Tamil Nadu, India: Chennai to Pondicherry

I got back from India almost two weeks ago, and I'm just now getting around to writing up the blog posts.
I got back and was so ill for about 5 days. I don't know whether it was the anti-malaria medicine, the black mold that was growing in my flat while I was gone, or the 36 hours of traveling it took to get back (or maybe just the air pollution in China). I'm still recovering, but I wanted to finally reflect on my trip.

This was roughly the route I took. It's kind of insane. And when I got to India (at 3am), we hit the ground running. We traveled to a different city every day or two, so it was a nonstop trip. I got invited to come along on this trip by some family friends, who are from India, but had never been to Tamil Nadu before. We were all tourists together, which was pretty great. Also, because they speak Hindi and Gujarati, and people in Tamil Nadu tend to only speak Tamil, we all had some trouble with the language barrier.

On the first day, which started about 4 hours after I arrived, we left Chennai, where I flew into. Our first stop was an artists' community just outside the city. The artists, whose work was on display, lived in the community, I think. Unfortunately, I couldn't take pictures in the galleries.

Our next stop was at a heritage museum called Dakshina Chitra. They built houses there in the styles of a bunch of different states and they had cultural activities running. I got my henna done. I also enjoyed my first ever coconut water from a coconut.

The architecture was absolutely beautiful and I really enjoyed walking around there.

The last place we went on our first day was a temple by the sea. It's called Mahabalipuram. The thing I found the most interesting about it was that the architecture took elements from Ancient Roman, South Indian, and Chinese architecture. 

The temple admission ticket included a few other sites in the area, which were also really amazing architecturally. A lot of the temples we saw that day were monolithic, meaning they were carved out of one piece of rock. I can't really get my head around how that works. And on top of that these temples have been around for around a thousand years and are still there. 

I also had some fun taking sneaky portrait shots, which I continued to do throughout the trip. This one is one of my favorites.

One of my favorite things that struck me on my first day was all the cows wandering around. I liked that this one was hanging around the ice cream stand!

There were also temples and works of art carved into giant boulders. This wall was a couple of stories tall and was particularly impressive.

Another one of my favorite pictures - a few women crowding around a shrine to pray. 

That evening, we got into Pondicherry, checked into our hotel, and went out for dinner. We went to bed as soon as possible, because we were all exhausted. I had only a few hours of sleep from the night before, so I needed to rest!