INDIA!

3.14.08
India: Chennai
My first day in India was absolutely amazing. Everyone had kept warning us about all of the staring that we would get, all of the sensory overloading, and everything in between. I was really terrified, I’m not going to lie. I spent the day with my roommate, and it was amazing, though! I felt safer walking around Chennai than I had in both Brazil and Africa.
We took a rickshaw to a local market, T. Nagar. Rickshaws are like taxis, except a bit scarier because they have open sides and a black tarp for a roof. Driving in India is definitely nuts. Between the crazy buses that stop for no man, woman or child (literally, there are apparently hundreds of deaths from bus drivers all the time here) and the people on motorcycles and the taxis and the regular cars—it was just plain crazy. Quite an adventure. The local market was awesome. It was filled with locals, so we were able to “stalk” out some and see what they were paying for items before trying our own bargaining skills out with sellers, which was really easy. We were able to cut prices by more than half right off the bat. After some good purchases, we decided to head over to Spencer’s Plaza, which we were told was more of a touristy place. I wanted to go because I figured they would have magnets and postcards, and we were pleasantly surprised when we went and found it to be pretty untouristy. It was like the local market: full of locals and maybe one or two small groups of foreigners. One of the shop owners we met was awesome. I had been looking at the beaded tapestries here and knew I wanted to go home with one. I figured I would spend the first day just looking around at all of the different ones, but after going into this shop I couldn’t resist. He shut down the store for us, and individually took out each tapestry to show it to me. I would say if it was in the ‘maybe’ or the ‘definite’ pile and he would lay them all out on the floor, and the ‘no’ pile he would throw out of the way. Well, of course, there were just too many beautiful ones. I couldn’t walk away with just one. I ended up with four, and he gave me such a great discount on all of it (especially in comparison to what the other shop owners had tried to badger me into). What originally he was going to sell me for 9000 rupees, he sold to me for about 7000 (which is only about $175)! He was a really nice guy, and we could tell he wasn’t just bullshitting us. You could tell how hard he worked for his money: he and his brother would take turns traveling to Kashmir to purchase all of their products. He did talk me into buying something else, but it was so cool that I couldn’t resist. I’m going to give it to Kevin, and I’m sure he’ll like it too. It’s a Tibetan Monk Singing Bowl. It’s a hollow brass bowl with designs on the side. When you hold it in the palm of your hand and swirl a padded-stick-thingy around it, it makes these really cool (and surprisingly very calming) sound. After a successful day of shopping, Christine and I headed back to the ship on a very good high. I went to bed early because my Taj Mahal trip left at 3:30 am! I know, tell me about it.