Weekend Trip: Madurai!

On September 21^st and 22^nd we took a weekend trip to Madurai. Despite the fact that we had to wake up at four thirty in the morning to start our five hour journey, we were all really excited to be going on our first trip. In previous batches of ISP students, the Madurai trip has been referred to as the “Coimbatore appreciation trip” because of the very different climate in Madurai. Though the actual temperature in the two places is pretty much equal, Coimbatore sits between mountain ranges and catches an excellent breeze, whereas Madurai is humid and gets no breeze whatsoever. The entire weekend it felt like we never stopped sweating.

After stopping for breakfast during our drive, our first stop was at the Gandhi museum. The information was really interesting, with walls filled with the entire story of the Indian independence movement from way before Gandhi’s time, up through specific details about the work during his lifetime.
Unfortunately, much of the area devoted to Gandhi’s personal life and beliefs contained signage exclusively in Tamil. What I really loved about that place was the architecture—the museum was housed in an old exhibition pavilion called the Tamukkam Palace. It was built around 1670 AD, during the Nayak Dynasty. All the windows and arches were gorgeous!
 

We spent the night at the Tamil Nadu Theological Seminary (TTS), which was this beautiful oasis right in the middle of the city. I’m not kidding, either. You are literally driving through the middle of the city and you turn down a road that you probably didn’t even realize was a road because it’s right between two buildings and then you drive for a ways and are suddenly on this spacious, coconut tree filled campus with chickens roaming about and plenty of walking paths. All you can hear on the TTS campus are crickets or cicadas or whatever chirping even though five minutes away the city is bustling. It was crazy! We spent the afternoon resting and visiting with the TTS “principal” (as opposed to the American version that would be president). TTS is unique in that they are making a marked effort to help the untouchable caste or dalits. The caste system is still a major detriment to the people and society of India and TTS is attempting to empower the people who are still being abused in this dysfunctional system. Hopefully I’ll have a post exclusively about the caste system and the dalits sometime in the future, but for now just take my word for it that it’s totally messed up and lame.

That night, we went to the Thirumalai Nayak Palace and saw a sound and light show. Which meant that different parts of the palace were lit up with colorful lights and voices narrated much of the history of that place. It was really interesting—if only we’d all been awake enough to truly absorb everything we’d heard!

We spent the night at TTS, but the rooms were so blasted hot that everybody had a hard time sleeping. While the power was on the fans kept us relatively cool, but when the power shut off and the fans stopped, it got positively sweltering in our rooms. I slept pretty well throughout the night, but lots of people had a rough time.

On Saturday, we visited the Sri Meenakshi Temple, which is a huge Hindu temple that gets lots of traffic both from worshippers and also from tourists every day. It really was enormous. And so much of it was beautiful. But at the same time it was weird and a little eerie. Okay, at times a lot eerie. There was an area of the temple that had all these idols on the pillars and people came and prayed to specific ones for specific things (kind of like Catholics with the saints), and one of the idols on the pillar was for something to do with bearing children and they had this cloth tied over it and men aren’t supposed to look at it and it was smeared with goop and it was just really gross and unnerving.

We did get to do sweet things like take pictures with the temple elephant! And inside we found a small stone elephant and took pictures "riding" that too! On the way out, there were all there pigeons on the ground and I ran through them and made them all fly away. It made me feel like a small child, and it was lovely. So basically, my favorite part of that visit was the photo ops...

On our way back from Madurai, we had the opportunity to stop at a “hospice” called Arugalam, which means hope. But a hospice here is not the same thing as hospice care in America. Instead, this hospice was an outreach through TTS that takes care of people, predominantly children, infected with HIV/AIDS. Obviously, the children who have it have mostly gotten it through genetics rather than unsafe choices of their own, which made it seem like a potentially depressing place to visit. But it wasn’t depressing AT ALL. In fact, stopping there was my favorite part of the entire weekend! We got to hear all about how the children receive treatment and are loved and cared for and given an extremely nutritious diet so that their bodies can be as healthy as possible. And best of all was that we got to play with them. Seeing the way those children were loved by their caretakers was absolutely heartwarming, and seeing how they all interacted as siblings was also beautiful.
When our time there was over, none of us wanted to leave! One of the boys reminded me of Jon like crazy except for the fact that he was shorter than I am and is sixteen instead of thirteen. But it seems that all Indians are shorter than Americans for their age and all Indians also look younger than they really are. It can be really confusing to try to figure out a person’s age!