Travelling Through Tamil Nadu

Yeah, it's been a while, I know.
Anyway, at least I have a lot to share with you now.
This past weekend my program planned a journey around Tamil Nadu, which is one of the southern states in India, which also neighbors Andhra Pradesh (the state that I'm in). I might as well start from the beginning.

It took a lot for me to decided whether or not to go on the trip because I felt really sick in the days leading up to Friday. On Tuesday night I came down with something and stayed in my room for all of Wednesday and most of Thursday. On Friday I was starting to feel a little bit better and decided to talk to the program director about whether or not I should go on the trip. He had me go to the health center on campus where the woman who checked me told me that it was fine if I went on the trip. After that the only thing holding me back was my own fear of traveling around this country because I had no idea what to expect, but I knew that I'd be safe with my program, so ultimately, about two hours before we left I decided to go.

We caught an overnight train from Hyderabad Station to Chennai. We rode in the business class sleeper cars, which were fine, but not ideal, and the traveling time from from Hyderabad to Chennai was about 13-14 hours. I think I did pretty well on the train, except I didn't sleep very well and there was this old guy across the aisle from my berth who coughed through the night and made me worry that I'd contract some other disease. Anyway, we at Chennai's main station 8:30 a.m. and then went to a hotel to shower and eat breakfast before hopping on a three hour bus ride to Kanchipuram, a famous temple town in Tamil Nadu.

I felt pretty nauseated after the train ride and on the bus, but once we got out at the first temple in Kanchipuram and started walking around, I started to feel better. The first temple we visited was built by the Pallava kings in about the 7th century I believe, and it was dedicated to Shiva, Parvati and their son Sikander. We had a guide with us for the weekend who had studied Indian architecture and design at Columbia, so she was able to tell us all about what we were seeing. It was so nice to have her with us so that we could fully understand and appreciate what we were looking at.

After touring that temple we hopped back on the bus and went to lunch at a vernacular house, which had a little museum in it, too. The lunch they fed us tasted delicious! The soup that they served before the meal was exactly what I needed. It was just a simple broth with herbs and it was sooooo good. I especially liked it because it didn't taste anything like the Indian food I've been consuming for the past two months, and at the moment, I'm sick of Indian food. (For those of you who know my quirks, you'll appreciate this)... they also had a really nice bathroom, so they got two thumbs up from me.

Following lunch, we went to the Sri Kanchipuram Matam for the Shankaracharya sect of Advaita Vedanta. For any of you who aren't familiar with who Shankaracharya is, he's an Indian philosopher writing in about the 5th century, and he wrote many commentaries on the Bhagavad Gita and other famous Hindu scriptures. He also sent four of his disciples in the four cardinal directions to set up four Matams (kind of like ashrams) in India, and this one is the one that was founded in southern India. I found it especially fascinating because I had watched a documentary on this very Matam in my Indian Philosophies class at Georgetown last semester, so it was a bit surreal at first. I didn't realize that was where we were going, so when we stepped through the front door and I looked at my surroundings, I thought, this all seems vaguely familiar, and it was! Not only that, we got to have darshan (an audience) of one of the current philosopher acharyas, and I ended up being one of the people from my group who talked to him. He asked me what I thought about India and what I liked about it. It was a very powerful experience for me to be so close to him and in his presence because he's obviously a great spiritual figure. Also, it made me reevaluate how I'd been feeling about India recently. When he asked me what I thought of about India, the first things that came to mind were all of my complaints about India—I don't like the academic system, it's polluted, I'm troubled by how the women are treated, etc. So then the fact that he had do directly ask me what I liked about India made me take a moment to think. At first nothing was coming to mind, (for the past week or so I've really not liked India at all) so I finally came up with the fact that I liked how much more time and space to be introspective here and how I liked how open and welcoming the people here are. Later that night I contemplated this more. Currently I am still experiencing a large bout of homesickness, but I am going to try a little bit more to find things that I really appreciate about India. It's not healthy to be so down on the country all the time because it only makes me feel miserable. Anyway, I just wanted to highlight how excited I am that I got that opportunity to meet the current philosopher acharya of Kanchipuram. I don't think that that's something that a lot of people get to do, even those who may be disciples of Shankaracharaya.

Next we went to another large temple, which was dedicated to lord Vishnu. It was quite beautiful, and it was dusk, so the temperature had become more bearable while we walked around the temple complex. Another plus, and almost more exciting to me, was the fact that there were a bunch of sari weavers' shops lining the street leading up to the temple. I bought a gorgeous purple sari with peacocks embroidered on it. (I'll try and post a photo, bear with me because the internet connection here is so slow when it comes to uploading photos.) Our day wasn't over yet because we still had a 40 minute ride to Mamallapuram where we'd be spending the night. The ride was nice, even though it was dark, I enjoyed watching the scenery out the window. It was so interesting to see rural India, parts of which had no electricity, so the shops and houses had candles burning in them. Then on the other hand, I was curious to see that some of the little shacks/huts had T.V.s going on inside of them. Crazy. When we finally got to our hotel for the night, we watched a 30 min. film about the temples we'd be seeing the next morning, and then I ate dinner and went to bed.

We started early on Sunday morning. I felt pretty nauseated again, but I worked through it. I enjoyed looking at the crappy headlines that they had in their paper. Seriously, how can their national papers have such horrible headlines? They're professionals. Anyway, that's not too important. After breakfast we went to check out the various rock cut temples built by the Pallava kings in the 7th century c.e. They're amazing! I don't want to go into too much detail, but take my word for it. One of the temples was right by the ocean, so we got to see the Bay of Bengal, although we couldn't even go up to touch the water because our tour guide wouldn't let us because we were on a tight schedule. (Some people still feel pretty annoyed about that). The whole time we went from temple to temple we were pestered by a group of men and boys trying to sell us a who array of things from shoes to carvings to necklace pendents. Some of them were entertaining, and I had fun passing off some of them to my other friends in the group, saying, "See that girl over there, I think she really wants one of your pendents." Ultimately though, they got annoying.

After our whirlwind temple tour in the morning they took us to this place called Dakshina Chitra where we got to see some local folk dances, buy various crafts and see period houses from Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. There was a palm reader out in front of one of the houses, so I ended up having my palm read for fun. According to her, my future's looking pretty bright. We spent way too much time there, so after a while I got really annoyed because I was so uncomfortable especially because it was so HOT outside and there was little shade to take shelter under. Finally at 3:30 p.m. we departed for our 2 hour bus ride back to Chennai where we caught the 6:10 train back to Hyderabad.

I got back to campus at 10:00 a.m. I feel pretty happy to be back. I'll admit, it was nice to be out of the heat and not constantly on the go, but I am really happy that I decided to go on the trip.