On The Bus (again)

Yesterday was another day in Chandigarh, we travelled by car into the city (we being Rachel, Katrine,  Ellen and myself). We were lucky enough to have two vehicles traveling into town, Ada and her Nani, Lekha, who had been staying for the weekend. Nani lives around 50km on the other side of Chandigarh.
The smog was pretty heavy ,

Travelling into Chandigarh 

and again the sights on the way in are just so different. We passed the rubbish heap

The Rubbish Tip

. A HUGE garbage disposal area.

The Rubbish Tip continues

We headed to the shopping area of Sector 17 to get Katrine an Indian SIM card for her phone, Ellen a new camera and Frederick a new charger as the power fluctuations fried mine. Thank goodness for power banks.
Around 2 hours later.... everyone had their items.
We wandered along the street to see some street food stalls,

Blurry pic of street food

and NO I didn’t try any, tho was tempted by this one.

We ended up having lunch at The Backpackers Cafe. When we arrived the place was full but the doorman (every shop and establishment has one) took us 50m down the street to their second establishment and when we entered it was....

The Backpackers Cafe

....very English, complete with Wedgewood plates on the wall. The menu was enormous both is size and range of food available. Was mainly western food, so I compromised and had a Butter Chicken Burger

Butter Chicken Burger

which I must say was delish! No bland NZ Butter Chicken but a tangy spicy (not hot) Butter Chicken.
There was also a Mushroom Vegetarian Burger, Pancake Stack and Vegetarian Pizza had. All very nice and huge portions.
The signs outside were interesting..

Signs

We then auto’d across to Sector 9 and the Brands Bargain shop for the ladies to look at clothes. While they were doing that I wandered around the rest of the area,

Hindu religious gentlemen

Was blessed by these two Hindu religious gentlemen (possible fakes), after I found a wonderful little shop called The Jute Mill, where I had purchased a lovely jute mat for my bedroom floor

Awesome jute mat

and for my meditating. The tiles on the floor are cold in the morning.
There were also some amazing grocery stores and we bought some wonderful dried fruit mix that has no added sugar! They also had dried kiwifruit (kiwi) slices that looked wonderful (next time). We ended up purchasing enough ingredients for a wonderful trail mix including 70% dark chocolate, dried fruits, cashews, pistachios, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds. Rachel roasted the nuts (I shelled the pistachios) and then mixed it all together. The nuts were still warm and so the result was a slight coating of melted chocolate over everything. It is awesome!

Rachel’s trail mix masterpiece

So after our shopping Ellen decided that she wanted to head over to Elante Mall, but was happy to go by herself and Uber back to Aura, so the three remaining intrepid explorers headed off to Sector 17 Bus Stand to catch a bus home. We ask at the office and the lovely gentleman comes out and takes us to where our bus will leave from (#40) and shows us where to sit (No standing for us thank you very much!). It finally arrives around 5pm and we make sure it is the right one and get on.

Rachel and Frederick on #40 bus

It gets progressively more crowded and by the time it leaves it is pretty full. The next few stops and more and more people squeeze on and eventually we have the very typical people hanging off the doorway. It was a huge squash but amazingly there was no body odor issues, I think mainly because most people are suffering from the cold weather (it is around 20 degrees Celsius and they are freezing!).
I knew we were getting close so I started to stand to make my way to the front of the bus like other people had been and was told in no uncertain terms to sit back down. When the bus stopped then I was allowed to get up. Different rules for us white fellows!
We eventually get to our stop at Boothgarh and everyone is helpful in allowing us to get off. I am very impressed with how helpful and friendly people are here.
It was dark by this time so we made our way down the road lit by the bikes and cars heading both ways back to Aura.
It had taken us nearly an hour to make our way home on the bus but was a wonderful experience.
This morning I was a bit surprised when Prince delivered our breakfast instead of Rajan, and it turns out that our cooks Rajan and his mate had done a runner last night around 10pm, saying they were going off to meet a friend but never came back. The rumor is that they have returned to Nepal but no one knows for sure. So Rachel our American chef is currently cooking for us all til replacements are found.
As I keep saying, Never a dull moment here!
One of the amazing things about traveling around Chandigarh is the traffic. Very loud, very organic, very scary from time to time. We had an interesting journey alongside, behind and in front of a big white bus while traveling in an auto. I could not believe how close we came. There were time I could not have put my hand between us and the side of the bus as it passed us or we passed it.
The roundabouts here are incredible with some having traffic light and some not. The traffic lights stop the traffic on the roundabout just prior to an entrance, so it is give way to your left. This also applies to non light controlled roundabouts. The good thing is that all the lights have a countdown so you can see exactly how long you have to wait.
There seems to be little attention paid to road rules and people come out of side streets and the traffic flows around them quite organically and everything seems to meld, mix and merge beautifully. The spacial awareness of all the drivers is amazing. I must take a video one day.

Safe travels everyone.