfortunately, last night we learned that his hand was badly injured in some mishap getting off from or on to a bus. Thus, after 1 day we may need another driver! If you look back at some earlier posts about "The Carpenter" - you can see this is not something new for us or for people in general here.
Today, we were planning to have the driver take us to a nice hotel on the far side of the city- about 1 hour away, but since he is resting, we could not do that. We decided to go with a friend by taxi to a restaurant that advertised a buffet lunch, music and a small crafts fair. With great pain we made the taxi reservation- it took 3 calls because the phone was cut off before Janet finished giving information. They give a booking number only at the end of the reservation by phone, so she got cut off twice and finally got finished. The reservation was to be for 1:30PM and we called at 12:45PM. At about 1:10 Janet started getting calls from the taxi driver that seemed to say he was very nearby and he needed more information. He called at least 8 times and we called him at least 4 times trying to get him to our friend's apartment. We walked to the apartment and found our friend was not home and her phone was switched off. We walked to a major intersection nearby- one that any driver would know and told the taxi driver we were there. The roads are one way (Mostly, but people will go whichever way they want to go). In one call it sounded like the driver was coming from the left, at another call it sounded like he was already past our intersection and he had to go around the block. This went on and on. Finally an auto- rickshaw driver came to us (these guys are often irritating, but they usually know where they are.) He offered to speak to the taxi driver. We do not know what he said, in Kannada- the local language, but he said the guy was still far away. It was now past 1:45PM, so we negotiated with the auto driver a little and he proceeded to take us where we wanted to go- and wait. On the way to the restaurant our friend finally called and said she switched off her phone to listen to someone speaking and she did not think we would get a taxi so soon, so that is why she was not home. (She was right, of course- when they say one time, one has not clear idea what they mean!)
The restaurant was interesting, the music extremely loud, but interesting. The crafts were bad. We had our lunch and left. The auto driver was outside waiting. He politely asked if we wanted to go to any craft shops (where he would earn commission) and he seemed to understand (that we knew what this meant) and when we said no, he took us directly back home. His name was Pasha. It is nice and cool in our AC apartment! The electricity has been on all day!
On Saturday, Jim went to the National Gallery of Modern Art here in Bangalore. This is a relatively new place which is built around an older heritage building. It has nice grounds. It has a lot of potential to be a really good place. There is a special exhibit on now of paintings from the collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (A great place). The paintings date from about 1790 to 1930 and are scenes in India painted by British visitors. Most, if not all, are watercolors that are very interesting to see. They are some of the better documents of how some places once looked, since Indian artists did not do much of this kind of work in the past. The museum has some nice and seems mostly modern. The buildings do have A/C, though the temperature seemed a little high. In the V&A section the A/C was cranked up- it was probably part of the contract. We hope they are able to keep up the maintenance and bring in more visitors. They also honored Jim's PAN card to get the Indian entry fee of 10Rs (about 23cents now- 20 cents year a go). The PAN is "Personal Account Number"- like Social Security number in the US. It means we pay taxes here.