Mysore

The temple at Mysore Palace

The market

     Casually and indifferently maleovolent. That is what India feels to me. I am sweating in a huddled room, the floor is filthy and the bed sheets worn. My guts are turning upside down and I am forced into the toilet (thankfully I have my own) every twenty minutes or so. The bizarre arrangement of the tiny cubicle means that you can actually only sit on the seat side on. Nice.
It took me ten hours to get here on the bus overnight from Hampi, on roads that seemed to have been heavily shelled continuously for the last twenty or thirty years. Potholes the size of ponds, rocks the size of footballs strewn across the thoroughfares. I constantly expected the axels to snap at the abuse but thankfully we kept on into the night. Tired and bedraggled I got off the bus at six am and, all the other hostels being booked up, ended up here at the Lakashi "Deluxe" Lodge. Oh the guileless irony of that name.
Mysore is a dusty train wreck of a city, honking cars and an atmosphere so polluted it forms and congeals on the skin and within the lungs. The people are friendly enough, and the palace here is very impressive (enormously ornate and massive, and proof that while the Brits did little to introduce notions of equality and social justice to India, massive disparity in quality of life as was already well entrenched) anf the market colourful and bustling, but these three things are - from my admittedly irritated and befouled perspective - the seeming only redeeming factors of this dusty hell.
      Shamefully my stomach's yearning for the safe and predictable lead my feet to Dominoes Pizza (the only western junk merchant in town) for my only meal of the day, and I have set my heart on paying twice my usual accomodation budget for a nice room in a clean and spacious hotel. The thought has entered my head that I don't have the nuts for this urban madness, which is a bit discouraging as in a month I will be in Rajasthan which, as far as I gather, is a series of metropolitan cacophonies situated in the raging heat of the desert. However I am sure it is the stomach cramps talking and I will cheer up.
Curse these stained curtains, curse the smog, GAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH. I'm off to the loo again.