Being on this business trip has been quite a surrealistic experience. Besides the fact that India is different from Luxembourg in a million ways, we have been living in a bubble pretty much. I spent all day either in the office or in the hotel. Every day, a car picked us up from to hotel to the office and back again in the evening. In the evening we had dinner together and after that some more working. Even if we would have had time for it, going outside in the evenings was just not going to happen. The area where the hotel was is mainly surrounded by a lot of traffic, construction sights and other hotels and it was always dark already by the time we reached the hotel. Even my adventurous side had to admit going out in those conditions was not a good idea. That is why is was so happy when the weekend came around and we had a car with driver to explore the city.
First stop; St. Thomas Mount. From this hill you have an amazing view over the whole city. There is a church and several memorials. Like in any place in the city, cows and goats walk around freely and nobody bothers them. It is a really calm place within the crazy city of Chennai.
Next, we wanted to go to a temple, but it turned out to be closed until 16.00, so we decided on a beach and lunch break. On the beach we saw the only signs of the Holi festival I have seen that whole day. That was a bit of an anti-climax. It was very different than I imagined. Some girls walked around throwing a bit of the powder on other people and wishing them happy Holi. We were not colored by them and neither did we have any powder. Or did we?
O wait, we did! We found a whole bunch of bags of colored powder just lying on the beach. That was pretty cool. Unfortunately we did not use them then and when we were back in the hotel it was too late (imagine the powdered mess in all that fanciness) . Still a shame.
Considering it had snowed just before we left Luxembourg, it was really cool (or rather, hot) to be walking on the beach barefoot with over 30 degrees and a lot of sun. The beach was full of small stalls, some selling food and some offering rather strange gambling games (?). I really enjoyed that walk, although we were being roasted alive and the sand was burning our feet.
All good things come to an end when food moments are calling; lunch time! We asked the driver to choose a local restaurant for us so we got to eat somewhere outside the hotel and try some "real" Indian food.
Tadaa! They also kindly offered us a jar of fresh tap water. We were trying to be adventurous tourists, but not THAT adventurous. I ordered something at random, which turned out to be weird, but good. But then again, everything there was good. The total price of our six meals was less then the cost of one meal at the hotel, crazy!
Eating where the locals eat; check! Time to move on to the next visit. This beautiful temple could only be entered barefoot, so we had to hand in our shoes for safekeeping. The normal shoe "wardrobe" was out of service, according to a quite angry looking man, so we had to leave our shoes with a lady sitting on the street. This all seemed pretty dodgy and we were half expecting to have to return to the hotel without shoes.
The sun had warmed up the ground and it was hot, so very hot. With feet burning even when walking on the "cooler" while line, we strolled along all the beauty the temple had to offer. Someone told us that we had to buy a ticket in order to take pictures, but then he just left and never returned. So that guy never got his money. This paying for taking photos pretty much seemed at random anyway (as many other things). Sadly, we were not allowed to go inside any temples, but still there was plenty to see. Upon leaving the temple, we even got our shoes back - success!
The heat and humidity had made the day pretty exhausting, so it was time for us to return to our bubble of luxury at the hotel to go for a swim and have dinner. What a day!
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