We made it back!

...but none of our luggage has yet. They say it will be delivered in the next couple days, but also don't know where it is, so...

Man I am tired. It's 8:23pm now, and it's looking like an 8:30 bed time.

Note: a three-and-a-half hour connection time in Mumbai is pretty tight

Sheesh!

Eclipse!

A SOLAR one!

Using SCIENCE I was able to see what the sun looked like without significantly burning my eyes.

See that in the middle of the shadow? It's the sun, with a good half of it covered from the right top.



Now see? The sun is almost completely blocked.

I also took a bunch of pictures with my real camera directly at the sun, with a dozen or so improvised filters until I found one pinhole / lens setting combination that worked out well, and by "well" I mean at least like this:


Neat, huh?

Shopping

The last few days have been largely shopping days for me with Vishaka and her mom. Lots of good things have been got!

And one day we rode around in an ambassador!

It turns out that over-stuffed bench-style seats are one of the worst ideas for car seats ever. I sat in the front but there was never enough leg room, and my head was nearly always pressed uncomfortably against the ceiling.

So, now I can say I've ridden in an ambassador!

Another dog

I think the word "puppy" doesn't apply until it's old enough to be playful, so this is still a "baby dog," taken in (and from the clutches of a strange monkey, no less) by a friendly family down the street.

She liked me. And the cuff of my pants. A lot.


She fell asleep like this, head buried in the cuff of my pants.


I don't have any pictures of this strange monkey because it was too dark, but we saw him sleeping on the roof of the house of this family. We suspect it's the same monkey that apparently picked up Brownie and, according to the maids, set him on a bicycle seat and sat down behind him, like Dorothy and Toto.

This was probably not exactly a wild monkey, but one that was previously trained and (I assume) performed tricks with small dogs?

Either that or it just has a thing for adorable little dogs.

I mean... monkeys don't, you know, *eat* puppies, right?

Right?

Just a quick one...

Food! Before:

After:



It was a paneer dosa with three kinds of chutney and one sambar at Saravana Bhavan which is pretty much the best restaurant ever. (Total cost of this dish ~ $1US)

Brownie is his name-o

He's not even (an estimated) 2 months old and has already convinced several families living in the building that he's cute enough to get food from them- the Rajarams mostly, I think.

Most dogs here are stray, but little Brownie seems to want to give up the street life for comfort and three square meals a day. Or more meals than that - we have evidence that another family nearby has named him "Jimmy" as well..

He's too young to know most simple commands still, but Christoph and I tried our darnedest to teach "sit" and to "not always bite," which is a particular problem with this guy:



He's got his shots, a chew-toy, recently a bath, and even a tipped-sideways cardboard box that he always sleeps in just outside the door, so he's well on his way to being one of those fancy "domestic" dogs.

He even respects the indoors past the doorway as forbidden, which is a big deal for a non-potty-trained dog, but you can tell he just wants to come in and curl up by your feet (this is as far as he comes when people are watching):



(or he wants to curl up and bite your feet.. we're working on it)

Sickly...

Hack hack wheeze hack.

Basically I am sick. It started off as a sore throat (I got one of those last time I was in India, probably from all the exhaust you have breathe here - and possibly from all the burning piles of plastic trash you occasionally get a lungful of. My throat is sensitive like that... it gets sore whenever I go to LA or other place with a lot of traffic too) but then it got infected with something else that webmd says is most likely "acute bronchitis" (also a top result: "the cold") which for me is basically a really, really deep cough that is almost always completely dry and left me with some horrible headaches, and only seemed better with tons of tea and hot water, which led me to waking up in the night to pee with nearly alarming frequency, especially because when I'd wake up I wouldn't fall back asleep without some more hot water to drink to soothe my lungs.

Christoph caught it from me too, probably, and we decided that we should go to the doctor because it only seemed to get worse day after day, and all cough syrups I tried seemed like the aggravated it more than anything (the one pictured above was one of 4 different types we tried, to little to no avail.)

The doctors office was interesting, but not interesting enough to write much about. The doctor is kind of a family friend of the Rajarams so it was all probably a lot easier than it could've been.

But alas, I was still pretty bad off and spending most the days either in bed or near it, and going into coughing fits - I swear directing all coughing energy directly into my throbbing forehead and temples - whenever I went out. Or, you know, talked much. Or smelled incense or bug spray. Or just thought to myself "hmm, I haven't coughed in a while now!"

But yeah, I'm much better now, though I did cancel my 2-day trip to Delhi, which, at the rate I was going, was going to be No Fun At All.
Christoph and Katja went anyway, and I think Christoph spent most of his time there so far in bed in the hotel. But they needed to be there to get their flight back to Germany in a few more days, and my ticket was both refundable and unnecessary so my decision was easy.

