November 22nd, 2009

Today was a pretty relaxing day. We had a really restful night (no power outages!) and got up around 7:30 as usual. We took our time getting ready and had our breakfast around 9:15 – breakfast was luchi (kind of like a deep fried pita – probably like eating 3 donuts, but very tasty!) and a spicy dipping sauce, and the ever present Coffee. Coffee is an interesting phenomenon here in India. Its mostly hot milk, mixed with some instant coffee and TONNES of sugar. I have a sinking feeling that when I get back to Canada I’m going to be craving triple triples from Tim Hortons.

We got on the train at around 10am, and headed back to Egmore station (same station as yesterday), where we planned to catch an auto rickshaw to Spencer Plaza. We were pleasantly surprised when the first auto driver we approached did not try to rip us off! We think that our confidence in approaching drivers, combined with dressing in more “traditional” clothing inspires them to offer us more fair prices. In any case, we arrived at Spencer Plaza about 10 minutes later.

Spencer Plaza is an enormous mall. It is slightly reminiscent of Canadian malls (complete with air conditioning!) but really confusing. It consists of two main shopping stories (and some business stories) and three “Atriums”. Surrounding each Atrium are the larger (fancier) fixed price stores , and then radiating out from each Atrium are spidery corridors filled with smaller stall like shops, where you can bargain for things like clothing, leather products and shawls. Going into the hallways was exciting but kind of stressful at the same time. The vendors stand outside of their stores and try to entice you inside promising “good price” on their items. Eventually we figured out how to ignore their calls and only go into the stalls where they weren’t as pushy. We both ended up with some really nice things!

While in Spencer Plaza we also found a real Airtel store to top up our phone with. We had run out of local minutes a lot quicker than anticipated, and we wanted to find a real Airtel representative to answer our questions (previously we had been topping up in this sketchy cell phone store in Thiravanmyuir). In talking to the guy in the store, we discovered that we got majorly ripped off in Thiravanmyuir. We’re pretty sure the international mintues we bought were credited to our phone, but the local minutes that we paid for were not. So we got cheated out of about 155 INR. Not that much money in the grand scheme of things, but enough to make us irritated. The guy in the Airtel store was really helpful though, and we loaded up our phone properly (he even showed us how to check our balance).

After we finished in Spencer Plaza we had intended to go across the street to the India Tourism office to get some maps and ideas of things to do in Chennai. Unfortunately it was closed on account of it being Sunday, so we’ll have to save it for later this week. We had spent a little more time in Spencer Plaza than anticipated (so many stores!) and didn’t really have any other plans for the day (since we couldn’t go to the tourism office for ideas) so we decided hop back on the train and make a stop off at the beach on the way home.

The beach in Chennai is one of the longest in the world! Its really an amazing sight. It is incredibly wide (I’ve never seen such a wide beach before) and something that you can’t really capture in a photograph. Closer to the road there are carnival like games, and once you get nearer to the water there are vendors selling cotton candy and balloons. It was busy, but not chokingly so, and it was fun to watch all of the people playing in massive waves. We sat there and admired the surf for a while, and then decided to head home before it got dark.

To get back to the train station we had to walk through a sort of alleyway where there were a lot of visibly poor (for lack of a better word) people begging and trying to sell second hand shoes etc. It was really sad, and a little bit scary. Unfortunately that is the reality of this country – there are a lot of people who are wealthy, relatively speaking, and able to send their kids to top notch schools etc. And then a lot of people who are so poor that they sleep on the street, and who will never be able to send their kids to school. Its very sad.

As an aside, in that alleyway, we also saw a free roaming monkey (don’t worry Mom, I didn’t touch it). I don’t know if it was somebody’s pet, or if it was something wild. It was neat though! I love monkeys!

We managed to make it back to our place before dark again tonight, and now we are just relaxing for the evening, and preparing ourselves for the week ahead. All in all its been a very nice and relaxing weekend!

Also, just a shout out to my Dad, who I know reads this every day - Happy Birthday Dad! Love you and Miss you!