Tropical Cubbon Park

This morning I decided to take up jogging again after a few weeks of little healthy activity.

Ajay, my buddy at the check in counter at Mélange, suggested that I go to Cubbon Park to jog. It's just down the street from the hotel. At 7:30 in the morning, I daringly put on my shorts and my t-shirt.

The reason I said daringly is because as of yet, I have not seen any Indian man in shorts. (Not including those little wrap around diaper things that I see guys walking around in, usually accompanied by bare feet and lot's of dirt - if anyone knows what they're called, let me know).

I left the hotel room and took off running. There were a few blocks I had to run before I got to the park. I remember thinking why it's a good thing that people don't jog on the streets in Bangalore.

If you don't get killed by speed racer rickshaws and scooters, then you'll certainly have a slow painful death from breathing exhaust fumes. I decided to walk the rest of the way to the park just to avoid breathing in deep.

I got to the park. What an oasis of green. This 120 hectare park is 'green lung' in the city. It's full of massive tropical trees, flowers and vines. Very beautiful. I was thinking to myself how lucky I am to be in such a beautiful tropical area.

I stopped to walk a while. In this blog, I will write because I wanted to smell the flowers. (But in reality I was out of breath)

There are scattered every where all kinds of stray dogs of all shapes and sizes which I don't really mind. They don't even notice when I ran by (I started running again) and they're all rather cute and surprisingly look well fed.

It's also surrounded by very beautiful old government buildings and museums from the British Empire days.

But the most fascinating and inspiring thing about this park is the people in the park. You have all walks of life together all doing exersises, jogging, power walking and yoga everywhere in the park.

Every where you turn there was someone doing some sort of yoga breathing, or movements. I found it all very beautiful.

Some of the men looked like they were monks or priests because of the robes they were wearing. There even were people who looked homeless, all doing different exersises and yoga.

When I got to the other side, I found a running track full of yuppie & university looking Indians. It was about 1 km long. I did one loop along with my fellow Indian healthy people and decided to head back.

I think that my morning ritual will be to go to Cubbon for my morning jog before I start the day. Tomorrow my SAP classes begin, I'm going to try and get some sort of health routine going.

Here are some video's I found on YouTube of Cubbon Park:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QRDk_8egT0&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjeF1PbGp4M
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLk6UbQbLwo


So far, I'm really loving it here!