Notoriety

Indian people like to tell us that when other Indian people see us, they also see a huge dollar sign stamped to our faces. We don't notice this phenomenon too much in Bangalore, where it would not be unlikely for an Indian person selected at random to make more money than we do, but we sure do notice it when we travel.

This weekend we set off for Madurai, which as I mentioned before is older than my country. Perhaps you remember the story I told a few months ago about the drunken man on a railway platform who told us that the temple in Madurai was older than my country (not difficult) and older than Gilles' country too (slightly more difficult). He went on to tell us how he was selecting a nice boy for his daughter to marry and to ask me the age at which I first had sex.

At any rate...

We traveled by 3rd class AC train, which we have discovered is a much more social experience than 2nd class AC. People actually talk to us in 3rd AC. They ask us where we're from, they make jokes. The train was quite nice except that I somehow lost my cell phone on it. Ah well. I seem to have a penchant for losing things in improbable ways.

The temple in Madurai was extremely large and contained a shopping mall. The funniest thing about it is that visitors are no longer allowed to climb its highest tower because someone once committed suicide from it, so now the souvenir shops outside it have built roof terraces from which once can enjoy the lovely view. They sometimes have elevators going up, but they only have staircases going down. These staircases conveniently lead to elephant statues, silk carpets, and all the other things that foreigners like to buy, apparently.

While the temple in Madurai had a nice atmosphere, we preferred nearby Thanjavur, where a smaller but more attractive temple is situated. The only problem with this small town was its rickshaw mafia. When we were leaving the bus station, no rickshaw would take us for less than 50 rupees, even though we knew that this was far too much for the distance. They held fast to their price, so there was no choice but to go with them and pay the 50 rupees. The next day, we walked to the train station, which was less than 300 yards from our hotel, and took a rickshaw from there to the temple. We were charged 25 rupees, which seemed slightly high but acceptable. On the way back, however, we tried to get another rickshaw. The driver said 30 rupees. We told him we had just paid 25 to come to the temple. "No," he replied, "you paid 25 to come to the train station. That's a kilometer difference." Our guide at the temple had explained the ancient Tamilian numbering and measuring systems to us. They seem to have been fascinated by the number 9 because of its "magical qualities" (if you add up the digits from 0 to 9 starting with the smallest and largest and moving inward, each pair adds up to 9, the digits of numbers divisible by 9 add up to 9, etc). Apparently the human body has 9 "holes." Our guide, incidentally, seemed to have just 9 teeth. At any rate, the rickshaw drivers seem to have their own math system.

We noticed it again on our third stop, Trichy, where we saw a woman rickshaw driver for the first time. Unfortunately, she also wantd to rip us off. When a different driver broke away from the crowd and offered to take us for 20 rupees instead of 30, he was chided by the other drivers. Of course, they thought it was okay to do this in front of us since they were speaking Tamil; they seemed not to mind that we could understand them saying "foreigner" several times in their sentence.

We were not happy to have to take our shoes off to visit the temples in Trichy, because the ground was so hot that we had to race across it in order to keep our feet from burning. We acquired a few schoolgirl friends inside one temple; they followed us around and kept speaking to us very slowly in Tamil in the hopes that we would understand. I figured out "you" and "me," but I was stumped as to what the rest of the sentence was about.

Anyway, I'll upload the pictures before too long...