Flashback - A day in Hyderabad

Our wonderful guide and friend, Mehender, from Bala Vikasa, showed us around Hyderabad. He is an expert guide!! And we weren't bothered quite so much by the touts with him around, but he was quite often bothered by the 'Security' types, who thought he might be a tout bothering us! He's the handsome fellow standing next to Nick in front of the Four Towers. He went to college etc. in Hyderabad, so knew his way around fairly well.

In our whirlwind tour, we saw the Salar Jung Museum, which is huge, and basically the personal collection of the righthand man to the last Nizam (royalty), the Charminar (or Four Towers) and the Laad Bazaar just around it, the Birla Mandir Temple (no pics allowed!), and the 17.5m stone Buddha statue out in the middle of a lake. Brenda particularly enjoyed the story about how the statue sunk to the bottom of the lake when it was first being delivered, and it took 2 years to bring it back up!

One of the most noticeable things about India is the sheer number of people - there is always a crowd. And there doesn't seem to be any concept that roads are for motor-vehicles, not people and herds of livestock! If there is a spot near the side of the road, there will be some sort of shop or market stall right up to the edge (laws and regulation about this sort of stuff don't seem to exist - in a Mumbai paper we read about shops being set up in what were meant to be toilets for the rooms upstairs - tax collectors even came by and collected the business tax, but didn't do anything about the fact that the 'storefront' was actually squatting!).

You can sort of get the idea from the crowd shots attached. Another example - there was some sort of traffic accident involving a bus outside our hotel, so for some reason, all the passengers got off, and proceeded to stand right out in the road! So then there was a back-up of traffic, every single one of them laying on the horn.

So after an exhausting day, Mehender took us to the restaurant at the Kamat Hotel for dinner. It was a traditional Indian 'thali', which is sort of a fixed menu. It consisted of a bowl of rice, half-a-dozen poori (flatbread similar to pita that is deep-fried so it blows up into a ball), and 4 or 5 different curries. It was fantastic! Also of note, we learned to eat Indian-style! No fork & knife, no chopsticks - just your fingers! There is a bit of a knack to learning to mix and mush your rice up in curry until you have a little ball between your fingers, and then scooping it quickly up, and then delivering it to your mouth with your thumbnail. Nick was pretty comfortable with it after some practice, but Brenda preferred the fork & knife...... Of course, she made the excuse that the rice got caught in her fingernails, but we all know she's a wuss!

Anyway, a great day! Thanks Mehender!

The next morning we headed for Hyderabad's new airport for the flight back to Mumbai. One more pic I just can't resist.......

Strange seeing Ronald there, but these guys were happy as anything to have their photo taken. And then 2 other guys came out of McDonald's and also wanted their picture taken with Ronald! And then they rushed over to see it on the camera. Such a contrast - the multinational, and people who so rarely see images of themselves that it is an event.... Which reminds me of the woman with a small child, standing at the top of the escalator with a look of trepidation on her face. She quite apparently had never attempted an escalator before, and was rather shaky. Brenda and another gentleman helped her on, and Brenda made sure she got off on the bottom OK.