Silk or Cotton?

It seems furnished apartments are very difficult to find in Mysore so we were left with deciding to stay in the Baha’i Centre, or move to a hotel. We opted for the Baha’i centre because it at least gives us access to the kitchen. With that decision made, we decided to make ourselves more comfortable and went shopping for some supplies. Among our purchases were some bed coverings, so we ended up doing yet more laundry (third day in a row) as we wanted to wash them before using them.

We also cooked some beans that we will later use for burritos. I used a pressure cooker for the first time and it was really a great time saver. Thanks to Vijay and his wife for telling me how to use the darn thing!

I was starting to get a little stir crazy, so we went off on a mission to mail some postcards, find a map and see about bicycle rentals. We hired a rickshaw and were pleasantly surprised to find that they only charge about 20 Rupees (about 50 cents) for the trip into town, and as we got closer to town and the crazy drivers, etc. we decided we could probably do without the bikes and just continue to hire rickshaws when we need them. We mailed our letters and found our map fairly quickly, but in the bookstore that we found our map, we didn’t find the 5th book in the Harry Potter series, which of course we realized we couldn’t go home without, so we added finding another bookstore to our list of things to accomplish.

We went to find Geetha’s Bookshop, but when we got there it was closed, but just around the corner was Mysore Silk Emporium. We went in “just to have a look”, but came out having purchased material and arranged for the tailoring of two kurtas (long Indian style shirts) for each of the girls and one for me too, all made of a silk-cotton blend. We of course had to have matching pants too. I would really like a long scarf to match as well, but we will see about that when we go back to pick up our clothes on Thursday.

Here in Mysore, over 90% of the women dress in traditional clothes. We ordered up clothes that are not quite traditional. The shirts are a little shorter and the pants are straight legged rather than the sort that balloon or gather at the ankle.

After all that we still made it to a bookstore and found “Harry Potter and the Order of the Pheonix”. Since we were in town anyway, we decided to eat out. Not sure about the cleanliness standards, but it sure tasted good.

CM