6-15-06
Chennai (Madras) and Pondicherry

On Saturday, June 10th, we got up at 4:00 to get ready for our airport pick up and had a quick coffee and cereal breakfast. Then we were served a hot breakfast on the plane. Just to make sure we had enough, we arrived at the Chennai Sheraton in time for their complimentary buffet breakfast and gosh knows you wouldn’t want to pass up a freebie like that. Free as in $140 a night for a bed. Somehow when you are sleep deprived, eating seems to be the answer. We took a short nap and I sent Ron off for a massage. He has been a wee bit stressed thanks to WAMU and some stress from his work. I read in the room while he had a massage with two therapists working on each side, left and right, simultaneously and he finished with a steam bath and shower. Afterwards we headed out to do some exploring and shopping. I try to buy gifts when I travel for the eight young women I work with at Shilpa, for Veena our landlady, and for Geetha, our wonderful housekeeper. We found a store that specialized in Indian crafts so I got the girls hand painted paper Mache boxes. We also found the hammered copper cups we had seen in Kerala and have been looking for ever since. That night for dinner, we went to a nearby restaurant that served the meal on a banana leaf and we were the only non-Indians in the place.

The next morning Jon, Ron’s boss and his wife, Alice met us after breakfast and we visited until noon and decided to head out and do more exploring. We went to the Fort museum, visited a Hindu temple, the tomb of St Thomas aka Doubting Thomas, St Mary’s Church in Fort St George that was begun around 1640. St Mary’s is the earliest English building surviving in tact in India and the oldest Anglican Church in Asia, consecrated in 1680. There are reminders here of Elihu Yale, the early governor of Madras who went on to found Yale University. We saw the beaches and harbor. Chennai boasts the second largest harbor in India after Mumbai (Bombay). We stopped for lunch at an Indian restaurant and Ron said “You can order anything you want because it’s your birthday”. Alice looked up from her menu and said, “Mine too!” I have only met one other person who shared my birthday and she was born the same year. Alice is 53 to my 61. We came back to the hotel after lunch as Alice and Jon had jet lag from their 20-hour flight. I had seen an ad for an ‘affordable art sale’ so talked Mr. B into going to check it out. The works ranged from not so good to professional level art work. We found a lovely framed with glass watercolor of a street scene in India and got it for about $70. We were quite pleased. Another find for the Thailand home we are furnishing.

Next day we left around 9:00 although the agenda had said we were to leave 6:30 a.m. We drove three hours to Pondicherry. We were once again delighted to have good roads to travel on: they were recently paved, had shoulder most of the way and even had four lanes for a while. Pondicherry has a lovely colonial French section of town, where we stayed in a wonderful colonial inn. It was stucco with colored concrete floors. My favorite part was the bathrooms with pedestal sinks and color washed walls. The shower had little arched alcoves for your shampoo, etc. This is a much simpler accommodation so it cost around $40. a night.

Pondicherry came under French rule in the mid-18th century and was finally returned to India 1954. A canal originally divided the town. On one side was Ville Blanche (that would be French for white) and the other side was (you guessed it) Ville Noir (black) for the Indian population. Let me just say, there is a distinct difference between the two sides. The streets of the old French area are cobbled and the waterfront was designed to resemble Nice. I am not sure what it looked like before the tsunami but now there is a pretty ugly seawall of large stones. Sri Aurobindo Ashram was founded in 1926 and it is one of the most popular with Westerners and is the most affluent. There are many businesses in Pondicherry with their name: travel agency, jewelry shop, bookstore, clothing and craft stores, etc. The Aurobindo group, the Alliance Française and other bodies undertook an extensive restoration of the French quarter a number of years ago. Many houses and institutions in the streets between the waterfront and the canal are now very chic and gentrified, the gardens blooming with flowering trees and bougainvillea. The overall impression is one of gleaming whitewashed residences and a concern for maintaining high standards that you don’t find in most of India.

