Adventures in Chennai (aka Madras)

After one month in India and 13 hours of travel, I'm back in Poland just in time for the holidays. I really had a great time - everyone was very nice to me in India, the shopping and food were amazing, and I always felt like there was something to do. I would love to be posted to India someday, although due to some work-related things I would opt for New Delhi over Chennai. By popular demand, here are the pictures from my trip to India:

The first weekend I took a tour around Chennai in a tourbus. They took us to Chennai beach and I got to dip my feet in the Indian Ocean. Chennai is one of the places that was affected by the Tsunami and you can still witness some damange in the areas all along the beach (especially if you drive outside of Chennai). I took this picture because I liked the woman in the Indian clothing wandering the beach:

There is still a very active fishing trade in India and we went out to see the fisherman. Their catches of the morning were already long gone by the time we got there (9am), but some were still untangling their nets. There boats were very colorful:

I was also surprised to find a little known piece of American history in Chennai: The Ice House. In the 1840's an American clipper ship arrived in port with a surprising cargo: ice shipped all the way from the US (it was cut from a lake in Boston). Using saw dust to insulate the ice kept it from melting, and imagine the prices the precious cargo could fetch in 19th century India. American Frederic Tudor, aka the "Ice King," built this Ice House right along the coast to store the ice when it arrived from the US. Ice deliveries from the US were lucrative until 1880 when steam powered ice makers first appeared in India.

Next up was my trip to Pondicherry, the former French territory. I had a great time in this town and it's one of my better memories of India. We walked along the beach at night (thus no pictures of the beach...sorry), we sat up on the roof terrace listening to the ocean while sipping wine, we shopped, and we enjoyed our fabulous inn. A French woman owns the inn and began letting out four of the rooms to help pay for the large house (she must make good money at it because she's now moved out into an even larger house). We had French croissants and Indian mango for breakfast! Yum! Check out this room...I love the floating linens:

This bed was too cool...it's much larger than a US king size. The words "Arabian Nights" kept running through me head every time I saw the bed.

While in Pondicherry, we visited a temple with an elephant. The elephant is very important and is generally viewed as a clever animal. One of the important deities in India is Ganesh, a human with an elephant head. The elephants are trained to accept offerings - money that they accept with their trunks, or food which they eat. The elephant then waves its trunk over your head and blesses you. I got a kick out of it and won't admit how many roupies I gave the elephant before we finally got the perfect picture:

Finally, I went to the town of Kancheepuram. Kancheepuram is a silk production center, as well as a temple city. At one time there were over 1,000 temples in the city. Today there are over one hundred. We managed to visit three before they closed at twelve. Here is a shot of a temple to Visniu (the god with many faces). Notice that everyone is barefoot - you have to take your shoes off before entering a temple.

Here is a picture of us in the marriage hall at the Visniu temple. The stone carvings were amazing. I love this picture...the guide took forever rearranging us until he deemed our pose was picture-worthy.

I really enjoyed the last temple we visited. It was a temple to Shiva, the destroyer god, frequently depicted with many arms. The temple was special because, unlike most temples, foreigners and non-Hindus were allowed into the inner sanctuary area. We were blessed by the priests (you'll see in the next picture we're all sporting the red spots on our foreheads). The backgroud is funny because the guide kept bragging about the fact that the temple had over a thousand of Shiva's "lakshmis" (I'm spelling that how it sounds). We were all confused because we had no idea what a lakshmi was. When we asked he looked uncomfortable and replied "it's Shiva's source of power." We looked it up in our guide book - a lakshmi is a phallic symbol. Mystery solved. :)