Hyderabad City Tour

The majority of the exchange students and two local students from ISB took a city tour on Sunday. We left at approximately 10:30 am and were back to campus by 6:30 pm. It was a warm, sunny day and we had an ambitious touring schedule. We saw the Charminar, the Golcanda Fort and Hyderabad Central Shopping Center. The first two are historic, important landmarks. The mall is quite new (less than a year, I believe) and you can hardly tell you're in India when you see it! I have made a slideshow of the trip, but it's got almost 120 pictures in it, so you need to have a long break to enjoy it. But you're invited to look at it at kodakgallery.com. Again, click on the title of today's blog, Hyderabad City Tour, above to go to the kodakgallery. You don't have to sign in to see the pictures.

The pictures are nice, but of course, they don't tell the whole story. So here are a few memories to add to the big picture:

We assigned ourselves seat buddies to make sure no one get left behind. There were a lot of us and no one really seemed to know how many, but we could each be responsible for one other person and that seemed to work. No one got left behind anywhere.

Geo and I were brave and tried some street snacks after our petite lunch. I got a bag of popcorn and a bag of cheesey puffs, but instead of being cheese flavored, they were hot and sour flavored. The popcorn was easy to eat and the puffs were not as good.

Soda in a glass bottle is cheaper than soda in a plastic bottle. We paid 12 rupees for a glass bottle (that needed to be returned) and 20 for the plastic bottle. Plastic is becoming a problem as it is littered everywhere and facilities don't exist for recylcing, as far as we can tell.

When we got to the mall, we shopped at the grocery store on the lower level. It's no "hypermarket" like we had in Prague, but it had a variety of items. We bought some cereal and cookies and shelf-stable milk (Geo picked out a malted chocolate soy milk).

Before we left the mall, we had Baskin Robbins. They have 31 flavors, but they aren't the same as the ones from home. For example, there was no peanut butter cup, my personal favorite. (Honestly, I was not at all surprised...peanut butter is such a strange concept over here, but peanuts are everywhere.) And they had a lot of fruit flavors, like mango, pineapple, and papaya in various combinations. I opted for banana caramel, which is a flavor I had never had, but it was delicious. I'm not sure if you can get that at home or not. One small scoop of ice cream cost about 30 rupees, if I remember correctly. That was without the cone. A hot-off-the-press waffle cone was about 30 rupees too. Delish!

So, now you have a few more stories to go with the pictures from the tour. Enjoy :)