Travel snippets... Leaving Varanasi

I rarely see a gas tank with more than a few liters in it. I guess that gas is so expensive that no one fills up more than 10 L at a time. The physical distances I'm travelling to get from point A to point B in the cities isn't really that big, but the traffic here is a disaster. Roads are broadly separated into two directions, but in each direction it's a bit of a free for all. Sometimes, the direction doesn't really mattter as everyone is bobbing and weaving around the get a better position. The concept of lanes on a road is a bit arbitrary when you find them, I was on a two lane road but when we reached the stoplight, there were four cars abreast. If a car has rear view mirrors, they are usually folded in so that they don't get taken off as you go. Things are so bad in someplaces that foreign industry is doing things about it. Although B angalore is India's Brand Name for high tech, the governor of Karnataka state doesn't seem to care much for the industry. He feels that since they only employ the educated, they aren't doing much of the welfare of the state as a whole (the fact that the people who end up relatively well off end up as consumer driven as we are in the west really isn't the indstry's fault if you ask me). So the governor hasn't been willing to put the resources needed into connecting Bangalore's tech district to the airport he's building. As a result, there's going to be a brand new airport and no highway to connect to it, just the standard one lane each way roads. So the tech companies, from Dell to Sun to Texas Instruments have decided to boycott the government run IT Conference. They're holding out for at least one session of the conference to be dedicated to the infrastructure issues facing the city.

I was planning on being in Bangalore for a few days before the conference, both to see my mom's cousin and to see a client. However, the city is flooded out right now. I'll call them this afternoon to see what the situation really is like and to see if it looks like I'll be able to go.

So here are a couple of travel related reviews and gripes:
The iPod Nano is really great. The fact that I can listen to music anywhere, and play a couple of mindless games to kill the time on a flight makes everything passa a little easier.

My camera has held up well, but as a general gripe, why are all cameras designed for right handed people? Think about it, the trigger is always on the right side, meaning that you have to hold it with your right hand to get it up to your eye. I'm a right handed person, so most times it doesn't matter, but when I sit in the passenger side seat of a car (over here, that's the left side), it makes it really difficult to push my camera out of the window and aim while taking a photo. Thankfully, digital makes taking lots of pictures cheap, but it has resulted in me missing lots of photos that I otherwise would have loved to snap. Why couldn't my battery grip have given me a left handed trigger and grip as well. I tried using my remote release, but the problem is actually that I don't have a grip to hold ontl with my left hand.