India

My cousin, Karissa!
And...the food. Spoons available, but eating with your hands is the traditional route of food consumption

Cruising the streets of Chennai

The view from our hotel

The beach in Mamallapuram, just don't take your shoes off

The beauty of India...

A great place to chill and a common theme in the cafes

Cows eating trash everywhere, so sad

Hmm, which cup of chai to sip...

Walking through the backpackistan (Mamallapuram - South Coast of India)

The "cooking class" we asked a restaurant owner to give us

The output

In the impromptu cooking class, we just asked the restaurant owner to teach us how to make a few dishes, so he did, and it was really fun (except that the extremely uneven cutting board and sharp flimsy knife were no match for my finger)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Since I'm going to be in school for the rest of my life, I decided to take one last trip to see my cousin Karissa before my traveling career is put on hold.

I spent only a week in India, just enough time to see a bit of a city, Chennai where I flew into, and some of the coast, Mamallapuram, where we stayed for 5 days. Chennai was really just a place for Indian people and not necessarily tourists, which was great, I got to experience their way of life without having to cater to Westerners. We ate food with our hands, at for breakfast the kind of food we might eat for dinner in an Indian restaurant here, and it was all fabulous. The people really were nice, except when they were trying to scam you, and it didn't seem dangerous at all. Dirty? Yes. Streets lined with people sprawled out over the "sidewalks" and starving cattle digging through the street garbage for something to eat. There really weren't garbage cans, per se, just piles of rubbish all over.

Street driving really is mad. Most people seemed to drive scooters/motor bikes. They fit 2,3,4 people on them, and it seemed as if no one was ever really holding on, despite the crazy driving. Honking starts at 4am and stops around midnight, so if you're looking for peace and quiet, India is not the place.

Our time in Mamallapuram was pretty chill, they call those towns "Backpackistan" which is a good description. In order to get Real Indian food, we just walked a couple blocks out of our town and went to eat with the locals, where meals (for two) were about $2, as opposed to $10 or so in the village area. Lots of begging in the backpackers towns, of course, but not in the city, hardly at all actually. They're not conditioned to it because there aren't foreigners roaming around to beg usually.

We would have loved to visit more temples, as they are all over, but we only made it to two, Swami Vivekenanda built the "ice temple" and was the first to introduce ice to India! The others required too much walking for me. It was a truly relaxing week with quite a lot of cultural education.

I received a traditional Ayurvedic massage (always my goal, to learn massage techniques from every country I visit so I can always take something home to practice). The most interesting part of this was actually when I went to the store front where I had booked the massage, and the man working there said "you go with my son, my wife will massage you at home" and I was thinking "oh shit" and wasn't quite sure what to make of that. So...I walked for about 15 minutes in the dark side streets, and finally down an ALLEY where it was VERY dark, and came to their house. If it hadn't been for the "Ayurvedic Massage" signs I saw on the way there a couple times, i would have been r-u-n-n-i-n-g back to the guest house. Oh, and the guy escorting me didnt' exactly speak English, so it was a long, relatively silent walk. I tried to ask some questions about the credibility of his mom, but didn't get much. The massage: lots of oil, and not the traditional "spilling of the oil on the forehead" you always see in pictures. Not swedish massage, but more like circulatory with lots of (what we call) "duck quacks" with the hands. Not real relaxing but hey, I was going for education! (and it was $10)