Crossing State Lines

I started in TN and crossed directly into KA... Yes, I'm sure about this. No, I didn't fly, in fact I got there very slowly. TN = Tamil Nadu. KA = Karnataka (said "Car Nautica").

I took the bus with mi hemana and despite the fact that we rode on the Interstate highway (with mostly good roads) and Bangalore is only about 220 miles from Chennai, it still took almost 7 hours by bus to reach our destination. Of course, that includes a 45 minute stop for lunch at a nice air conditioned restaurant (with most of the items on the menu missing from the restaurant). If you remove that time, the average speed of the bus is well still about 40 mph. Kinda slow...

Well, it was the first time I've crossed state lines in India. I intend to do that much more often over the next month, but so far I've only been to Delhi, Pondicherry and they are both federal territories rather than states. So my first experience crossing state lines in India was a little bit exciting. Bangalore, is however, at the very southern tip of Karnataka and therefore the vast majority of the trip is spent in Tamil Nadu. Once we crossed the border, the signs instantly changed from Tamil to Kannada. I'm told that a high density of Tamil live in that portion of Karnataka, which doesn't surprise me at all, and that bangalore has it's own Tamil neighborhoods, but I didn't see Tamil ANYWHERE except on buses and trains going back and forth. The whole experience was a little bit jarring. I spent the last hour of the bus ride trying to learn as many letters as I could from the signs as they whizzed by. Luckily, I've learned when certain signs will be direct transliterations from English rather than the actual Kannada (or Tamil) words. Happily for me, my good Indian friend had set us up with a host in Bangalore who was his roommate in undergrad.
Another lucky cultural difference in Bangalore is that rickshaw drivers are much more likely to understand english. Since I know exactly zero Kannada, and my Tamil isn't exactly stellar, getting around in some language other than English would have been tricky.

But, there it is, I finally crossed state lines in India, and it was a strange experience. I guess I'll get used to it within the next month!