I am not an expert on India nor am I a well traveled person.  All I can tell you is what I saw and what I thought about it.  What I am is a middle class, white, American woman with the beginnings of jowls and turtle skin neck. 

Of all the places I dreamed of going in my lifetime, India was at the bottom of my list.  I may have toyed with the idea in my youth during the age of hippies when gurus and madras caftans were the rage.  The madras fabric I coveted, I learned was named for some exotic place in India were it was manufactured.  Ironically, 45 years later, I was to visit that same area.  Of course, the name had been changed in 1996 from Madras to Chennai. 

My son and his family live on the southern fringe of the city only a block or so from the Bay of Bengal in a new, three-story cement house with a pool, 24 hour security guards, a car and driver, gardener, maid and “pool guy”.  He was sent there by his company when they outsourced their customer service from Wisconsin, USA. 

THE TRIP

Well, enough background.  I want to start my tale in Salt Lake City.  At 9:30 am on January 1, 2010, my husband and I were at the airport dutifully two hours before the flight was to leave but it didn’t.  This was to be the only airline hiccup in our entire trip.  But for nervous, first- time International travelers, it was as they say in India, “Not an auspicious beginning”.  We were not too concerned when our plane did not show up for some vague ‘maintenance’ reason because we had a two and a half hour layover in San Francisco and that time would be necessarily reduced.  When our plane did arrive, the flight was unmemorable.  In San Francisco, we were funneled into the International terminal in San Francisco where we were stared at in mild curiosity by all the “Foreigners”.  We were one of only a few white people to board that flight and the most out of place.  We were obviously not one of the white males going over for business.  

We checked in, got our boarding passes for the next two flights and found a place to sit on the same row of chairs as a guy wearing a John Deer Cap.  We stared out the window at the fog shrouded hills in silence for some time when the energy palpably changed in the terminal.  Fourteen Asian/Middle Eastern women all dressed alike, wearing red, pillbox hats with a veil attached to the left edge that swept under their chins and disappeared to be attached…I don’t know where, came prancing down the main isle and through the gate.  This reminded me of the scene in that Harry Potter movie, Goblet of Fire, when the students from the Beauxbaton School entered Hogwarts dining hall.  Wow! Let the 8000 mile adventure begin. 

I must insert my only piece of advice here.  If you ever have the opportunity to fly nonstop for 16 hours on an airplane, save up a little longer for at least a business class ticket.  Oh, if I knew then what I know now!  I would not have so naively followed the economy class passengers into the airplane.  We passed through a section of little cubicles with shelves and their own TV and another section with less amenities but still with plenty of leg room and little partitions between seats, which by the way, fully reclined…  But we moved on through that section into seemingly endless rows of 11 seats cut up by two aisles so that there were five seats in the middle flanked by an aisle and three seats on either side with only an armrest between the seats’ occupants and cramped together so closely that one could not recline their seat or pass into the aisle without requiring the intervening passengers to stand up and move into the aisle out of their way.  I was appalled.  At least, we each had our own TV that streamed movies on demand.  I can sit for hours watching TV and snoozing sitting up so I was confident that I could do this.  My legs did not agree.  It took several days after reaching India for my legs to regain their original shape.

 I sat on the aisle and DeVar sat across the aisle from me in the five-seat section with a small family of boys.  I sat with a young Indian couple on their way home.  Once on board, DeVar and I discussed our route.  We just assumed we would travel across the Pacific Ocean.  After all, India is on the other side of the world!  So we were surprised when the pilot announced that we would be flying over Canada, Iceland and Greenland, over the Atlantic over Finland, across Eastern Europe and finally over Iran to Dubai.

With the service we got, I can see why the plane required 14 stewardesses.  Before the plane even took off we were presented with a case containing stockings, toothpaste/toothbrush, and a blindfold (which I hope, since this was a Middle Eastern airline, the blindfold was for sleeping only).  Each seat had already been supplied with a pillow, blanket, and headphones.  Once in the air, we were presented with a hot, wet towel, a drink and a menu proclaiming the choices for dinner. 

