Another day at the rail

Paneer is a great guy.  We usually end up walking together or sitting in the backseat together on the drive out to the rails.  He is an all-purpose helper around the lab, and is always making people smile.  He showed me some of his favorite Tamil songs (Tamil is the local language)- they kind of reminded me of Cuban or Spanish music with an Asian feel.  

 There were some baby goats- it's hard to see how small they were.

 A woman tending to her heard.

 The landscape changes a lot depending how much water there is.  Some parts are very arid- others lush.  It changes in a matter of feet.

 Rice fields.. I think.

 It was so green. Very pretty.

For the win

 This picture pretty much sums up what it's like to drive a rickshaw.  We went shopping and eating on Saturday and the rickshaw driver wanted me to drive- so I did.  It was very fun and even more fun that I had no idea what he was trying to tell me while I was driving.  His English wasn't the best and I had a bad case of tunnel vision.

Here's him supervising my driving.

He recommended this amazing North Indian food restaurant that had amazing mutton curry.  Here's the gang getting ready to chow down.

The shopping was fun I guess.  It was cool to see some of the amazing craftsmanship and art produced within India.  Apart from the most beautiful jewelry I ever saw, I saw amazing wood and marble work.  Here are a few that I appreciated: 

 This piece (and hundreds of other varieties) are a solid piece of rock.  Within the outer design is another design with figurines carved inside of the sphere.  Some of the more elaborate pieces had figurines inside of figurines inside of figurines, if you know what I mean.  Hopefully looking at the picture explains it because I doubt that did.

 Inside the elephants' backs are more elephants. Bwaaaaah

This table was hand made and had beautiful inlay.

Also, Asaad found a genie lamp.  Pure silver of course.

We also saw a cool apartment/loft:

And inside the mall with the movie theater we went to we saw the creepiest clown ever.  It was like chucky and the devil schemed up away to make people feel uncomfortable.  Look in the picture to see if you can find him:

Yeah, he's the three and a half foot tall creature staring at the camera, near all the little kids.  Glad I never had to grow up with those nightmares.

Stare Down

When I was walking back from work today I found myself 5 feet from this lil guy.  I thought the deer definitely saw me, and didn't care that I was so close.  As I was taking the picture he noticed me, and we got in a very tense stare down.  I could see the muscles in his chest rippling as he tensed to spring.  It was kind of nerve wracking- so he got his own post.

Quick note: I guess two weeks was my threshold on blogging- sorry for the delay on posts.  I'll try and keep them coming as well as keep them in the right order (some aren't in this last string of posts, but I guess worse things can happen).  Thanks for reading!

Rail testing

A fun part of where I intern/job shadow is field trips to the rail yard in Tirumalpur. It is an hour and a half west of Chennai in a more rural area.  I really enjoy the change of scenery and the open skies. We go to this section of rail because it is not heavily used, which gives us time to run the equipment we are testing the rails with.

The one train that reaches the station.

The trolley with the railway engineers posing for a shot

The ultrasonic sensors that check rails for standard features and potential flaws (the water is sprayed on the rail)

The whole set up. The testing for the day was blessed (not sure if that is the right way of putting it)

close up of the burning 

incense

more playing around

I had woken up extra early to play cricket (at six in the morning we were to meet) but my friend never showed up with his cricket gang.  All in all it ended up being a long 12 hour day, but it was fun to experience the rail testing.  Right when I got back we left for Pondicherry.

Sometimes you really just need a vacation...

     After driving home from the rail testing excursion in a full car, I really needed some personal space and room to stretch.  Instead I hopped directly into a van with ten people.  This was because the Michigan State kids had decided to accompany Stephen, Autumn, Rachel and I on a weekend trip to Pondicherry.  The drive was fun and filled with music, which made the squished drive more than bearable. 

 We arrived in Pondi at around 11pm.  Our driver didn't know the city but the place he gave up on driving happened to be a short walk to the youth hostel.  There, the manager was extremely helpful.  Apart from letting us check in after they were closed down, he sent a car to get us dinner.  That night we sat on the rocky beach to talk, ate our midnight dinner, and ended up sleeping on the roof to avoid the heat of the hostel.

wrong lighthouse

Early the next morning we left for the heart of the city.  Instead, we ended up on the opposite outskirt of the city.  We had asked to go to the old lighthouse, but all our driver heard was lighthouse.  We ended up getting a little exercise, and stumbling upon the best place you could hope to stay.

Le E'scale (or something French) is a hotel an Englishman owns in the French Colony of the city.  He referred to each of his guests by their nationality, which got quite hilarious as he explained to us how he would rearrange his guests to serve us best.  He moved the Americans in room 5 to room 2, and once the French couple got back from lunch he would move them from room 6 to 3, and that French in room 3 had to checkout first.  With his pace of speaking on an accent, a confusing jumbling of guests, and several qualifiers on his sentences, we all had something to laugh about later on.

Each floor had two rooms and a common area. Nicholas (the owner) was able to give us the fourth floor, and he put 4 additional beds between the rooms.  The facilities were absolutely amazing, and amongst 10 people, very affordable.

The town was extremely lush and the buildings all very well maintained.

We did some walking on Saturday.  Right next to our hotel was a very old Cathedral.  The sign hinted that it might of been the third attempt to build one that wasn't destroyed shortly after completion back in the 18th century. That day we also got some amazing bread, coffee, and sweets.

Gandhi memorial on the beach

yupp.

awesome roof of our hotel to relax

maybe hard to tell, but every roof is optimized for relaxing

moooo
For daytime fun we went to the beach.  We passed some really pretty places on our way to swim.

palm trees

We took a trip to Auroville on Sunday.  It is an experimental community that represents a hundred different countries (a hundred different countries' hippies that is).  They focus on different types of housing, architecture, food sources, spirituality, learning and cultural research.  I was less interested in all of things and more interested in climbing the weird buildings though.  Maybe next time.

All in all, it was a great trip. Thumbs up for Pondi.

Small Little Indian Wedding

   
     For the last couple days (when I wrote this a week ago) I had been losing sleep over attending an Indian wedding.  All twelve of us were invited impulsively by a professor we met with on the first day.  He seemed to have invited us to be polite, but we jumped on the invitation to attend the reception.  Everyone got super excited to attend; the girls got sarees and the guys bought kurtas.  These items are traditional ethnic clothes.  I was hesitant to buy one because for the most part everyone in Chennai wears very modern western clothes.  Ten minutes before we left for the reception I jokingly mentioned to my roommate Stephen that everyone there would be wearing western clothes and we would look like overanxious tourists decked out in ethnic garb.  Turned out I was predicting the future and not joking.

     The wedding reception was held in a beautifully decorated tent behind a hotel in a different part of the city.  However, the first thing I noticed was not the tent, but rather the reception men wearing button-downs smiling at us.  Our friend from work Rajasenkar looked like he was holding a laugh in as he offered us incense and flowers.  The women attending the wedding were wearing more traditional clothes (this is the case day to day too), yet all but three other men at the reception were wearing suits and standard western business-casual.  Lucky for us, the social awkwardness of our dress was self imposed.  After ten minutes we relaxed and it seemed as if most people appreciated that we dressed up.

     The most unfortunate part of the wedding is that I felt like we took a little of the night from the newlyweds.  The wedding filmer and photoman definitely took enough film of our group, not to mention the photos that were taken by the group of the group.  In the end though, it was just a reception to give gifts, make small talk, and eat food.  The people at the wedding were friendly and the couple was very grateful of our presence and gift.

Newlyweds and Bride's Father

Hamp is a boss

We had the most awesome van