But yeah, I'm feeling much better now. I'm still coughing, but not incapacitatingly so - and i have no other symptoms that could mean it's something more serious, which was my main concern at the doctors. (Really though, thoughts kept running through my head of all the diseases they have here that I normally never think about... Cholera, for example, is something I felt the need to convince myself I don't have by going to the doctor and having them say that I'm being silly for worrying and that it's just a normal infection.)

Right. So maybe that bears repeating for certain readers: I'm ok. Don't worry.

Bus adventure

Yep, you heard it: bus.

But a nice bus, see?

So yeah some words of warning: those letters in your "confirmed" train ticket that you booked weeks in advance CAN mean that you are actually waitlisted, and therefore do not actually have a ticket. And if you chose an uncommon class, that is very bad because you are waitlisted for only that class, which may have only one car while other, also perfectly acceptable classes may have dozens of cars and space, but they won't tell you that.

Also, apparently 2AC Sleeper is one of those Uncommon Classes. Oops.

We found out it was waitlisted early on in the process but figured it was ok because we were ranked 2, 3, and 4, and they say that you only need to worry if your rank is something significantly above 30. But yeah, that's for the more common classes like 3AC Sleeper or 1AC (clearly!)

So, after a hectic afternoon of finding this out, being passed from person to unhelpful person at the Ernakulam train station, waiting in lines at each one, we finally got a "no, you can't take the train for the next few days" and that was that.

So we eventually found a travel agent and bus tickets... leaving in just one hour! Aah! (we didn't have our bags and we hadn't payed our hotel and we didn't have enough cash for both the bus tickets and the hotel and this hotel was at least a half hour drive away, and the bus was another half hour from there! Hence the Aah!)

We took the risk and bought the tickets, hopped in a very quickly-driven cab and eventually stopped at an ATM - but it didn't work! Oh no! Then the cabbie got lost! Double oh noes!

But then we found another ATM that worked and the hotel, got our stuff, paid, and got in the bus with 2 minutes to spare. Phew. - Also I think the cabbie might have called the bus and told them to wait for us, but I didn't realize that until we were on the bus already. So it was pretty stressful, but it was high-fives all around when we sat in our seats (and realized they were about 100 times nicer than the other commuter-style bus seats we'd been on before.)

It was probably the nicest bus I've been in, and due to the ticketing fiasco with trains, I've decided that these private bus companies are the way to travel in India. Leg-rests, leg room, comfy seats, pillows... It was nice.

...For the first 45 minutes. Then the clutch went out and we were stranded in the road for over 4 hours while a parade of different mechanics tried to fix it. No announcement or anything, just no movement of the bus and we all continued to watch the heavy-action Tamil movie playing on the screen in the bus and got more and more curious what was going on.

We eventually walked over to the "European Fried Chicken" down the street - the only option, we checked - and had some dinner. They were the first place this trip that took credit card. At all. Not even any of the hotels did, but this greasy fast-food joint did. Weird.

Then, something like 12 hours went by, and we made it back to Tambaram! (there was another mechanic at some point and apparently somebody came and sat in the seat next to me for half the trip, but I was asleep for almost all of that.)

updates!

A fatal flaw in my grand blogger scheme is that I was really expecting a lot more wifi. Oh well.

I have several more posts that, while I have ready access to the Internet at the Rajaram's every day, there is no wifi and my iPhone posts that I painstakingly wrote by forefinger cannot be posted, still.

Basically, we got to Tambaram, got fairly sick in a coughing sort of way, met a dog, Christoph and Katja left for Delhi, but I canceled my (thankfully refundable) ticket there and back because I was still pretty sick, and now at least I'm feeling a lot better, and have eaten a lot of food and done a lot of shopping.

That's pretty much the whole story.

Cochin!

Hi! Sorry I haven't updated much recently, but we left the one wifi area seen so far this trip, that is until now!

Look at this street. Seriously, you expect me to think this is India? This is "India for beginners" as the guides say. No traffic, no cars, no cows, no endless confusion. Just lots of tourists and lots of stores trying very hard to take your money. There's a reason for it too, as this is a really neat history here, as well as "the backwaters" nearby.

Yesterday we went on a punt-driven large boat largely made out of coconut fibers on a tour that was really neat, but I don't have any more pictures of that with me here. Expect updates on that later. Tonight we head back to chennai!

Location:Kochi India

Morning!

With the mist! It's tea museum day, as well as going to the coast this night. We still won't be using an ambassador cab, so christoph is upset. Oh well.

Location:Munnar India

Tea plantations and more!

Today we went on an exhausting tour of the area, complete with seeing miles and miles of tea plantations, the sugar cane plantations, then sandalwood forests (with lemongrass all over, though I'm not sure it was there on purpose).

Also, a hike through a nature sanctuary where we saw lots of, er, "evidence" of wild elephants, as well as some sort of non-monkey tree mammal, and tons of trees and cactuses. Oh! And it was all near the highest mountain in southern India.

Pret-ty neat.