For the first few hours, we were offered drinks, snacks and finally the dinner.  Dinner was a wonderful collection of little surprises.  Everyone got the same appetizer, fruit/veggie salad, bread product, little chocolate, water, dessert but we had a choice of three entrees (all Arabic or Indian cuisine) and coffee or tea was offered after the meal.  Sometime in the middle of the night, they offered sandwiches and they came around regularly offering drinks…no alcohol.  This was an Islamic airline, after all.  Sometime after dinner, the lights were all dimmed and people settled down to sleep or watch movies.  My favorite part of this whole experience was the lights that simulated the night sky on the ceiling of the airplane. 

I suffered a little anxiety attack about one or two in the morning (my time).  But after an appeal to the Lord, I got hold of myself and settled down.  I was most worried about removing my contacts.  Well, the little bathrooms were adequate for that.  I was more worried about being blind in an unfamiliar setting.  I was genuinely afraid I would not be able to find my way back to my seat and I would have to call out for DeVar in the dead silence of the cabin, disturbing 300 people!  But it worked out OK. 

Around 6 or 7 in the morning (my time), the lights came back up signaling, to my relief, the end of the night and the end of the trip.  Another hot, wet towel was brought around and breakfast soon followed.  We arrived in Dubai at 7:30 in the evening (their time).  At this point, it had been 24 hours since we had left our house in Utah.  We were now about 10 time zones into the future.   

The terminal in Dubai reminded me of the shopping areas of one of the nicer casinos in Las Vegas.  No, we did not see the world’s tallest building.  It was dark and I have no idea where the airport is in relationship to downtown.  The stewardess as we disembarked the plane wished me a Happy New Year and presented me with a travel pouch filled with lotion, perfume, mirror, hairbrush, toothbrush; all the little things you would need for an overnighter.  As far as I could see, I was the only one that got this token.  I guess they were feeling sorry for the plump, white woman stuffed back in the coach class!!!  I later found out that those bags were the little amenities the first class passengers received.  

I also learned later that this is the 6th busiest International airport in the world and we were in a terminal that is exclusively used for the Emirates airline. 

As we entered the terminal, evening prayers were being sung over the intercom…it was quite soothing.  We saw two Arabs dressed in their long dresses (kandoura) with their carpets spread getting ready to kneel but we didn’t wait to watch.  I wanted to sneak a picture but Geesh…We’re not in Kansas anymore. 

Dubai, located on the Persian Gulf, in one of the seven emirates that make up the UAE (United Arab Emirates).  They boast the largest man-made and 7th busiest seaport in the world, Jebel Ali.  Besides the tallest, free standing building in the world, the largest shopping mall is also located here.  Only about 6% of their wealth comes from oil which is running out; so being the traditional merchants that they are, they are developing tourism; and doing a pretty good job of it.  Arabs have a historical tradition of hospitality.

When we checked in for the third leg of the trip, they informed us that our seat numbers had been changed.  We were put in the very back of the plane in an area where only rows of two seats would fit.  I wonder to this day if they did that in sympathy for us.  To sit just the two of us side by side made the trip so much more pleasant.  I wonder who got bumped to our original seats! 

Since this flight was also with Emirates, the wonderful service continued.  This flight was only 3 hours and 45 minutes so my excitement to see Gavin started to rise.  We finally arrived in India at 2:15 in the morning their time.  The heat and humidity hit us like a slap in the face, the second we stepped off the plane.  Wow! Chennai International terminal compared to the one in Dubai was like going from the Bellagio to a parking garage in Tijuana.   Indians love to stamp stuff so after a number of check points…one to check us with heat sensing equipment to see if we had fevers (after all, we were coming from a country where the swine flu was present) and another to stamp our visas, we passed through an unmanned metal detector that seemed to be used more as a counter than anything else as it beeped each time someone went through it; we were in the baggage pickup. 

ARRIVING

Gavin said his driver would be waiting outside with a placard along with 200 other people waiting for their passengers.  We saw Gavin first, waving to us in the crowd.  This must be what death is like….One exists in a comfortable, familiar place and then suddenly after a long dark emptiness, one enters into another…. unfamiliar existence.  We can only hope to see a well-loved face there to greet us.

