Carvings, Mamalapuram.

January 13-19 Bangolore , Mahabalipuram, Chennai
      After overnighting in a Bangalore hotel we caught an 8:00am train to Chennai. It was a very bearable 6 hour trip to Chennai helped along by interesting scenery and food. The landscape varied between rural, small towns and small cities; dry wasteland, rocky hills and agricultural land.  We arrived in Chennai about 2:30 and we could already tell we’re in the south; it’s much warmer.  Got a taxi to the long distance bus station (as opposed to the bus station for the city busses) about 7km away.  On the way the taxi driver tried to talk us into having him drive us to our destination; “Where you go” “ Mahabalipuram or Pondicherry?” and how much more convenient it would be and “okay I take you there?” I can understand people wanting to make a living and offering their services.  But some salespeople/ taxi drivers/ travel agents etc. can get very annoying with their sales pitch.

Monolithic temple in Mamalapuram.

Indian dance.

The church on St. Thomas's Mount.

Mom sharing.

Family picture.

North Indian Bamboo dancers.

Fishing boat, Mamalapuram.

The temple at dawn.

 After multiple no’s and refusing to divulge our destination, we finally made it to the bus station.  By 3:48 we had seats on a state bus to the coastal town of Mahabalipuram.  Seeing it was a Saturday afternoon of a 3 day holiday weekend, we felt fortunate to even get on a bus to say nothing of getting seats.  And getting big backpacks on as well can be challenging on the more local type busses.  By the end of the ride there were many people standing in the aisles.  Fortunately it wasn’t extremely hot and we arrived about 6:00, got a room with 4 beds in a budget priced hotel that overlooked a swimming pool.  (A lot of budget hotels don’t have pools- some even have shared bathrooms) This became our base for the next few days.  Mahabalipuram  is a resort town south of Chennai and also a world heritage site for its rock carvings, old stone Hindu temple overlooking the beach and other sites.  It’s a town of 13,000 or so and one section is mostly Indian locals and a pocket of hotels (a variety of budget and expensive) restaurants and souvenir stores/shops/stalls. We spent a good deal of time just hanging out.  One day we spent a few hours walking around 2 of the most important of the rock sites; the ancient Hindu Shore Temple and the Five Rathas. Other activities include eating, walking the beach at sunrise, walking the town looking for flipflops/snacks/fruit stalls, eating, swimming in the swimming pool and doing some homeschool and did I mention eating?  There was also the yearly dance festival going on while we were there so we went 2 evening performances of traditional Indian dancing. One afternoon we left most of our stuff in the hotel and caught a bus back to Chennai to visit with Jerry Phabhakaran, our exchange student from last year.
 Chennai is the fourth largest city in India and the capital of Tamil Nadu state.  Tamil Nadu is in the south eastern end of the country and is quite different from the north of India.  Their language of Tamil is comes from an old Dravidian based language, which is not related to Hindi. (India has something like 28 major languages.  English is the common language people use between all of the various ones, but not everyone knows it.  For example signs and announcements at Railway Stations are in the locally used language(s) and English-very handy for us) 
     Jerry  gave us the Chennai Tour.  He lives in a section of Chennai called St. Thomas Mount.  There is a hill nearby where the disciple Thomas was martyred.  He had come to this part of India after leaving Jerusalem and preached here.  The following day Jerry took us to the Snake Park (an exhibit of various reptiles and amphibians including snakes, frogs, crocodiles, etc;  the National Museum which had art, history, geology, fauna and other exhibits, and finally to the beach that extends about 50km along Chennai and onwards.  It is called Marina Beach and is one of the places to go to.  January 17th, the day we spent with Jerry happened to be a holiday-Farmers Day and there were crowds all through the city, but the beach was the most popular spot to be.  We estimated that there had to be 300,000 people near the city of Chennai section.  It was like a carnival.  There were food booths and kiosks set, hucksters of cotton candy, toys, carnival games, hand turned merry go rounds and other like rides, and so on and so on. It was unbelievable.  The only thing you didn’t see was people in the water or sun bathing. The police had actually roped off the last 20 feet of the beach down to the water for safety reasons.  They didn’t have nearly any lifeguards so they denied access rather than have people trampled or not able to aid those who were in the water and in trouble (as if they could even keep track of it with those numbers!) Jerry also pointed out his school and church though we didn’t stop at either one.

              

The beach in Chennai.

  The highlight of our visit was our evening with his family.  One of his aunties hosted us and about 20 other assorted aunties, uncles, cousins, grammy, and great aunts and his mom, Christina. The evening started with his mom and 2 aunties escorting me into a bedroom and outfitting me into a saree.  It was quite the experience to be wrapped into one and it was lovely-I felt quite pampered.  Steve was dressed into a dhoti.  They had some time of hymn singing and prayer.  They asked me to share something so I tried to sing one of our Sunday School songs and then shared a couple of passages from

Sam in a motor rikshaw, Chennai

Philippians and James and gave a bit of a testimony on what they meant to me in relationship to this trip.  This was followed by one of his aunties giving a testimony and praising God for healing her in a health issue the previous week. We happened to visit on Sam’s 10th birthday (Jan 16) and they sang Happy Birthday, had cake for him (first smearing some on his face) setting off a confetti bomb and gifting him with a shirt.   According to their tradition he had to first serve a slice of cake to his brothers (Ben and Jerry) and to his parents before eating his own. It was a truly joyous wonderful evening and so incredible to be surrounded by a wonderful group of loving family.  We stayed at his Aunties house.  One of his uncles is a photographer who busily took photos on both his camera and ours so we have some wonderful photos of all of them and various groupings. Thank you, thank you, thank you Jerry and the rest of your family.
     The following afternoon we headed back to the beach community and hung out for another couple of days. On the 19th we left middle of the afternoon and made our way back to Chennai and had supper with Jerry and his mom Christina at their house.  She made an incredible biryani and payasam for dessert.  They then arranged a taxi for us and with parting hugs we made our way to the Railway Station for our 11:30pm departure for Kolkota.  We had confirmed bookings for 4 berths but until we arrived we weren’t sure if they were all in the same coach.  In answer to prayer we all ended up in the same coach but our berths were not all together.  29 Hours later at 4:10 in the morning we found ourselves in Kolkata after traversing nearly 2/3 of the east coast of India by rail.

