So much hospitality!

Friday night (19/12) Alessandro and Maise arrived 4 hours after my last blogpost in the middle of the night at our hostel in Bangalore.

They had to fill in a lot of forms and a thousand times showing their passports until they actually got out of the airport. - Complete opposite to my experience at the Bangalore airport. Now I get why: I had a domestic flight from Delhi to Bangalore and had all the 'paperwork' of coming to India already done in Delhi. They were coming from Doha, (which is not in India).

Anyway. The hotel had nice service and staff, but was too far outside Bangalore, so the next day we drove into town after almost no sleep.

In general our plan was to travel from the 20th of decembre 'til the first of january from Bangalore to Trivandrum in the very south of India, because this is where Alessandro's and Maise's flight back home took off. What exactly we wanted to do and to see, we decided on our way - worked out pretty well.

Bangalore wasn't too exciting. Basically a huge noisy chaotic Indian city (8mio. inhabitants). The traffic as chaotic as the Ghanaian and Nepalese, the horns even loader than in Ghana and the pollution at least as bad as in every huge city.
Very interesting though that such an IT metropole looks not really developed. But it might have just been the area where we stayed.
I thought I took some pictures, but it looks like I haven't, so thats the only picture:

We spent saturday (20/12) arriving at the new hotel (in an area without any tourists) and arriving properly in India:

That was written in the German travel guide

And we looked for a park - to relax from the city's chaos - with the help of our travel guide, which didn't work out too well...
We didn't find it, but we found another very beautiful park.

Having dinner in the Restaurant beneath the hotel, Alessandro and I noticed, that we're both not too big fans of Indian food, even though everyone always seems to love it. But it's not that we hate it, we just don't like the taste of some of the spices/herbs. By now though we've eaten lots of various dishes and snacks and noticed there is also a lot we actually like very much.

Sunday we decided to go on to Mysore, a 900,000 inhabitants city, a lot smaller than Bangalore but still even bigger than Frankfurt.
Getting the right bus wasn't too easy, but luckily we met Sheriff - the reason for the post's title.

Sheriff, father of two grown up children, both made it to a very good job, himself lawyer, his wife Aisha professor at the Mysore university.
He showed us the right bus and then offered to have something to eat at his house. I was a little sceptical, which turned out to be completely needless. We arrived with the rickshaw at his house. Very sweet looking house from the outside and inside interesting, comfortable and need, even though Aisha excused for not being too much of a housewife. My mom and I disagreed. Taking into account that she is a full time worker, even professor, she is a way too good housewife.
What I liked the most were all the books on the table. Especially the title "Prevention of domestic violence against women" caught my attention. Also very noticable were the stuffed animals. A huge lion and a small bear in the living room - the first room you enter once you come in the house. That's quite impressive. An elephant paw as a little desk, a snake's skin across the whole wall, leopard, heads of dears, crocodile and lots of other animals you could find.
In a kind of garage in the back a jeep, fishing utensils, a TV, hunting gear and other things.
I'm a bit sad I forgot to ask to take a picture of their house.

We had nice food - rice with lots of meat - and had such nice conversations. And what really surprised me positively was that we weren't just very distant and over-polite to each other, no. Actually a lot of jokes, laughing, honesty and 'down to earth' sounds like the right expression to describe it.

After dinner we went to see the palace, which was unfortunately already closed.

Just some shots from the outside

..then went to a viewing point on the Mountains to see all of Mysore:

..and finally to the Maharaja palace, which is now a hotel.

Quick selfie :P

The unbelievably expensive maharaja suite.

When we came home, we even got convinced to stay over night and so we couldn't and didn't want to say no.

The next day was monday, so both - Sheriff and Aisha - had to work. In the morning we left to go to the hotel, Aisha had called for us.
This really gave us such a nice first impression of Indian hospitality. Imagine that in Germany? Be honest, unthinkable.