I’m sorry for the lack of updates! I left my computer on the ship in India because I didn’t want to risk carrying it around with me.  I hope this giant update makes up for the wait.

Day One- Chennai

The port in Chennai was pretty ridiculous. We had to wander through about 1/4 mile of filthy construction zone dusk and garbage to get to the customs booth where they checked our forms and we could get into cabs. At first it seemed like there wasn’t even a city, but after a few minutes in a cab the landscape changed dramatically. The local people knew we were coming. The shop owners had “Welcome Semester at Sea” signs hanging in their windows and someone was even selling specially made t-shirts with the Taj Mahal (3 hours away by plane) on the front and a ship with “Semester at Sea 2010” on the back. I didn’t buy one because I hadn’t seen the Taj yet, but a few people thought they were funny and spent the 100 rupees (about $2).

After we cleared customs, Rachel, Tucker and I got a cab and headed into a more densely populated part of town. The first place we visited was Spencer Plaza, which we didn’t know much about, but had heard was a pretty cool place. It ended up being a shopping mall… we wandered around for a while and grabbed a delicious spicy lunch, then left. Instead of wandering, we chose to snag an auto-rickshaw. A sweet older man who had lived in the US and wanted to help out argued with the driver for a minute to make sure he wasn’t ripping us off, then we got in and we were off.

Similarly to China and Vietnam, traffic laws in India don’t seem to exist. If you’re lucky, people drive on the left hand side of the road, but even then, lanes don’t mean much. If there are too many cars, buses, horse drawn carts, mopeds and rickshaws holding up traffic on the correct side of the road, the drivers have to qualms about flipping over onto the right hand side of the street to pass a few dozen other vehicles at a time. It’s common practice. At first I was a little nervous about all the honking (after Vietnam I can’t say I’m afraid of almost getting hit anymore) but I quickly realized that honking in the US and honking in India are two completely different concepts. Yes, the angry honk still exists in India, but 95% the time honking is simply a, “hey, I’m here and passing you two inches to your right!” In fact, most trucks and rickshaws have “please honk” painted on the back. The honking helps with the lack of lane obedience thing, It’s easy to keep track of one person in the lane next to you, but in India, that one person can become five people within seconds. It’s like a mosh pit of cars.

In Chennai (and I’m assuming the majority of the country) rickshaw drivers rule the city. They get some sort of commission for taking people to specific shops and restaurants (some people heard it was petrol and some people heard it was a new work shirt) so once you’ve argued the price down and you’re in the rickshaw, your opinion really doesn’t mean much. They’ll take you where you want to go in terms of landmarks (eventually), but if you have a specific shop or restaurant in mind, you’re out of luck. They’ll insist that they know the best place and refuse to stop until you reach their destination. Also, once you have a rickshaw driver, you have him all day. He waits for you at every stop, bargaining with you and pushing for more money, while also being great company and inviting you over to his house.

We didn’t take our driver up on the offer of meeting his family because we were on a bit of a schedule and didn’t know if it was normal or not. Looking back, I wish we had because I’ve talked to a lot of people who got to see their drivers’ homes and meet their families and they had great experiences.

Our driver was crazy to say the least. I never got his name, but he was probably in his early thirties and he was very smiley. He asked us if we wanted music in the rickshaw and when we said yes, he was very happy to oblige. He was obviously a fan of the Indian music on the radio because he danced in the front seat and yelled “yeehaw!” as he wove through traffic.

After the seemingly unavoidable shops he insisted we visit, he took us to see a snake charmer on the street. We got lucky enough to catch the tail end of another group’s show, so we saw the cobras without having to pay him. I would have definitely coughed up a little bit of money to see it again, but he was asking 2000 rupees each to see the snake charming, then to see the snake fight the mongoose he kept in a cloth bag. The bag was flipping around on the ground, which definitely made me curious, but we passed and asked our driver to take us to a temple our inter-port student, Vikrum (sp?), had mentioned.

The Kachabeswarar Temple (at least I think that’s what it was called), which was beautiful and elaborate. It was located at the end of a crowded street market, which made the atmosphere interesting even though it was closed when we got there. We found out that it would be open again in another two hours, but we wanted to keep exploring, so we chose not to wait. I did, however, take a bunch of pictures of the outside of the temple. Most temples I’d seen up to that point were stone and though they were cool to look at and explore, most were ruins. This temple was a frequently used Hindu temple and there were hundreds, perhaps a thousand, carvings of various gods and symbols on the outside. I wish we could have taken a tour of the inside, but it was definitely a stop I’m glad we made.

