Chennai

December 12: Chennai

11:55am We boarded a plane for Chennai. I didn’t think the city atmosphere and environment were going to be different but I was so wrong! The minute I got in the car that the travel agent provided us with, I could tell it was different than Mumbai….and any other place that I’ve been. This is what I thought India was going to be like. There were palm trees, green grass, houses with roofs made out of palm leaves and high rise buildings. I never thought that Chennai would be more developed than Mumbai, but it certainly seems so!

After getting settled in our room, we were all craving some good authentic India food. So we all went diving into our guide books in search of a restaurant. We were finally able to find Saravana Bhavan. This restaurant was so unique in the fact that it served 23 dishes in one entrée! You were given rice, a plate with a banana leaf on it and about 15 different dals, curries, etc. They were spicy, but sooo good! The curd (yogurt) that came along with the meal too helped to balance out the spicyness. The one thing that was so authentically Indian is that you ate the whole thing with your hands…no utensils! Soo I offer this…

How to eat like a local:

1. Put rice on your banana leaf

2. Put dal, curry, etc. on the rice

3. Mix the dal in with the rice with your fingers

4. Take a bit of the mixture into your hands and squeeze out the extra liquid

5. Then pop it in your mouth

We washed it all down with some yummy pineapple, mango and chikku milkshakes. Since we were full after that delicious meal, we decided to take some Indian sweets to go. Later that night, we indulged in some ladoos and other sweets courtesy of the restaurant’s sweet shop. The ladoos had fruits, nuts, honey—they were delicious! Then others had gram (kind of like chopped up graham cracker crumbs) and almonds in them. I hope we plan on going there again—that $10 meal (total for all 3 of us) was delicious! Unfortunately, the rickshaw ended up being the same amount ($10) though.

I thought living in Mumbai for four months would help me in south India, but that wasn’t the case. The rickshaws in Mumbai are on a metered system which makes it easy to know how much it’s going to be. But here, you can only ask the rickshaw driver how much it’s going to be. On the whole though, I already love Chennai, possibly more than I love Mumbai. We’ll see.