‘Just chill’ was the mantra over the last few days and that’s exactly what I man­aged to do. On Mon­day, I decided to go wan­der­ing around MG Road. My aim was to go book brows­ing. But I also landed up walk­ing around MG Road.

Now this is what I haven’t done in a long while. Just walk down MG Road! Usu­ally, I avoid the place because of the hor­ri­ble crowds. Get­ting jos­tled and fight­ing for walk­ing space on the pave­ments is not my idea of shop­ping or enjoy­ing myself.

August 14th how­ever turned out to be a rather pleas­ant day. It was driz­zling and with loads of folks out of the city, it turned out to be a rel­a­tively uncrowded atmos­phere that side of town. After a nice hot cof­fee @ Java City, along with Vivek and Lavan­nya for com­pany, three of us ven­tured into the Mag­a­zine Store on Church Street.

I love the place, not just for the mag­a­zines but for the 4 cute cats. A few months ago, one of them was a lit­tle kit­ten bounc­ing hap­pily from one mag­a­zine pile to another. Now, she’s all matured demon­strat­ing feline beauty and grace. She looks a lot like Kit Kit too! The other 3 Per­sian cats just flop around hardly mov­ing at all. In fact, if you didn’t know they were cats, you might be mis­taken for think­ing you’ve stepped on a Per­sian rug.

What a doll!

After about a cou­ple of hours, brows­ing around the store and pick­ing up a few mag­a­zines we stepped out into the rain soaked streets. Walked up Brigade Road, one of Bangalore’s most famous and over-rated stretches!

Pan shot of Brigade Road

If you’re tired and hun­gry, there are hot steam­ing but­tas on every cor­ner. This par­tic­u­lar snack seems to be everyone’s favourite, espe­cially on cool evenings. And we’ve been hav­ing quite a few of them…

Hot butta for a quick snack

From Brigade Road, we turned onto MG Road a cool breeze blow­ing after the driz­zle. Really nice roman­tic weather I must say. So while Lavan­nya and Vivek cosied up, I went about tak­ing pho­tos. Actu­ally, they did too!

The lights cast these beau­ti­ful multi-coloured shad­ows on the pave­ments as peo­ple walked by. Lavan­nya had a long inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tion with the lit­tle girl sell­ing roses in front of Bar­ton Cen­ter. Appar­ently, her father works in a show­room nearby and leaves her there to sell flowers.

MG Road after a drizzle

After wan­der­ing around for a few hours, we stepped into Mei Ying for din­ner. For those of you who like Chi­nese food, this place is just diag­o­nally oppo­site Empire. It’s a dingy look­ing place that you’re bound to miss if you don’t look closely.

The food is rea­son­ably good, the por­tions are large and try and stick to the Chi­nese part of the menu (the Thai was not too good as Lavan­nya dis­cov­ered!). I like the won­tons and the soup. We also had thread chicken which was nice. Only the prawns were a lit­tle chewy but apart from that, it was a nice sat­is­fy­ing meal. And it’s extremely rea­son­able too. I’ve passed it a hun­dred times and never stepped into it till a friend con­vinced me it was worth vis­it­ing. So next time you’re in the area and don’t want to wait in queues for a table, try this place.

Mei Ying on Church Street