Martha

Impressions of southern India:
Fewer cows, slightly cleaner appearing in the streets, better roads, more evidence of Protestant and Catholic churches, hotter and drier.

The original rikshaw.

A game of cricket in the park.

 January 21-25 Kolkata India
     We pulled into platform 23 of Kolkata’s main Railway Station of Howrah at 4:15am. Railroads are a huge part of India’s transportation system and this is one of the major stations and therefor very busy.  There were already lots of people up and about at the station; passengers coming and going, cleaning people, porters, and kiosk people running their snack shops.  However busy it was there, we didn’t feel we would be very successful looking for a hotel at that hour so we just hung  out for a couple of hours til daylight and caught a taxi to cross the Hooghly River into Kolkata proper.
   Several of the hotels we checked were full and we finally ended up at the Chowringee YMCA, a rather cavernous building of lackluster care both in and out.  It was clean, but didn’t seem to have had much TLC in the last few years.  We had a large family room with 3 beds and its own bathroom.  We pushed 2 of the beds together and Steve, Sam and I fit on that and Ben had his own.  We are back in the north so we needed blankets at night and did not need to run the fans.

The Victoria monument, Kolkata.

Street food, Kolkata.

 Kolkata is the third largest of India’s cities with a population of over 14 million in   metropolitan area.  It is the capital of West Bengal and  the main languages are Bengal and English.  I have given up at this point learning any more in expressions in the language where we are and am relying on English.
      We spent most of the first day relaxing, checking out the neighborhood and finding a place to eat.  Steve had spent some time in this city, in this neighborhood about 30 years ago and so he was quite happy to roam around and strike up conversations with the street people and kids, the rickshaw drivers and the people running little food stalls.  During our 4 days here we spent a few hours on the Maidan one afternoon.  It is a huge park where people go to do park things!  We were there on a Sunday afternoon and so there were a lot of people there flying kites, friends sitting together talking, and there were lots of cricket games.  In the immediate vicinity alone we counted 15 and those ranged from the rag tag pickup games with ids of varying abilities to the older men in their white pants and shirts who take it pretty seriously.  Of course going and hanging out in the park is like being in a fishbowl as we were pretty much the only foreigners there and the object of some curiosity.  The third day we took a rickshaw (the human powered kind) to Mother Theresa’ Missionaries of Charity Mother House.  This was her headquarters for many years; where she lived and organized her work.  It is still a working convent but also has her tomb, a museum of her life and work, and her room has been preserved with her bed and writing table.  It was all very interesting and thought provoking as she dedicated her life to working with the poorest of the poor (of which we’ve seen innumerable examples) and makes me think about how could I do things differently here.  We are approached several times a day by people with their hands out; women carrying babies, semi toothless old ladies, men on the sidewalk bouncing coins in a metal cup, and 4, 5 and 6 year olds toting baby siblings or hauling toddlers along; and it’s impossible to give to all of them.  My conscience pricks me with the knowledge that I have enough money to be here feeding myself at a fraction of what it would cost in the US and these folks (many of whom) have legitimate needs.  I feel hardened by it all.  Sorry about that digression.  Steve was hoping to spend a day volunteering with them but he was hit with a flu type thing the following day.  The boys and I let him get some rest and walked to the Victoria Memorial and wandered through the gardens and galleries of art exhibits and historical artifacts.  I found the gallery on the history of Kolkata very interesting but involved copious amounts of written placard that would have taken 3 or 4 hours to digest and while I might of devoted the time to it, I was facing a mutiny from my companions.  I contented myself with a brief skim of as much as I could.
     Impressions of Kolkata: it’s a huge city and the roads seemed quite good.  Traffic was pretty much standard, a weaving, furiously honking race through the streets.  Many of the buildings seem to to suffer from lack of care; muchly faded paint, crumbling cement, shutters hanging askew.  But the people seemed friendly and we got to recognize street people on Sudder Street as we wandered back and forth to the restaurant.  One lady let me hold her 3 week old baby that had been born under a tarp on the sidewalk.  Kids would come up and hold our hands and yell “hello” in English.  Steve went out a couple of mornings to chronicle their lives with his camera.  The waiters in the restaurant got to guess our meal choices we were there so much.  Travelling with children, especially one the age of Sam opens people up to us.  People often just come up to touch him; pat him on the shoulder or arm, and I can’t count the number of times people would come up and want to have their photo taken with him on their cell phones.  He said he should start asking them to pay for the privilege!
     So this ended our time in India.  The next morning (Sam was now not feeling well and Steve had not really recovered) we caught a taxi to the Kolkata International airport and at 12:30pm we left for the next leg of our trip.  We arrived in Bangkok Thailand 2 1/2 hours and a whole different culture later.  We have spent our 3 days here getting visas and airline tickets and US dollars for our trip to Myanmar.  We leave tomorrow (1/29) and are planning on travelling lighter by leaving some of our things in storage at the hotel. Myanmar has a restrictive government and sometimes there is internet access and sometimes there isn’t.  It may be a couple of weeks before we can update you on that part of our adventures!  

Martha