Walking across the parking lot, the first thing I did was step into something I can only describe as a cow pie.  It splashed all over my boot and Gavin said we would have to watch everywhere we walked because of garbage in the streets and uneven surfaces.  I promptly tripped on a piece of cement and Gavin had to rescue me from an oncoming auto rickshaw.  Man, that was the busiest place I have ever been at 3 o’clock in the morning. 

Chennai was originally established in the 17th Century by the British, but since then it has grown to the fourth most populous metropolitan area in India with an estimated population over 8 million people.  Seems that most of them were on the road either going to or from work.  The streets were filled with cars, buses, little three-wheeled cabs called auto rickshaws that held maybe three people in the backseat.  Any space left over between vehicles was filled with a motorcycle. 

Gavin says there is a growing middle class who makes enough money for an apartment and a motorcycle.  He claims on one of his business trips, he saw a woman driving a motorcycle with a child on each knee with another woman sitting backwards on the motorcycle holding a child on each of her knees.  That would make six people on one motorcycle.  That would not be the strangest thing we saw over the next three weeks.  It was very common to see a man with his wife sitting sidesaddle in her sari behind him, holding at least one child as they maneuvered the congested, stop and go traffic. It never ceased to amaze me how she stayed so firmly seated.  

Since India was a British Colony, cars drive on the opposite side of the street.  DeVar liked to ride up front and had to stop himself several times from taking the driver’s seat since the steering wheel is on the right side of the car.  We never got use to those sweeping right -hand turns in front of oncoming traffic.  It was so backwards to our experience. 

It was common, well…expected behavior to cut other drivers off as one jockeyed for forward motion.  All that was required or expected was a warning honk and of course the courtesy not to bump or crash into anyone.   It became apparent to us that road rage is not a characteristic of the Indian disposition.  Pedestrians have a certain status though. Gavin says he heard of a bus that accidently hit someone and the onlookers pulled the driver out of the bus and beat him.  The only accident…human accident…. we saw was on our way back to the airport.  Someone had his car high centered on the cement barrier that runs down the middle of the road.   Of course, on his way home from work one night, Gavin was forced to slow down to avoid a bull propagating in the middle of the road.

I thought cattle wandering on the streets of India was an old fashioned stereotype…but not so.  There were less in the busier parts of town but they were an integral part of the town where Gavin lived.  On one of our trips to town, we passed a forlorn looking beast with his forelegs on the cement barrier in the middle of the street with cars whizzing close enough behind him that he couldn’t back up.  He had a look in his eye like, “What do I do now!”  Another time on our way home from picking up the kids at school, the traffic had to negotiate around a steer pulling a cart going against the traffic.

THE HOUSE

It was 3 o’clock in the morning when we got to their house so we did not see the kids till the next morning.  We slept well that night.  The only effects I could see from jet lag was not being able to stay awake in the afternoon but I assigned that more to the fact that we were awake 34 hours straight than to the fact that it was now 12 hours in the future.  It took a couple days to catch up on our sleep.

The second morning there, we decided to walk out to the beach before breakfast.  A divided two-lane street had to be crossed and I had gotten to the middle of the street, looked right to see if anything was coming and would have walked out in front of an oncoming car if DeVar had not reminded me right then that the oncoming traffic would be coming from the left.  Geesh….How bad can it get when ya can’t even get yourself across the street! 

Another lane like the one Gavin lives on led to the beach.  At the opening, of that lane was a shrine and a little idol dressed in a piece of brightly colored silk with a swastika drawn in chalk on the ground before it.  This lane was lined with walls punctuated with gates that opened into large estates or farmyards with goats, chickens, and a cement house covered with woven mats and a thatch roof.  Guards peered out or stepped out to greet us as we passed the big houses.  We passed a couple from Australia coming back from the water.  He claimed they had been swimming.  He was braver than we, from what we saw when we got there.  Other than the bloated dead dog, litter and people were sprinkled along the shore in either direction.  A wide swath of spotty vegetation divided the beach from the continuous walls that divided humanity from the ocean.  Gavin says this coast was inundated by the tsunami in 2004.  All the pictures we took were from our second trip because we had left the house without our cameras.  We got home just in time for breakfast.

