This blogpost is written by one of our German volunteers
For quite some time we had been looking forward to our first trip at the end of October. We had made a plan to take a train to Bangalore, meet two other DIZ-volunteers and then travel to Mysore and Ooty together. Finally, we would see more of the multi-faceted India! Little did we know which ups and downs had been waiting for us in those six days…
On the morning of the 27th of October we woke up early to catch our train to Bangalore, the city housing the most IT companies in India. When we arrived we still had some hours to spend until we would meet the two other volunteers. They are working in the Dream School Foundation in Bangalore. We decided to visit the Bangalore Palace and listened to audio guides learning more about the history of the palace. The furniture and decoration of the palace were beautiful and colorful, but very chaotic. I remember one big room with yellow and red painted walls and a pastel turquoise and purple ceiling.
We spent the night in the apartment of the other two volunteers, cooked together and talked a lot about the experiences that we had made in India so far.
The next morning we three Hope House – volunteers ate breakfast in a restaurant nearby the apartment of the others and that was the moment when things started getting wrong. When we came back to the apartment we ordered a rickshaw to bring us to the train station. We spent the next 20 minutes searching for our train because the train app told us the wrong gate. After finally finding the right one and sitting down on our seats, the train app displayed a delay of our train over 10 hours. We were shocked. Thankfully a fellow traveler and a train conductor told us that the delay would only be 1 hour. Thank god, that was true.
Mysore seemed like some streets through a big forest to me at first.
The nature was so nice and the houses were beautiful. We stayed in a nice hostel called Zostel and after checking in we wanted to find something to eat and walked through the city. Suddenly one of us felt sick and wanted to go back to the hostel. If only we knew that she wouldn´t stay the only one…
Us other four went to see the Mysore Sand Museum. It was fascinating to see those sand sculptures, but the museum was very small and for a long time we were the only visitors there and got all the attention of the people trying to sell us some tourist stuff.
To be continued...