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Published: March 25th 2007
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The Happy Couple
Yes, I know the bride doesn't look too impressed! My last weekend in Madurai and what a quiet one it’s been. I am pretty much the only resident at the guest house at the moment. Scot has now set off to meet up with his wife, Heather, for a week’s holiday in Thailand. Sachi is spending the weekend with the wife of one of the Doctors whilst he is away at an eye camp - the deal is that Sachi provides the company and in return receives 2 days of Indian cooking lessons - she is extremely excited! The Michigan students have set off as separate group, one group heading for Thekkadi following recommendations form Sachi and myself. The other group are heading for Kochi on the Kerala coast.
Saturday was reasonably normal, a long day working followed by dinner and some cricket. On Sunday I decided it was time to catch up with some shopping and find some gifts, I also paid the Meenakshi temple another visit.
Visiting Meenakshi turned out to be a great decision. Rather than spend all my time walking round checking out the incredible architecture, I decided to do more people watching this time. I ended up spending an hour or so
Wedding Party
There were large groups of people just sat around with bags full of food with each wedding group. sat in one of the cloisters that surround the central Tank watching the world go by. There were a number of weddings taking place around the temple and most of the wedding parties seemed to end up around the tank area for photographs, this really added an extra splash of colour and interest to the area. It also turned out that a white-man sat doing nothing attracts a lot of interest from Indian children. During my short stay, several approached me to show off their English, to ask me where I was from or just to get their photo taken.
After killing some time at Meenakshi I spent a few hours exploring the area surrounding the Temple. I paid Kannan a visit at the Tailors market and picked up my shirts, this should have taken 5 minutes but turned into 30 as we discussed the state of Indian Cricket! Indian’s really do have a gift for talking.
I spent a few hours exploring side streets and one of the main shopping areas called Town Hall Road where I picked up some Tamil movies which Mary had recommended to me. I searched, unfortunately to no avail, for some WWE
Two Guests
A couple of guests who enjoyed having their pictures taken by me. Not sure the official photographer was too impressed though. Wrestling merchandise to give to Mary as a gift - much to her father’s disapproval she is hooked on the sport! I’ll have to find some back in the UK and send it out.
Eventually, having somehow wasted most of the day I headed back to the guest house for dinner. Dinner turned out to be far more enjoyable than I had anticipated - I expected to be eating solo this evening but I ended up joining Mary and Sangeetha, sat in the middle of the Kitchen floor, eating well and generally gossiping about everyone and everything. We spent a lot of time discussing marriage and relationships. Both Mary (Christian) and Sangeetha (Hindu) will be married by arrangement and both are extremely intrigued and somewhat confused by the concept of the Western “Love Marriage” as they refer to it.
Mary expects to marry in the next 2 years and simply has 100% faith that her father will chose wisely and find her a good man. The phrase “Good Man” sums up Mary’s view of men, they seem to fall into 2 categories - Good or Bad.
Sangeetha is different in that her marriage has been arranged for
Not so silent
This girl came charging across the temple to show me her little brother - she didn't stop talking and I couldn't understnd a word of it. many years and is to a relative. Sangeetha is currently 21 and her future husband is 29. They will marry in 4 years time. The biggest worry that Sangeetha has about the whole arrangement is that her future husband is the head chef or baker in a sweet bakery and her concern is that once married she will get very fat!
The night ended up with a little more excitement than we had expected. As we sere sat chilling on the kitchen floor we heard the Tibetan Dr, shouting out upstairs for her colleague, Nema. She sounded quite distressed so we thought it best to see if we could help. The Dr was clearly quite upset and once we had worked out what was going on through an elaborate game of charades (she speaks no English) it became clear that they had both been resting and when the Dr woke up, Nema wasn’t there. It was now 22:30 and she was panicking that Nema was out on the streets alone. Mary didn’t help matters much by making many references to “Bad Men”! Not that I’ve seen any evidence of such men in this amazingly safe city.
I ended
The silent type
This lad stalked me for about 15 minutes but never said a word! up escorting the Dr. as we went searching the neighbourhood for any sign of Nema. In a few minutes we bumped into her, quite Ok, being accompanied back to the guest house by a couple of Chinese Doctors who were residents at Aravind. It turned out that Nema had been concerned that one of her friends hadn’t eaten all day so she had decided to go and check on her.
I then had the somewhat embarrassing experience of watching Nema receive an extremely angry and animated telling off in the middle of the street luckily all in Chinese, from the Dr. I was grateful not to speak the language to be honest!
As far as I was concerned all’s well that ends well.
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