Biannka : Mysore love!

Chocolate shop owners
Chocolate shop owners

I’m in love – in total, mad, crazy love with this beautiful place called Mysore and I’ve only just arrived.  Because I decided to arrive in Mysore a little earlier than I had booked my apartment for, I am staying in another place owned by my landlord.  It is a little self-contained room upstairs of a Chocolate Shop.  As soon as I sat on my bed I felt like I was in heaven – the mattress was sensational, the pillows were soft, the sheets smelt amazing!

The next morning, I awoke to the smell of chocolate cake cooking – what delight!  I wasn’t due to start at the Shala until the 2nd January  so rolled out my mat to practice but found the smell of this beautiful chocolate cake wafting through my windows very distracting!  It was similar to the smell of Harry’s Chai brewing on a Saturday morning at Live and Breathe! As it turns out, the Chocolate Shop is very popular with the Yoga students here – they make a variety of different flavours of chocolate, catering for a bunch of different tastes and fancies.  They also make the best ever granola and freshly grind  coffee for those keen to brew their coffee at home.  Another sensational smell that I can smell from my room!!

As I walked down the street to meet Mel for breakfast at a little place called Anokhi Gardens my heart was singing – again – if my life was a movie I would have had a whole bunch of Bollywood dancers behind me dancing as I sang and danced my way down the street, swinging effortlessly around the trees, patting the dogs and waving at the neighbours as they come out to see what the commotion is all about…  Needless to say, I was feeling pretty happy.

Delicious chocolate treats
Delicious chocolate treats

Given we didn’t have any plans for the next few days aside from Registration, Mel and I decided to do some exploring.  First stop was the Devaraja Markets in town.

Colourful markets
Colourful markets

These markets are amazing.  So much colour; selling anything you can imagine from fruit and vegetables, to perfumed oil, flowers, pots, sugar, bangles and all the equipment necessary to slice, dice and shred coconuts.

Over the next few days we checked out a few other local shops and great little places to eat.  I also had my very first Masala Dosa.  Yummo.  If you are like me and don’t know what a Masala Dosa is, it is like a skinny pancake which encases some yummy potato, onion and other tasty additions and you dip the dosa into coconut chutney.  Very tasty and very cheap! I was also very excited to find out that you can order freshly made coconut milk and pick it up the next day from a little shop up the road from the Shala called the Green House.  Freshly made coconut milk is the bomb – no doubt about it.  I am aware there is great potential for me to overdose on coconut here especially with the coconut water after practise, the fresh shredded coconut on my granola topped with fresh coconut milk – but I will push the limits anyway!

Registration was a breeze – mostly…but that’s another story.  My start time is 9:45am and Sharath told us – ‘come not too early but not too late’.  I change my watch to Shala time so I would arrive somewhere close to ‘on-time’… Shala time is always 15minutes faster than ‘normal’ time.  Now that I have my start time I am able to plan my extracurricular activities.  I decide to attend class with James Boag – a wonderful and passionate teacher of Indian philosophy.  Tuesdays and Thursday’s we chant and study the Bhagavad Gita and Wednesday’s we will study the Eight Limbs and stories of the Gods and archetypes to live by.

Coconuts with Mel
Coconuts with Mel

I spent New Year’s Eve absorbing the beautiful energy of this magical place and feeling very grateful.  What a year it had been and what a wonderful and exciting year 2014 was going to be.

~Biannka xo

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