This is Rabhi. I met him when I was here house hunting in Jan 10. I had introduced Rabhi in an earlier post. When I get an urge to experience the city, when I want to give my driver, Nagaraj, a day or two off on the weekend, I call Rabhi. He is very safe and his Rick is, so far, the nicest and cleanest Rick I have been in.
Jason Zagula, a colleague, was here on business a couple weeks ago. It was a weekend and we decided to have a Rick adventure. Avenue road is always a good choice for an adventure. It is in "old" Bangalore. The shops on Avenue road deal mostly in discount text books and stationery supplies. A thriving discount text book market is not unusual in a city with so many engineering colleges.
The streets are narrow and crowded. I have shown some scenes in an earlier post. This trip took us to a different section of Avenue Road. For some reason, Rabhi was reluctant to take his rick down into the crowded streets. He stopped just outside the district and let us out.
We came upon this food stand which I will describe in some detail in another post. It was crowded. On the streets of Bangalore that is a good sign. It means good eats and usually safe. There really wasn't a queue and we crowded our way up and had a snack.
As we stood on the street eating our snack, we encountered these folks. It is so easy to strike up a conversation in situations like this; partly because Indians are friendly and partly because they are curious. Remember, we stand out. These folks were very friendly and it turns out they were protestants. Pentacostal I believe they said. I'm guessing they were part of a mission. I was sure we would get "witnessed to" but I was wrong; just a nice converstation and we were on our way.
After we walked around for awhile we decided to go a little further into the neighborhood. We went back to Rabhi and convinced him to take his rick into the neighborhood. As we wound our way down a crowded little side street we got an idea. Let's pretend we are rick drivers. Rabhi pulled his rick over to the side and humored us. He kindly let us sit in the driver's seat as we took each other's picture. This drew a crowd. They all thought it was hilarious. We talked some of the bystanders into getting into the rider's seat and turned up with these pictures.
The rick driving pretense created commotion in the neighborhood. We were doing this in front of a barber shop. The guys in the shop all came out on the sidewalk to watch. They were laughing and calling out to us to take their pictures. That produced the pictures shown below. These are snaps of all the guys from the barber shop.
After the picture taking the fellows insisted we have tea with them. So we drank tea and continued with considerable laughing and visiting, trying to explain where we were from exactly in the states. That attracted the attention of the police officer shown above. I think he thought the tea was scotch or something because he came over and inspected our beverages. When he saw it was tea he laughed and visited for awhile. The small child is a shot I took in traffic when we left.
We left with Rabhi at the wheel of his rick. A good time was had by all. As we headed home we engaged in an age-old rick tradition; the craft shop visit. A rick driver gets 50 RS for every ex-pat he brings to the craft shops he has made deals with. Some say they get more than 50 RS. Some say they get a cut of what you buy. Whatever the case, visiting a craft shop is a good thing for your rick driver. We told Ravi to take us to one of his shops. I had been to the shop Ravi took us to several times before so they knew me. Jason got the hard sell from the two salespersons shown below. The guy on the left is telling of the time Goldie Hawn visited the shop. He is pointing to the ruby necklace she bought........for $15,000.
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