Mysore isn’t small fry: this is the second-largest urban area in Karnataka, and it has plenty of the cacophony and chaos you’d expect from a big Indian city. Sayyaji Rao is the main thoroughfare, and it’s alive with beeping mopeds, brightly painted dosa carts, and vendors with giant stacks of flowers on their heads, Carmen Miranda-style.

Just off this main artery, Devaraja Market sprawls under a seemingly endless orange-yellow patchwork of tarpaulins, ringing with the repetitive calls of market traders. Here, stallholders sit cross-legged on their tabletops, reading the newspaper or making flower garlands while electric fans waft mingled scents of sandalwood, jackfruit, onions and mangoes over pyramids of brightly-colored kumkum powder (used for bindi dots). It’s a bewitching scene – and as mundane for Mysorians as going to the supermarket.

Mysore Palace, at the other end of the spectrum, is the very opposite of ordinary. It’s one of the largest and most extravagant of its kind in India — a legacy of the lavish and long-lived Wodeyar Dynasty. It was restored to its gaudy, Indo-Saracenic splendor in 1912, having been gutted by fire in 1897 (an annus horribilis for Mysore: bubonic plague also killed nearly half the population). Visit on a Sunday evening to see the whole thing illuminated like a fariground ride; swarms of visitors and vendors laden with neon-flashing knick-knacks completing the carnivalesque atmosphere.

Though Mysore’s hotspots can be quite full-on, it takes surprisingly little effort to escape the hubbub. Wander off the main drag and you’ll soon find yourself in wide, leafy streets and colorful alleyways, where the atmosphere is more of a village than a city. Further out still, you’ll find Ashtanga yoga retreats, bird sanctuaries, and the ruins of Hyder Ali’s old capital, Srirangapatnam. Step into a Bollywood scene at Brindavan Gardens, or join locals as they walk up to the Nandi Bull on Chamundi Hill. Don’t miss the chance to have dinner at the Lalitha Mahal Palace, with its barely changed colonial-era bar, redolent of the lost days of the maharajahes. Even confirmed city-haters frequently fall in love with Mysore, and we can totally see why.