And so, after an overnight flight on the very comfy Emirites Airlines , I arrived in Chennai. My first impressions of India were very much as I had expected - it was hot, muggy, dilapidated, and teeming with people. What I hadn't quite expected was the scale of the traffic - endless streams of cars, tuk-tuks, motorbikes and lorries all weaving around each other at high speed, honking wildly. The only way to cross the road is to hang on to a local! To be fair, Chennai is pretty run-down - old colonial buildings just crumbling away, but since I was expecting hundreds of homeless people living on the street, not as poverty-stricken as I'd imagined. Add to that I had expected to be pursued by a gaggle of people every time I ventured out, but by and large I'm ignored, apart from the tuk-tuk drivers plying their trade.
Riding in a tuk-tuk is an experience in itself as I found out on my first day at work. The office is only around 10 minutes drive from the hotel - that's 10 minutes if you drive like a demon!!
The hotel is lovely, the staff really cannot do enough for us, and it's still a novelty having my laundry done for me...I could get used to this.... There are three restaurants on site, the main Club House restaurant has a fixed price buffet with unlimited alcohol twice weekly; there's a south Indian restaurant, and a mediteranean restaurant on the roof with good views of the city, a lovely place for a beer ;). So far I've tested them all out, plus the one in the sister hotel across the road, and have also bravely eaten fresh samosas and vahda from the roadside - its mostly vegetarian food here and the curries are spicy. You have to be careful when ordering vahda, since put the stress on the wrong syllable and you end up asking for a smell!! I've grown a bit partial to curries for breakfast, and the fresh fruit especially the mango is to die for. The coffee is OK, and the masala tea a bit of an acquired taste - milky tea with cinammon, cardamon and ginger.
There are two shopping malls near the hotel - Spencer Plaza which has lots of clothes and handicrafts - and its de rigeur to barter. The clothes are all handmade so don't come with any sizes indicated - most Indian ladies are a lot slimmer than I so many items I couldn't even get over my head! But here's the clever bit - they always have plenty of material left in the seams so if something's a bit too small, off to the tailor you go and in twenty minutes and for around 50p he will take it out or up for you, add sleves or whatever. The second mall is Express Plaza, this is where you can find all the Western outlets like M&S, Body Shop, Lush and so on. There is also decent cappuchino to be found, as well as a fab supermarket stocking everything and anything, and a state of the art cinema.
By Friday I was feeling I hadn't had the chance to see that much of Chennai apart from the bit that was within walking distance of the hotel - it gets dark around 7pm and although its a fairly safe city, its not wise to be wandering around after dark. Apart from anything else it would be easy to fall down the huge random holes in the pavements! So I booked onto a walking trail run by an excellent company called Storytrails, around the traditional bazaars. To say it was fascinating was an understatement - the bustling bazaars are a wealth of exotic vegetables, spices, chillis, coconut oil, ghee, tea, coffee, rice and lentils. Motorised rickshaws vie with men with barrows, cows, and all sorts of pedestrian tarfficc.
Saturday saw a trip to the beach - Chennai has an enormous city beach, araound 14km in length and all human life is there. Apart from stalls set up on the sand selling all manner of wares; there are horses, dogs, fairground rides, fish sellers and hundreds of people! Sari-clad ladies splashing around in the huge breakers, sopping wet, and kids having a whale of a time. Rather soberingly, around 400 people were killed on Marina beach during the tsunami.
So those are my first impressions of Chennai....I'm slowly acclimatising to the heat - mid to late thirties in the daytime, late twenties at night, but what really strikes one is the damp atmosphere - we've had no rain to speak of since I've been here, but the humidity is very high. There is a very nice hotel pool however, so I am coping.. There are chipmunks and mongooses - or is it mongeese? - huge eagles soaring around, mynah birds and exotic sounding cuckoos in the garden at work, where I eat my lunch. But its already starting to feel less foreign and a bit more like home....
Riding in a tuk-tuk is an experience in itself as I found out on my first day at work. The office is only around 10 minutes drive from the hotel - that's 10 minutes if you drive like a demon!!
The hotel is lovely, the staff really cannot do enough for us, and it's still a novelty having my laundry done for me...I could get used to this.... There are three restaurants on site, the main Club House restaurant has a fixed price buffet with unlimited alcohol twice weekly; there's a south Indian restaurant, and a mediteranean restaurant on the roof with good views of the city, a lovely place for a beer ;). So far I've tested them all out, plus the one in the sister hotel across the road, and have also bravely eaten fresh samosas and vahda from the roadside - its mostly vegetarian food here and the curries are spicy. You have to be careful when ordering vahda, since put the stress on the wrong syllable and you end up asking for a smell!! I've grown a bit partial to curries for breakfast, and the fresh fruit especially the mango is to die for. The coffee is OK, and the masala tea a bit of an acquired taste - milky tea with cinammon, cardamon and ginger.
There are two shopping malls near the hotel - Spencer Plaza which has lots of clothes and handicrafts - and its de rigeur to barter. The clothes are all handmade so don't come with any sizes indicated - most Indian ladies are a lot slimmer than I so many items I couldn't even get over my head! But here's the clever bit - they always have plenty of material left in the seams so if something's a bit too small, off to the tailor you go and in twenty minutes and for around 50p he will take it out or up for you, add sleves or whatever. The second mall is Express Plaza, this is where you can find all the Western outlets like M&S, Body Shop, Lush and so on. There is also decent cappuchino to be found, as well as a fab supermarket stocking everything and anything, and a state of the art cinema.
By Friday I was feeling I hadn't had the chance to see that much of Chennai apart from the bit that was within walking distance of the hotel - it gets dark around 7pm and although its a fairly safe city, its not wise to be wandering around after dark. Apart from anything else it would be easy to fall down the huge random holes in the pavements! So I booked onto a walking trail run by an excellent company called Storytrails, around the traditional bazaars. To say it was fascinating was an understatement - the bustling bazaars are a wealth of exotic vegetables, spices, chillis, coconut oil, ghee, tea, coffee, rice and lentils. Motorised rickshaws vie with men with barrows, cows, and all sorts of pedestrian tarfficc.
Saturday saw a trip to the beach - Chennai has an enormous city beach, araound 14km in length and all human life is there. Apart from stalls set up on the sand selling all manner of wares; there are horses, dogs, fairground rides, fish sellers and hundreds of people! Sari-clad ladies splashing around in the huge breakers, sopping wet, and kids having a whale of a time. Rather soberingly, around 400 people were killed on Marina beach during the tsunami.
So those are my first impressions of Chennai....I'm slowly acclimatising to the heat - mid to late thirties in the daytime, late twenties at night, but what really strikes one is the damp atmosphere - we've had no rain to speak of since I've been here, but the humidity is very high. There is a very nice hotel pool however, so I am coping.. There are chipmunks and mongooses - or is it mongeese? - huge eagles soaring around, mynah birds and exotic sounding cuckoos in the garden at work, where I eat my lunch. But its already starting to feel less foreign and a bit more like home....
