My brain is fried.
It’s early evening and I’m writing from a hotel room in Mysore at the end of day 3 in this Indian adventure.
How come my brain is so fried, you might ask?
This story answers exactly this question, as it takes us back in time.. Back to the days of like, 24 hours ago.
The bus trip
Yesterday we were awake until 2am,
only to wake up at 4am
to catch a bus at 5:30am from Bangalore to Mysore.
Yes, the whole city of Bangalore keeps moving and dancing 24/7!
Buses and trains depart from every hour of the clock, every day of the week. India does not sleep.
After 4 uber drivers had canceled our ride to the bus stop, and we started to get worried to make it in time, the 5th uber driver confirmed he was on his way.
In the car ride towards the bus station, I called the bus driver a few times, to find out where the bus would actually be stopping.
Because apparently it doesn’t really stop “at the bus stop” but it more like stops at “it totally depends”.
After about 10 seconds of conversation, that familiar moment happened where I realized I would not make any sense of whatever this person was saying.
So I wisely passed the phone to the taxi driver, who tried to convince us in his best English (of a very similar low adequacy level) that he was dropping us off at the right place.
And there we were, at 5am, in the middle of Bangalore, hoping to stand at the right spot and hoping that the right bus will arrive at the right time.
…
And it did!
So you’d think after a miserable 2 hours of sleeping and 1 hour of semi-napping in a wobbly bus, arriving at the beautiful city of Mysore, we’d take some time to rest right?
Wrong! Because we’re on a MISSION.
And that mission is: Buying a tain ticket.
The mission
Yes, you read that right.
Some of the most difficult things in life, such as finding healthy, cheap, fast AND tasty food, are ridiculously simple and common in India.
And some of the simplest things in life, such as buying a train ticket, match these amounts of ridiculousness. Only this time in difficulty.
The night before, I had been forging plan after plan with my dear Indian friend Danish, to enable us to buy train tickets for ourselves.
From dodgy government websites that don’t work, to outdated information about websites that no longer exist, to installing the 5 different apps that suppose to allow us to book a train ticket, none of the plans worked.
Either I could not create an account, or I could not prove I’m of Indian nationality (to be fair, I’m not), or the dreaded “Something went wrong” message appeared – the most functional part of any Indian government website.
If you want a crash course in technical difficulties, just try and buy a train ticket in India as a foreigner.
There was one immediate solution remaining: To buy the tickets at the train station itself…
The train station
I immediately had some flashbacks from my previous visit in India.
Flashbacks of hour long queues, chaotic overcrowded train stations, bureaucratic nightmares and scammer faces.
Coming out of the nightly Bangalore to Mysore bus, we started walking a bit towards the train station and took a break in an absolutely adorable tea shop where we had about 3 cups of chai each.
The shop wasn’t bigger than 3 by 2 meters, and the host made up for it with deliciousness of chai and hospitality.
We naturally had some conversation with the host and 4 local people who were there. We lightly talked about culture and religion, and when one guy started to give his opinions on Muslims, we decided to move on to the train station.
To our surprise, the first queue was quite empty.
We got to speak to a person really fast, and got disillusioned about the smoothness of the situation when she sent us to the correct queue straight away. This queue was longer but it still wasn’t anything like the queue from my flashbacks. First relief.
My hawk eyes had spotted that every person in the room was holding a piece of paper, and I asked what’s up.
Aha! There was a pile of empty forms, waiting for innocent suckers to walk into the room to fill them in.
This means we didn’t wait in a queue for 30 minutes to figure out we needed to fill in a form and then had to re-queue. Second relief!
We filled in the form.
And we re-queued.
And to my amazement, we got our train tickets without any issue and with barely any waiting! Third relief!
Parvati was with us today.
So here we are, in Mysore. With train tickets to our next destination.
Ahh, the 11.5 hour train journey in sleeper class tomorrow promises to be quite the experience.