After the temple, our guide took us to another shop or two and then over to Saint Thomas Cathedral, which is considered the home base of Christianity in Chennai. It’s called Saint Thomas because two thousand years ago, Jesus’ disciple Thomas came to India and brought all that jazz with him. He was originally buried on site, though eventually the Vatican swooped in and reburied him in Rome. They had a small museum and pictures of Pope John Paul II visiting the site. There were relics of two other saints, but I think they took all of Thomas to Rome, so now it’s just a memorial. We weren’t allowed to wear shoes down there and we couldn’t take pictures. I tossed up a prayer for good measure because if I’m ever going to kneel down and pray, it might as well be at the used-to-be-tomb of doubting Thomas. That last bit sounds bad, but I didn’t mean it sarcastically; it was a cool experience.

The beach (I don’t remember the name) was right next to the church, so we took a quick walk down. It’s the second largest beach in all of Asia, which was a fun fact, though people don’t swim much because the water is so polluted and they don’t hang out in swimsuits because it’s not culturally acceptable. I picked up a few seashells and dipped a toe in the water just to say that I did; it was soooo much warmer than Lake Michigan.

As we were walking up the beach back towards our waiting rickshaw school got out and suddenly there were kids everywhere. They were all ridiculously cute, so of course we stopped to take a bunch of pictures. There we ran into two women waking a group of schoolgirls home; home turned out to be the extremely poor fishing village farther down the beach. The girls were all dressed in matching uniforms with matching pink bows tied in their matching braids. They were excited to see us and were practically crawling over each other to get into the pictures. They got an even bigger kick out of seeing themselves on the screen when I showed them how to review the pictures. What really got to me, however, wasn’t the group of kids, but the two women. They couldn’t have been older than thirty and they tapped me on the arm and motioned for me to take a picture of them, too. They weren’t shoving to get in the picture, but they were also excited to see themselves on the screen. It was obvious that they were good friends.

They were walking the kids home from school, so I asked if I could ask them a question, which they eagerly nodded yes to despite their unusual lack of fluent English. I explained that I was doing a project on education, but as soon as the word education came out of my mouth, they shook their heads. “Fishermen,” one woman offered as an explanation. They had been pulled out of school as very young children, probably as young if not younger than their daughters, to be educated in a different way. I understand that these women technically don’t need a long-term classroom education to be able to sustain a family as a fisherman’s wife, but wow. It was an eye opening experience. It hurt my heart that these women accepted that they were pulled out of school so young simply because they were fishermen. They weren’t resentful or discontent, they simple accepted that as fishermen’s wives, they weren’t going to be educated. It allowed me to understand their lack of fluency in English, which is one of the two national languages of India.

Side note: the two languages are Hindi and English. In the north, Hindi is the native language, so many people don’t speak super fluent English because they don’t need to. The south, however, is home to 15 recognized languages and an incredible number of local dialects, which means that anyone who wants to take a standardized test or get a good job needs to speak English; they don’t know Hindi. These women knew a little English, but their occupations don’t require them to use a language outside of their local dialect.

After the beach experience, we found our driver sprawled out and dozing in the back seat of the rickshaw and he drove us back to the ship. On the way back he asked us not for more money, but for any pens or paper we had on us that he could take home so, “his babies could go to school and learn.” He had previously told us about his son, daughter and the baby (Joseph, Mary and I didn’t catch the baby’s name). It almost made me cry. Luckily I had two pens on me and we also gave him a pair of brand new, clean socks that Rachel happened to have in her bag. If he had been able to drop us off closer to the ship I would have run up and brought back more pens and notebooks, but he dropped us off at the customs desk and we had to walk 1/4 mile through the nasty shipyard back to the Explorer.

I didn’t go back out that night because I had to meet in the union at 3:30am to leave for the Taj Mahal/Jaipur trip. I wish I had though because Rachel went back out later and got to ride horses on the beach for 40 rupees ($1=45 rupees). It would have been worth the even more overwhelming exhaustion. Next time that will be the first thing on my agenda.

This is the end of Chennai, day one; I’ll write about the Taj trip tomorrow. Next time I’m in India, I’m bringing TONS of pens and chocolate (all the kids asked for it).


Love,

Molly