Bangalore, Karnataka, India – We got up and Rich headed to the hospital. He is on a tour of the hospitals of the third world while I took a rickshaw out to the commissioner of police’s headquarters to try and get our visas extended because they would expire before we could get to Nepal. I had to talk to three different people before being told they could not extend the visas because the embassy had given us the maximum period allowed.
I was told to visit the home secretary at the Vidhana Soudha, the Karnataka State legislature building to see if I could get a special extension. We needed this extension and I was determined to get it. So, I went to the legislature and spoke to a government worker about the extensions, telling him that Rich was dying while I waived his passport in one of the medical admittance certificates from the Mysore Hospital. Dude gave me the forms and said he needed two copies of this, four copies of that, etc.
I went across a street, copied all the stuff on the xerox, and began to fill out the paperwork. Seeing how it would take 48 hours to process and they needed Rich’s signature and he was not with me, I had to use his passport as my guide and forged his signature on the forms for the home secretary. It was back to the state house to drop off our appeals. Then, I got the chance to wander around a little bit. The legislature is a huge ornate building on par with California’s Capital Building, but the interior decorator must have been smoking a lot of crack when he picked the colors to be used inside the building. All of the ceiling facades and if you are really lucky, some of the wall facades are painted in one of five colors, bright lime green, neon yellow, neon pink, bright purple, or neon blue. These were all the colors that were compared to some of the rides at Disneyland. Once I had had my look around, it was back to the room for more MTV/BBC to wait for Rich.
Doc said Rich was okay now. So we went shopping in the nicer part of the city for the rest of the day. We did manage to grab a pitcher of beer at a “English” style pub followed by a screening of When Harry Met Sally on the big screen. From there, it was back to the hotel for more MTV, neither of us had had a TV in our room for so long. We were ODing on MTV.