The animal is not me so far

Visited the snake centre. Anyone want to molest, rag or ruffle etc. etc. a snake? They have a bag of the number of pebbles that have been thrown the day before. And these signs are everywhere - but not normally as expansive. As you can intuit most of the snakes including the cobras are not behind glass - they are in pits.

Got driven round the sights in Pune today. Ganesh temple (slightly disappointing) so I took the lead and suggested snake centre (from Lonely Planet) and the hill I could see. This turned out to be in LP also - Parvati, with a temple or three on top. On my way down I saw a great blip with a couple of kids flying homemade kites so I went off the path and found myself in the middle of the crapyard for the shack homes below, and then I got noticed and a lad came up asking me "photo" - I wasn't sure if he wanted me to take his, or him to take mine or if he wanted money - so I headed off, without the blip. The snake centre is part of the zoo and the animals have a reasonable amount of space - apart from the reptiles and the birds (owls, eagle). The tigers, wolves and a rare bear are not in cages, the moats and walls are supposed to keep them in.

I was the only whitey in the park. And I didn't get bothered. In fact I've hardly been bothered at all. I thought I would need the sign in the picture. A small child attached himslef to my leg once outside the centre, but he did let go as I got into the car.

I told the driver I was hungry and he suggested going back to the hotel districts - either Kolyani Nagar where the apartment is or Koregaon Park. This seemed daft so I decided to sneak off, but he dropped me at the door of the museum, by this stage I was getting quite dehydrated so at the fort come palace I just walked off and eventually found somewhere in the middle of a load of crowded streets with an english menu (Hindi words, English chars) - the Hindi chars put me off at the closer places. Everyone else appeared to be drinking quarter bottles of Rum - a real Indian drinking den, I'll have to try taking a bunch of expats there.

So it took me 39mins to find a stream of Scum v Pompey, but the first half seems to have been mainly scummers - the second half was great. As you may know there was a bomb in Pune - somehow I didn't even hear it, Koregaon Park is less than a km away across the river. I found out in a posh bar I went to to see if they had any later football on. No, 1 bottle corona - GPB3.50 - the sort of place that terrorists target - just foreigners and extremely rich indians - there was a party of Germans (probably from one of the car firms who have a big presence out here) watching live bundesliga. One tv in the corner had the live pictures from across the river.

I was gonna visit the area today (Sunday) but am hanging out in places with no or few europeans for the time being.