So, I have some amazing news: I got married this week!! She is a fabulous girl called Maria, met her in Hampi and we disappeared from the standard traveller scene together and went down to Mysore, a place that is just crying out for rude jokes to be made about it.
Okay, I was going to keep the pretence up but I just can't; we did indeed `get together` as the kids say these days, and sharing a room and loitering about each other in a furtively intimate manner makes the Indians think only one thing, usually (that being that the lady, why, she must be a whore! This is my main problem with the culture in the country,and this problem is dwindling pleasingly away as I get just that little bit less prejudiced every day, you'll be glad to hear) so we told everyone that we were married for the sake of an easy life, and it was a bit of a thirll going all over palaces, into shops, checking into hotels and catching autorickshaws with `my wife` ("Hi! Did my wife come in here - oh there you are. Found anything nice? We haven't much room in the hallway now, remember..") has been strangely exciting.
I do take a pleasure in misleading my fellow humans, and it's been a fun game to play this last week; and it keeps the majority of Indian men off our backs although, seing as she was commiting the trampish crime of baring her lower shins to the world it's no wonder they mistook her for a hooker. Obviously.
It does still get to me, that women are seen in such a callous and bigoted fashion - the main problem is, you see, that she looks Indian.
Maria's parents were Indian even though she was born amongst our (her) green and pleasant hills herself, so a white guy and an Indian girl makes it actually quite dangerous, potentially. pleasingly however, I'm the one who would get lynched of course. In some strange bittersweet way it is a good thing I despatched her on a plane back home this morning 
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Oh and when you read this darling, XXX. God it makes you sick, doesn't it.
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Anyway, I have seen some cool stuff, oh yes: we took a sleeper bus from hampi (well, Hospet, the city 12km away) at some ungodly hour of the night and arrived at an equally godless morning hour in good spirts thanks, entirely, to Prince Valium 
You really are excused of all pretension of bveing teetotal and stright-edged here if you plan to travel by bus - I have many bad words to say about Indian roads and their complete lack of smoothness, comfort or sense, generally starting with personal insults towards the roadlayers and their families and working all the way up to a spittle-encrusted tirade of unseemly horror regarding construction methods, materials used and the completely appalling c***s in government who fail to fund the enterprise properly.
Imagine being plonked into a man-sized blender and being slowly converted into a slush puppy, and you're somewhere close to the sensation of riding on the Indian road.
Anyway, we got hammered on Valium and Diazepam for the journey and I, with a creaking spine and Maria with a trapped nerve in her back, felt pretty damned justified. So there.
We went to the IT capital of India: Banglaore, also known to be the most progressive of all indian cities. We stayed for, ooh, at least 2 hours and most of that at the train station, so I can hardly claim to have investigated this most cosmopolitan of native conurbations.
Funny thing though, progressive as it is deemed to be they have some weird laws; I read in one of the daily papers (fresh towels, newspapers and disapproving looks every day in the hotel in Mysore; life doesn't get any better) that live bands, or livebands as they are always known (indians love running words like these together and creating new ways of looking at the concepts) are almost completely banned (ha ha) in the city through unnecessary and highly awkward legislation and licensing, and sin any case dancing has been criminalised. Dancing, illegal!! In bloody Bangalore it just doesn not compute, honestly I can't imagine what they were smoking the day that new law was passed.
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Trains in this country are fantastic; the doors in each carriage's end and centre are left open - it would be a clean and easy murder method if you felt so inclined - and I spent almost all of the 4-hour trip from Bangalore to Mysore next to one or the other of them, chatting to an engineering teacher at the university of Bangalore, and consuming at least half a dozen cups of masala coffee from the screaming chai-wallahs who squeeze their way through the thickinging crowds every 10 minutes.
Oh yes overcrowding: this was `sleeper class, a class of train ticket that allows no sleep unless you grew up in a blasting quarry and were savaged by roaming coffee merchants every night of your pre-teenage life. Still, it's better than `2nd class` where the seats are plain wooden slats and people still climb outside and on top of the carriages to get on board in rural areas. It's just one of the 8 available classes of tickets in India; they're nothing if not bureaucratic about these things
So I got some cool photots and a few vidoes, and now have nearly 2000 photos from India alraedy and I'm shitting bricks at the prospect of sorting them all out for this blog, I can tell you.
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Mysore: busy and not as pleasant as we were led to believe; so we spent most of the time in the hotel room. What a terrible burden this was.
Room service got to know us, and we got to know them very well if only because we had to keep shunting them out of the fucking room as they had this endearing little tendency to barge straight in, even silently unlocking the door before knocking, in the hope of seeing what it is western couples get up to that their religion and upbringing doesn't allow them to get any of until they're married, the cheeky fuckers.
Well, this would at least explain in some way why they like to marry by the age of 24 at the latest!
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The palace in Mysore is splendid, but with no cameras being allowed inside I couldn't show you the best bits even if I had got my finger out and managed to get the photo situation under control. Nice temples in the grounds though, and even though we had to buy 3 tickets from 3 seperate parts of the ground to enter the place itself (one office/booth for the entry ticket; one at another booth for depositing your camera, and one half a light-year away for depositing your shoes at - the shoes thing is pissing me off a little actually - bureaucracy rears its ugly head once more) it was superb in every way.
I haven't seen so much gilt since that convention of Catholic pries- err, waitasec', since that convention of old Scoutmaste- no, no that's pretty dark too. Umm. Sorry, you'll have to think of your own perverted joke there folks.
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And since then, since Mysore that is, we travelled today and yesterday on the most mighty of taxi rides I have ever had the displeasure of undertaking; they little man in the little office in Mysore said it would take 7 hours; we were in the car for 16. Oh yeah - more than twice the advertised time - this is what is known as Indian Time.
5 minutes = 15 - 45 minutes. 3/4 days = 1 week or more. An hour is at least twice that according to my heathen western watch, and a 20 minute break can in reality be anything up to a calendar month.
Life is taken at a pretty slow pace, generally speaking.
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Right! My back is aching from this chair and I'm off to my hotel to watch antiquated holyywood films and drink imitation champagne - the rest of my witterings shall be up tomorrow. I made notes but abandoned the idea halfway through - tomoorw I shall try for a little more structure and elegance.
You have been warned 
