India Post 1

I have returned from India!

We were prepared for India to be quite a different experience than anywhere else, and it really has been. The highlight of my stay in India was a visit to a rural village.  I will again post some info from India out of order and in shorter posts so that it does not take as long to post.

Pre-India
Before we arrived in India the crew was preparing for our ship to spend 6 days in India. Apparently India has always been very rough on our beauty of a ship, so they are taking great precautions to keep it clean and in good shape.  Starting a few days prior to arrival in India the crew began to lay plastic down through all of the public areas on the floor, they also covered all the steps from the gangway in cardboard and then plastic. The outdoor cafe on the seventh deck looked like it had been entirely saran wrapped in order to protect the kitchen equipment and to keep it sanitary. They closed the seventh floor cafe and instead we could only get cafe meals downstairs (indoors). The pool was drained and covered and even the residential hallways eventually got covered in plastic. Our ship was practically entirely saran wrapped!!!  We were getting a little nervous with all the precautions the crew had taken since we had not seen anything like that in any of the previous ports. It turned out though that much of the precautions were unnecessary and we really didnt dirty the ship too much!


Kancheepuram and Mallarpuram
One of the day trips that I did in India was a cultural cities trip. We visited two cities which were both famous for their temples (both working temples and old temples).  Each temple was unique, but by the end of the day we had visited 6 different sites.  At each temple we would be asked to remove our shoes before entering the temples. Since I am not Hindu, I could not enter the inner sanctum, but could wander freely throughout the rest of the temple. It was very interesting to see the temples. The working temples were cool because there were Hindu people practicing their faith right in front of us. The tour guide was slightly hard to hear, so I did not get as much information as I would have liked, but I loved wandering around the temples and stumbling across unique things. In two of the different temple visits we came across large groups of Indian College Students. We learned they were all education students and part of their training involved visiting these historic sites. They were all dressed beautifully in matching Sari's and they all looked so pretty. They were as interested in us as we were interested in them. Although the language barrier was a little tough, we ended up exchanging some words (and pictures) before leaving the sites. It really was just fun to spend time with them trying to communicate. I am glad that we stumbled across them, it was a really fun experience.  Another part of the trip that I really enjoyed was the lunch!  We stopped at a GORGEOUS resort mid day for lunch. I learned it was actually a Radisson, but it was by far the most fancy Radisson I have ever seen. The pool outside the restaurant had to be at least 3 acres! It was huge! It was all different levels with bridges and palm trees intertwined with the pool. Very cool. The food at the restaurant was awesome too. The buffet was HUGE with a variety of Indian food and desserts. Typically, I do not really like Indian food, but I found quite a few things that I really enjoyed.  One other funny story of the day is how the Indian people were so fascinated by us. We realized partly through one of our temple visits when listening to our tour guide that Indian families were strategically taking photographs so that us (American students) were the background of the photos instead of the temples. We just started laughing. We decided to jump in the photos and pose with the Indian families and they were pleasantly surprised. It was actually really, really, funny!