This was from the hike:

These are all tea bushes:


What an ugly place, huh?

So yeah if you haven't guessed I finally found wifi...

... In Munnar! More specifically, the Internet is in one end of the hotel lobby we're staying in. The end nearest the hotel next door. Whatever works!

The drive was exciting! Munnar is surrounded by amazing looking tea plantations and mountains.

Location:Munnar India

Gandhi museum

The Gandhi museum in Madurai is really neat. Apparently Gandhi first "donned his loincloth" in this city, so they had an excuse to make a museum for him here.

It is full of the history of the Indian occupation and revolution, along with many old photos along the way.

I learned that I did not know how big a role japan played in world war 2 to advance the Indian cause. I think I've only ever received a very peaceful (how the Indians were) and brutal (how the British were) view, so I'm glad this museum seemed to have a realistic, non-idyllic view of how things happened. Well, to a degree.

It also had the blood-stained cloth that Gandhi was wearing when he shot. And, among others, a letter Gandhi wrote to Hitler in 1939 badically asking him to not start a war.

So it was pretty cool!

Then we ate some palak paneer, ginger paneer, and garlic paneer at a favorite hole-in-the-wall restaurant of Adam's.



It was probably the best paneer I've ever had. And who's ever heard of "garlic" or "ginger" paneer anyways?

Location:Madurai India

Madurai has a really really big temple

One of the rooms is so big that it alone has 1000 pillars, all of which are fairly ornately carved, some incredibly so.

They charged per camera (which I actually prefer, because at least then you know that taking pictures is allowed!) so I only paid for the good camera, which means I have no iPhone pictures to load to the blog right away ...Or, at least be able to compose right away as I still haven't found wifi yet.

However! I took a couple pictures with my phone just now of the preview screen on my real camera, so here's an idea of what the temple is like:

Those towers are about 50m, 164ft tall and covered with statues all the way to the top, and all statues are painted with bright colors. Any one of them is pretty overwhelming to look at. I should point out that the towers actually serve as "gates" for the temple, and aren't temples themselves (this is something it took me a while to figure out).

So all of the space between these gates - actually called gopuras - is one, massive temple. The view of the temple in the above picture is actually pretty deceiving because of how enormous the gopuras are and that the main level is actually significantly lower than ground level, so the entire place inside has very high ceilings and seems much bigger than it appears.

Here is a (terrible, because of the quality) idea of what some of the inside looks like:



Those are people on the bottom there.

Location:Madurai India

Shirt-making

Near the massive temple in Madurai:

There's a kind of bazaar with taylors and cloth stores:


Christoph and
I are both getting shirts custom-made there as we speak! We're getting them made from the same guy that made Adam six pairs of pants when he lived here, and for only a few dollars each.

Location:Madurai India

Happy new year!!

Happy new years! Or, ten and a half hours till new year!

We just shook hands with just about everybody on this rooftop restaurant saying happy new years to them all, and for some several times.

Sorry if the timing of this post is weird, but there is barely any wifi at all anywhere. Oops.

(and yeah, we found Adam and we're with him now)

Location:Madurai India

Lunchtime

We just ate a huuuuuge thali lunch after a hike up a big hill to see a temple that is fiercely guarded by monkeys and a very neat mosque built into the rock.

(this was the beginning ~15% of the meal):

Adam chatted up the auto driver for the best local lunch place, and this was it. It was PACKED. There were so many people inside just standing around waiting for a table to free up that you had to ask push past people just to get out of your seat. But they were all there for a reason, because the food was fantastic!

Location:Madurai India

Good Morning

This was basically what Pondicherry was like starting at 6am this morning. We did not
sleep in. (If it's not too clear there's a loud instrument playing continuously pretty close by.)

Location: Pondicherry India

Pondicherry

We're in Pondicherry already, we being Christoph, Katja and myself. It's nice and we're hungry and getting ready to eat good food!

There's no wifi hardly anywhere it seems, so I'll write and post this when I find some. (not even at this fancy "European" cafe!)

Location: Pondicherry India

Sheesh!

Wifi is one of those things I was really expecting about 100% more than I'm getting.
I have queued up 4 different posts on my iPhone, all fairly brief and with pictures and things, but have not yet found a single place that has wifi at all.

So this is posted on an old-fashioned "computer" with a "cable" but I suppose it could be worse. I will still keep writing the other blog posts when I feel like it on the phone, but be prepared for a bunch of messed-up timelines.

Basically what has happened so far: Christoph, Katja, and I went to Pondicherry, then took a bus (actually 3) to and meet Adam here in Madurai and rang in the new year on a rooftop restaurant watching fireworks. Today we've climbed a hill that has a temple on the top, as well as a mosque. Then we had an enormous amount of food and all basically passed out in food comas. Now we're at an internet cafe, still feeling very full!

It is nice! we are well! and less perfunctory posts are being written, so stay tuned!