Leave it to Erica to blog about bombs and chocolate in one post.

I haven't followed the news closely so I didn't know all the facts, but today there were some bombings in the city. They happened sometime in the afternoon and I didn't become aware of them until one of my hosts was talking to a waiter at the restaurant at which we were having lunch. We had been putting off going to Commercial Street for shopping all week until now, but the bombings and the rainy weather forced us to cut our day a bit short. Throughout the day, some other bombings happened as well so Swathi got a bit nervous since we didn't know when the bombings would stop or who was doing them and why. We wanted to avoid the rainy weather by going to a mall to shop, but the malls were closed on account of the bombings and the movie theaters were, too. I got all my news on the bombings from wikipedia when I got home since I couldn't understand the Kannada updates on the radio. If you look at the map on wikipedia I'm staying very close to Malleshwaram.

Swathi kept saying that the gloomy, rainy weather made things seem especially ominous today. Not only were things closed today, but the streets were a little less crowded. It could have been due to the weather too, but I'm sure the bombings also kept some people at home, too. Swathi's grandfather even called us to say that we should come home which we did, after making one last stop at a store to buy some more churidars. On the way back, the traffic was pretty clogged, especially in the main streets so we had to take some of the narrower back roads to get home. As of right now, we don't know who is responsible for the bombings. Some of us wonder if it had to do with an incident that happened a couple weeks ago where there was a riot after some people threw some pork at a mosque. That day, we were actually planning on going to Fun World but it and some of the other places were closed due to the riots. When we drove by, there were still crowds and riot police and down one of the streets, I could see that one of the buildings had some of its windows broken. There were even black blots on the streets where people had set some fires. At least tomorrow we're all leaving town for a road trip to Mysore and some forest place. I'll be back Tuesday and I'll try to blog some more, provided the wifi/electricity decides to be nice.

In lighter news, Swathi's brother ordered some chocolate cake by accident (from the name he thought he was ordering a fancy chocolate drink) so I had no choice but to help him, despite having stuffed myself with Indianised Chinese food, mushroom manchuri and the strawberry shake I'd ordered for myself:


Chocolate cake (with sprinkles and chocolate chips embedded in it), vanilla and chocolate ice cream, chocolate syrup and of course, an enormous dollop of whip cream- mm! I actually ate so much this afternoon that I wasn't even hungry for dinner, 4-5 hours later. Nevertheless, I forced myself to have a bit of rice, leftover chicken fried rice and a small scoop of veggies. Now I've got to pack up for tomorrow's trip since we're theoretically leaving the house at 7 am in a 14-person bus.