Crawling ...

I went on a pub crawl on Sunday night. The crawl -- which focused on the history of beer and beer and Bangalore -- was led by Arun Pai, the entertaining and informative impressario of Bangalore Walks. My friends and colleagues, Paul Bolding and Jane Young, also went along for the walk.

The crawl started at Koshy's, one of Bangalore's oldest and most atmospheric restaurants. Over glasses of Kingfisher and UB Export, Arun gave us a beer crossword to fill out, the first of a series of quizzes and games that made the walk a lot of fun.

With its ceiling fans and big white room, Koshy's makes you feel like you're in a 1940s movie -- Sidney Greenstreet and Humphrey Bogart could walk in any minute.

From there we went to Koshy's antithesis, 1912, the hip restaurant/nightclub. We had glasses of draft Kingfisher and had a look at antique bottles that contained marbles used to seal them and keep the beer fresh. They even used an old carbonation machine to make the beer even fizzier.

Next stop was the Museum Inn at a hotel on Museum Road. 1912 had been quiet and hardly anyone was there (it was relatively early in the evening). But Museum Inn was noisy and packed with young Indians having a good time. More draft beer for us.

We wound up at the ultra-trendy 13th Floor, a bar on the top floor of the Barton Center that looks out over the city. People were having a good time here, too.

I recommend the pub crawl highly, but I have one request for Arun: please do it on a Saturday night next time. It was REALLY hard getting out of bed to go to work on Monday :-)