Today we seem to have some free time, so I'm going to attempt to tell you about what we've been up to since we've gotten back from Karnataka.
First, we hung out around Chennai again. We went out with Vishaka's friend Shobana to the beach after dark, where it is surprisingly very crowded.
See?
(you can see Christoph and Shobana and Vishaka in the middle right.)
Then we went out to eat at this cool place where you sit on these hammock-benches and eat really really good stuff that neither Christoph nor I had ever had before.
(If you've gone through my pictures you know all this stuff already, though, because it's all in the captions. I'm realizing that I've written most of this before already because it's there... so maybe I'll keep it brief for the stuff already covered.)
This is a picture I need to point out. No explanations, nothing.. Just a cobra-cage with a gaping hole in it. That was at the zoo.
The zoo was otherwise a good time. But not too much to write about.
Then Christoph and I went to Dakshina Chitra, which is a kind of outdoor museum of south Indian life. It was neat. Christoph made a clay pot.
Umm... Let me think...
Then we went to Mamallapuram, or Mahabalipuram, depending on which name you want to use of the person it's named after. (It's like how some people call Washington DC Georgeton DC - I guess nobody does that, but that's the way it works here sometimes. Apparently.)
Mahabalipuram (the more-fun version of how to say it out loud, so the name I'll use here) was really cool. It was like ancient Egypt in India. At least that was my impression. There were tons and tons of temples both built into cliffs and freestanding, and rock carvings that were 4 stories high like this:
Maybe 4 short stories. I don't know the size exactly, but this one's gigantic. (the elephants carved are far bigger than real elephants, for reference.)
Something weird to me about the whole place was that there didn't seem to be any rules, or at least the didn't seem to be enforced, so you could in theory climb all around the whole place.
Like this:
There were some ancient stairs going up that rock that petered away into mere hand/footholds, so we followed those up to the top. I get the feeling that it shouldnt've been allowed because the rock itself was covered in thousand-plus-year-old carvings (then still only on the underside), but everybody was doing it.
Another temple, surrounded by "crouching Nandis." Apparently a Nandi is a bull. I have yet to learn what makes a bull a Nandi, exactly, but they make neat statues.
So we learned a lot and saw a lot that day, and got sunburned - but not too badly.
In the town surrounding Mahabalipuram, I should mention, are dozens upon dozens of workshops, usually opening out (and taking up most of) the sidewalk/street, all with people actively carving stone figures to sell. All of the carvings we saw looked fantastic... apparently the town has been known for millenia for being a town full of stone-carvers, and the trade has been alive ever since ancient times when the temples were made and their walls carved. We didn't buy anything, but if I ever wanted a 1/4 sized black stone elephant with intricate costume and patterns carved into it, I'm sure I couldn't get a better deal with better craftsmanship than from one of those little sidewalk shops.
I don't think they usually sell those ones though. They're probably just for show to attract people to stop and look.
Then we went to Pondicherry. ('We' being Christoph and myself.)
Pondicherry was basically the French city in India, and has lots of French-attitude - including in the service! well not really the service.. I was half expecting for signs and menus to be in French and Tamil, like things are in English and Tamil in the rest of Tamil Nadu, but it wasn't the case. We met some French people at "Le Cafe" down by the beach, and they told us that they spend 4 months out of every year in Pondicherry (like French 'snowbirds,' they being of retirement age), and they still can't get over the fact that nobody speaks French anymore.
oopp... time to go for now.. I'll add more later.
No comments:
Post a Comment