Kate took us to an upscale restaurant the first day we were there.  I ordered the lunch special which was a large stainless steel platter with rice piled up in the center with little stainless steel cups surrounding that, each filled with a unique concoction and a large tortilla-like bread called naan.  The locals would pull the naan apart with their right hand and scoop up rice and any one of the side dishes and eat it.  I used my spoon.  Gavin says it is not proper to touch your food with your left hand.  (Must have something to do with the lack of toilet paper and sinks in the restrooms)  Have you ever tried to eat without using your left hand?  I was finding it almost impossible. 

The side dishes were a variety of sweet, savory, and yogurt items that I could not begin to name or even describe.  I ate my favorite ones first and the sweet ones last.  I realized too late that the yogurt sauce should have been eaten in conjunction with the hot/savory stuff to temper it!!!  Man it was good.  I was keeping an eye on the man at the table next to me who was eating the same thing.  He was eating in the traditional way and his hand was covered with his lunch.  When the dishes were cleared away, the waiter brought us a big stainless steel bowl of warm water with lime slices floating in the bottom.  This was the only time I have ever seen a finger bowl put to good use. 

Our first trip out was to Spencer’s Plaza.  It was a multi level, indoor shopping mall built around a central court.  The privately owned shops reminded me of Tijuana.  Each shop had its specialty and bartering was expected.  It is so foreign to our tradition to be assaulted at each storefront to come in and see their goods.  We did buy some sari material and a couple of handbags for souvenirs.  It was early and we were the first customers.  The shop owners were burning incense and arranging fresh flowers around their idols for their morning pujahs or prayers.  It is a tradition with them that for good luck, the first transaction of the day must be cash.

The next outing was to Mahaballi Puram.  This was an area/village that boasted outcropping of rocks that had been carved into temples and elephant, lion, and cow during the 6th century.  The village had workshops were they made and sold objects carved out of stone. And of course other assorted tourist stalls.  We had to pay to get into the village and to park and to get into the monuments.  There was a blind woman with no fingers begging on the sidewalk to the main gate. 

As soon as we got into the first collection of monuments, Gavin’s family was mobbed by a group of young boys with an older man as a chaperone.  They wanted their picture taken with Gavin’s little girls.  Being from Wisconsin and having two very fair parents, Ella and Lauren are very fair, blond.  The locals think they look like dolls and no matter where we went, they attracted too much attention.  We had been warned that this would happen but we were still appalled.  I took Ella by the hand and drew her off and Josh took off by himself but they were soon noticed and the crowd was soon surrounding them.  Ella panicked at the last moment and ran off before a picture could be taken and poor Josh remained to have his cheeks pinched.  Kate was told that it is a superstition that evil follows beauty so they will pinch a cheek and kiss their fingers to try to rob some of the beauty from the little girls to protect them.  I wonder if they are trying to claim some of it for themselves.  This same situation arose time and again wherever we went. 

Eshvaren, their driver, drove us around the village so we could see some of the other buildings carved out of granite; we bought a couple of elephants and ended up at the shoreline temple to Shiva.  It was hot and stressful so after a whirlwind look around we headed home. 

Lauren is being potty trained so poor Kate has seen the inside of way too many Indian toilets.  The tourist toilets here were very good, she declared.  They had Indian style toilets as well as Western style with regular porcelain bowls and sinks to wash your hands which is not the rule.  The Indian toilets have a drain hole in the floor surrounded by a porcelain plate with ribbed areas for your feet, a water faucet and a pail with a cup.  I guess they used the water to flush the toilet.  Their bathrooms usually have no toilet paper or sinks. As I was not privy to anyone’s bathroom habits, I can only imagine the other ways in which these buckets of water were used .  Gavin’s bathrooms have a hose attached to the wall that has a sprayer on the end, like we have on the kitchen sink here.  Now that’s a good idea so I’m going to look into installing one in my bathroom. 

Dakshina Chitra is an artist’s village/historic site like Pioneer Village in Salt Lake City.  They have brought in representative houses from the four southern states of India.  There were weavers and potters and artist selling their wares.  At selected sites, crafts were available for the kids to make.  This place was inundated with school kids on field trips the day we were there. 

Coming Next: Our Trip to Mysore