It was a wee bit oxymoronic to sit in our outdoor dining area at the hotel, with its thatched roof, feeling like you were in France, although we were in southern India and hearing waiters speak French and the radio playing country and western music from a US satellite radio station in Nashville!

That afternoon Alice and I went antiquing and meandering. We had a fabulous meal at a French-Indian restraint. It was hot so we took a nap. We ate at the hotel that night. On Tuesday we found a great clothes shop called FabIndia. It was started in 1960 using rural craftspeople to create beautiful handcrafted items. They sell furniture, bed linens, kitchen items, incredible hand loomed fabrics and clothing. They source their items from 7,500 craftspeople in India in an effort to encourage and sustain rural employment. If you are interested to learn more, Google fabindia. It’s a great success story. The day we were there Pondicherry had a power outage so we tried on clothes in the dark, stepping near the windows when we wanted to see how we looked. Since we wanted to pay for our clothes with a credit card, we had to come back after 2:00 when the power would be on. I am pretty sure this was a planned outage because when we went to the other side of the canal, half the merchants had their generators on the sidewalk going full blast, spewing more pollutants into the atmosphere. That was the same day there was a taxi, three-wheeler strike in town to protest the higher gas prices.

Alice took off with Ron and Jon for the afternoon to do site visits. I was so hot the thought of standing on more hot concrete was not appealing so I hung around the hotel reading, eating lunch and napping. Later in the day, I walked to the waterfront. I paid for my clothes and looked for a scarf to go with one of the outfits. I have gone native because I am unable to find ‘western’ clothes in this neck of the woods. Soon I’ll model them for the camera and post the photos on the web. As I was meandering through town, I saw an elderly man ironing outside using an old cast-iron iron and I don’t know how it was heated unless he had coals inside the base. I saw mothers who had brought their child’s lunch to school and they were having picnics on the sidewalk in front of the school. School lunches are not provided in this part of the world.

The group got home at 6:30 and Ron went to an art exhibit with me and bought a shirt at fabindia. This is a hand block print shirt for $5. The four items I bought cost $32. That night our AC wasn’t working so we slept in another room. About 3:00 a.m. we were awakened by acrid smoke filling the room. Apparently the air conditioner was going down in flames. We ran around looking for our clothes and other items we brought to the room with us (thank goodness we had not bothered to move everything to the new room). We got to the reception area where two staff were sleeping on cots. They found us yet another room; this one had no AC so we had a hot night, so to speak. We woke up tired and sweaty. Our original room had no power so we couldn’t shower there.

Ron had a morning meeting with Jon and Jami, another ICMA staff person. We left after lunch for Chennai. On the way we saw lots of horned cows many that had had their horns painted red, blue or green, rice paddies being plowed with two horned cows and the old wooden plow that we see in those great photos in National Geographic. We saw mud huts with coconut-thatched roofs that came very low on the structure. I couldn’t tell if the walls to the house were only 3-4 feet high with the roof being the major part of the structure or if the roof just came very low on the structure to provide shade. We saw fences made from coconut thatch. Six to eight women standing side by side were planting rice paddies in their brightly colored saris that they had hiked up so as to not get wet. Swastikas are common here. They are used in Hindu, Jain and Buddhist traditions and symbolize good luck and auspiciousness. We saw them frequently on the sides of buildings. There were many communities where all the houses were made of thatch or mud and thatch. We weren’t sure if these were temporary houses after the tsunami or not. We passed by an area where salt was being ‘mined’ from the sea using evaporation ponds. We got to Chennai early so went shopping for sandals to replace those that were taken at the temple when we were in Navsari. I found some at the second store we went to in this mega mall that catered to western tastes and pocketbooks. For $20 I got a pair of Nike sandals. We ate at the food court, as we weren’t sure what would be available at the airport. Off to the airport and home by midnight. It was a tired couple of cuties that got to bed around 1:00 this morning, but glad to be back in our own bed. Photos will be posted this weekend.