Journal 8-31-2010

Journal 8/31/10

So far today has been fairly uneventful. We woke up and had a delicious breakfast of some mystery yellow potato dish. We have started to only eat with our right hands although they continue to give us silverware at every meal. Eating with our hands is much more difficult than eating with silverware. The food coats your fingers and it is much harder to place foods like rice into your mouth without spilling.

After breakfast we went to the US embassy for the second time. Katie went in first. After about an hour of waiting she came out and informed the rest of us that they were no longer doing the registration in person at all. While we were waiting around for Katie we went to look at the Presbyterian church that was next door to the US embassy.

When she came out we returned to ICSA and filled out the required forms online. While we were at ICSA we ate lunch and then met with Irene who was going to take us to the mall. We got in rickshaws and drove for about 10 minutes through the city to a mall area. We all went into Pothy’s, which was like an old fashioned department store. It had many different floors, that each specialized in a different type of clothing.

This mall was amazing they had everything! Thousands of different fabrics made of silk and cotton. Many were embroidered with intricate and beautiful designs. They also had tons of different types of finished clothes. They had both western clothes and traditional Indian dhotis, lunghis and saris. It was very difficult to communicate what you wanted to the people working in the store. They spoke only a couple words of English that was muddled with a heavy Tamil accent. However they were all eager to please us and showed us many different things. The store also had a strange checkout system. Your purchase went into the hands of about 4 different people and stamped 3 or 4 different times before you were allowed to take it. I purchased a dhoti and a pair of brown pants. The boys all went in on 7.5 meters of fabric that we took to a tailor to have made into pants as well. This was extremely cheap to do and I hope they turn out well. Here is a picture of the boys wearing our newly purchased dhotis.       

I still need to find some shirts that I like, but matt and john both bought some pretty awesome ones. The mall was a pretty intense cultural experience. We were the only white people in the entire mall, which was at least 6 floors tall, and packed with people. It was a really fun experience, and everything was very affordable for us because of the great exchange rate. We all want to go back before we leave Chennai so that we can buy gifts for people at home.