Chennai, India

Arangabad was our last official destination with our tour company. Although we had to drop some serious coin to get the tour we both feel we made the right decision. The things we saw and people we met were fantastic and we never would have had the kind of experience we did had we gone alone. The tour company dropped us off at the airport and we flew to Mumbai to catch our flight to Chennai. Unfortunately, the time between flights was about 6 hours, so we got to know the Mumbai Domestic Airport pretty well. On the airport note. All new Indian airports are the same. They are long, cavernous buildings that are divided in two, with departures on one side and arrivals on the other. Very rarely do these new airports have the gate extensions that connect to planes. Instead, all departures have a single gate on the ground level and when a plane is ready you simply catch a bus, or walk, to your plane. The reverse is true for arrivals. All arrivals come into one gate, on the ground level and you walk to the carousel to get your bags. At Udaipor and Jaipur the airports were brand spanking new and both had the connecting tunnels and what appeared to be nice second floors. Unfortunately, the tarmac area where the planes are supposed to park and connect to the gate is occupied by the old airport. It appears that at both airports, they can't use their new facilities because they haven't torn down the old facilities which are blocking the planes. Another case of India's clusterfuck bureaucracy. I would put a picture of an Indian airport up, but you aren't allowed to take pictures of airports in India for security reasons.

Back to Chennai. We arrived in Chennai in the evening and were back on our own. The flight and cab to our hotel went perfectly, but so did our trip to Delhi and look what happened. One thing we hadn't experienced in India was some nightlife. Lucky for us, there was a dance club in the basement of our hotel. After getting rejected from the club once for wearing a t-shirt we were able to get and see the scene. There wasn't a scene. There is a term called sausage-fest that is in the contemporary vernacular which means a party predominately made up of males. This was a classic nerd sausage-fest. 30 people in the club, 25 men, all either sitting at a table, the bar, or standing staring at the dance floor or each other. The 5 girls in the club were socializing with each other, all probably asking what they were doing there. We had one round of over priced drinks and left.

Chennai is on the Bay of Bengal, on India's East Coast. One thing that we both wanted to do during our limited time in Chennai was touch the Indian Ocean. Our hotel was about a mile from the ocean so we made the trek. Chennai was similar to Mumbai in that it is much more developed than any other parts of India that we visited. There were nice houses and neighborhoods sprinkled throughout the city. It is also significantly cleaner than most of of the other places we had visited. However, it's still India. When we got within a 1/4 mile of the ocean we were surrounded by goats, kids peeing on the streets, and women drying dead fish on the pavement. For all the San Franciscans reading this, don't ever complain about the cleanliness of Ocean Beach. The beach on Chennai was disgusting. There was litter of every shape, size, and putridness scattered along the entire beach. Not to mention the hundreds of tee-pees built on the beach. What do they say about building your house on sand? We walked several miles along the beach and saw some OK sites; a lighthouse, statue of Gandhi, and some old colonial buildings. When we satisfied our desire to see the beach we headed inland to the George Town area of the city. George Town is filled with narrow streets and shops. We hung around there for a while but it got old pretty quick. We hopped in a tuck-tuck and headed out to a yoga studio.

Lara made a "Must do" list before our trip of things we had to do. On that list was do yoga in India. On our way to the yoga studio the skies opened up and we were caught in a monsoon like we had never seen before. The streets were flooded and we got drenched. The yoga session lasted an hour and it definitely wasn't the best yoga session, nor anything special. When the session ended we walked around the neighborhood.

The nieghborhood was kind of cool with some nice clean shops and an office of KPMG, the smallest of the Big 4 Accounting firms and not nearly as good as EY. As we were walking the sky opened up again. The rain wasn't as bad this time, but the streets became flooded, Venice style. We tried to get to another shop but we were spending more time dodging cars, motorcycles and dangling power lines than actually walking to the shop. We threw in the towel and got a cab back to our hotel.

Since we had a late flight we had some spare time at the hotel. Lara found the hotel's pool and we took a dip. The hotel's pool was a pool experience I won't soon forget. The pool was on the hotel's roof and as we were swimming another monsoon came in, it was like we were in a waterfall. We left Chennai and India that night.