Amy and I are in Madurai, in the state of Tamil Nadu, in South India. After a 11 hour flight to Frankfurt, 9 hours to Chennai and 1 hour flight here, we finally made it. This place is unreal. Wild, colorful, exotic, crazy, beautiful...I could probably think of a lot more adjectives to describe this place.
One of my favorite things on any foreign vacation is the first morning, when you take the taxi into town from the airport, especially in a place like this. You see the daily life and here that is folks riding in carts driven by huge horned oxen, ladies walking to town in their beautiful sarees, kids going to school in their uniforms, which for girls is sarees or salwar kamees. It really jolts you suddenly to the fact that you are in a different place.
Madurai is most famous for the Meenakshi temple, dedicated to the god Meenakshi, (who is Parvati in most of India), consort of Shiva. It's big...five square blocks of corridors, inner temple rooms (where the non Hindus can't enter), lotus ponds, thousands of gorgeous statues, walkways, and of course the colorful gopuras which have literally thousands of pastel colored carvings on them. The largest of these goporas is about 60 meters high and you can see them from any tall rooftop in town.
This morning, our second day here, we got up at 4:30 and walked down to the temple. At 5am the priests have this interesting ceremony. You see, Shiva and Meenakshi are put in a special inner room, the sanctum santorum (off limits to us fer-ners). Since they are man and wife, they make them very comfortable so, basically, they can do it each and every night. This is really good for the continuation of the planet, apparently. But at 5am the priests burst into their room, put them in a covered palanquin, wth curtains so you can't see them, and march them over to another room, where they can meet the faithful during the day. Hindus can go into the room and pray to Shiva and Meenakshi. Then, at around 9pm, the priests put them back in their palanquin and take them back to the other room so they can have another night of bliss. At the 5am procession this morning, we were the only white folks there. I guess I can understand that, but this is really something to see. There is a little three piece band that follows them around with a wild, blaring horn and some drums. They march very fast through the temple and some of the brahmin priests are carrying torches. They stop along the way and play more music.
My other favorite thing about the temple is the elephant. You give him a rupee coin, he puts it in his trunk (then quickly hands it to his keeper) and then he gently blesses you on the top of the head with his trunk. He does this all day, many times per minute and always seems to really enjoy it. Small children sometimes are frightened and many women reel back so as not to have the elephant mess up their beautiful hair that they have been working on all morning. Some, like us, stand and have our picture taken with him and he just keeps his trunk on your head while the picture is taken.
Of course you have to take off your shoes before entering the temple. That's fine, and they have a place where your shoes are guarded, but the only slight bummer is that, especially after a rain, you are walking through mud, spit and dog shit. So you have to try to at least walk around the dog shit, which occasionly is cow shit.
Besides temple exploring the main thing we've done here is gone shopping. Well, Amy has done most of the shopping. The ladies outfits here are quite beautiful and Amy especially likes the salwar kamees, which is a long tunic with matching pants and scarf. Today we went in what I must say is the busiest, most crowded, crazy as you-know-what shop I have ever been in. It's called Pothy's. It's five floors of absolute madness! There were thousands upon thousands of shoppers there. You really could not move in the aisles without pushing people around. I could not believe my eyes, but in a country of over a billion, three hundred million people you are bound to get some crowds here and there. But somehow, some way, Amy was able to find some nice shirts and a salwar kameez. I even found one of those nice long shirts the men were here.
When Amy is wearing her salwar kameez, the local women really love it. We were sitting near the lotus pond in the temple last night and some local young ladies came over to us and sat down and then giggled and talked to us a bit. Then they wanted their photo taken with us, which we happily obliged. This is another thing....you'll be walking around and then a group of local folks will come up to you and ask to have their picture taken with you. This kind of suprised me at first, but now I'm used to it. We do kind of stick out here.
There are just some things here in India where you have to go with the flow. The main one we've found so far is riding in an auto taxi, basically a tuk tuk. First of all, the horns. The drivers' hand is pretty much glued to the horn and he constantly blows it. Another thing is the fact that every two seconds or so, he comes really, really close to having some kind of accident; either running a pedestrian or cyclist over, or getting hit by a car, but somehow, some way he always avoids the accident...usually by inches.
Oh, and how can I forget the food? Traveling is all about trying the local cuisine, among other things. The food here in Tamil Nadu is mostly vegetarian. I've said for a long time that if all vegetarian food was as good as South Indian vegetarian food then I could almost be a vegetarian. Almost. We've had some real tasty treats here. My favorite was thali, at the Anna Meenakshi restaurant. Your plate is a big banana leaf. A guy comes around with some big pots full of tasty food and plops some on your plate, along with rice. You usually have three vegetables of some kind on your banana leaf, most covered in a delicious spicy sauce. There are no utensils as you use your fingers (right hand only, please!) to scoop up your food and plop it in your mouth. It's best to look at how the locals do it. They have all these little movements with their fingers that can gather up just the right amount and not make a mess of it (like I kind of did). But it's just a matter of getting used to it. So we had this thali, all you can eat, a big bottle of water, a lassi (yogurt drink) and ice cream for about $3.50! And we were the only foreigners in the place, which is typical for us somehow. Tonight we just had a lovely vegetarian meal in a hotel and topped it off with cold coffee with ice cream. Another thing that I like about the south is that they are coffee drinkers. I'm a coffee drinker myself and not am not really fond of tea.
Tomorrow we are off to a hill station for the day and then it's the backwaters of Kerela. Hopefully we'll find a computer.
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