Mmm... litchi season

IPL T20 5

Chinnaswamy

The Chinnaswamy Stadium, home of the Royal Challengers Bangalore, is a short walk from our house. In cheerful echoes of our last flat, close to the Oval, we can occassionally hear the crowds (or music, or fireworks...). We've also taken the opportunity to go to several matches over the last few weeks. My evenings at home, with away matches on the tv, have often been punctuated by shrieks of delight, and texting my brother to compare notes on run rates and which batsman needs to sort himself out and start running.

The Indian Premier League's fifth season is just coming to a close. Much hyped, the league has more or less successfully survived complaints about the format (twenty20 as opposed to test cricket), disrupting the international schedule and elevating cricket players to the same overpaid celebrity as the premier league at home. To say nothing of the second season's swift relocation to South Africa following security concerns about the Indian general election.

Our local team, much to my disgust, lost their chance to go to the playoffs by losing abysmally to the Deccan Chargers, who had spent much of the short season languishing at the bottom of the table.

Tonight another south Indian team, the Chennai Super Kings, take on the Kolkata Knight Riders in the final. My allegiances are torn, as CSK took 'our' slot (albeit which we failed to claim). I'm quite sad about the gaps in TV scheduling it will leave, although watching the England team take on the West Indies may help in the short term.

Then in the autumn England will be touring here... fingers crossed for a match in Bangalore!

A real fan.

** With thanks to Thomas for technical advice, support and explanation. A short guide to cricket available on request; pre-tested on several Americans.

A good way to spend a Saturday morning

Tom on a hill to the South of B.

Hoping both to understand more about the local geography, and to meet some other people, yesterday we joined the Bangalore Mountaineering Club on a day trip to the south of the city. We met the minibus at a local mall at 7.30 (it had been light for an hour so this was technically civilised), along with six other nice young men, and stopped for a breakfast of idly vada (steamed rice cake and lentil doughnut) and coffee on the way. I've very happily adapted to rice, chutney and sambar (spicy soup) for breakfast, especially accompanied by sweet milky coffee.

We stopped not far out of the city, and had a short but fairly steep walk up the hill, around boulders and informal quarrying sites, to a tiny Shiva temple at the top. Much to our dismay, having had to stop several times for admiring the view, and catching breath, there were several motorbikes which the locals had used to come for their morning worship. The temple looked much like the dry-stone shelters on the top of British hills, but with a standing stone rather than wet walkers in the centre.

I was surprised how much cooler the breeze seemed to be than in the city, although we'd probably only climbed a hundred metres, if that. The opposite hillside had very visible scars from mining, and reminded me a little of the side of Ingleborough, with open white gashes, and a well established rock road for the trucks to rumble down. After we'd had idlis again for lunch, we had a surprise dessert of mangos, enthusiastically lobbed across a small pond by some boys who were cheerfully sitting around at the other side. They were small but sweet, but I need a lot of practice to successfully suck out the juice without either getting too many of the fibres or smearing it across my face. On the way down I also snacked on some tamarind leaves - apparently good for energy - which were sweet and almost lemony.