Journal 9-5-2010

Journal 9-5-2010

Today is Sunday, so this morning we were not sure if we were expected to attend church or not. Church services are held all day at ICSA however they are all in Tamil. Because we wouldn’t be able to understand the services at ICSA, and because it was already too late to take a rickshaw to a nearby church, we decided to not go.

            Instead we went shopping at a nearby mall named Spencers. The vendors at this mall are particularly aggressive. They stand out in the hall and accost anyone that passes by. The best way to get rid of them is to insist on absurdly low prices. After a while we found several really good handiwork stores. I ended up buying a pendant for Claire. Matt got a very large marble hand carved elephant and Katie and Leah both purchased scarves. We came back to ICSA for lunch.

            After Lunch we decided to try to find a food market so that matt could begin to gather data for his extra project. We ended up at the dirtiest market I have ever seen.

It was almost exclusively a fruit and flower market. With only a few stalls devoted to other types of merchandise. When we walked inside. The interior of the market was very dark. Enormous piles of flowers were illuminated under bright lamps. This made the inside of the market glow with an eerie colored light.

 

This was without a doubt the most intimidating place that I have ever been. We were obviously the only white people in the packed market. As we passed, everyone stared at us. Some people seemed to like us and even lined up asking for a picture.

In general people were pretty nice to us. Although I did get some strange liquid flicked into my face at one point by someone passing by. I really hope it wasn’t urine. The market was absolutely filthy. In the flower section the floor was completely covered with flowers stems and leaves that were in the process of being trampled into a thick matt. In the fruit portion of the market the stone floor was covered with a thick brown muck. This muck had hardened in some places. But where there was water it was a stinking slime. It seemed like this brown coating was almost exclusively made of rotten and decaying fruit that had been discarded by the vendors. The market seemed to be endless. We spent at least an hour and a half just walking down the different halls and asking vendors how much they charged for 1 kilogram of their various items (this was for matt’s project). It was interesting to see that some people would try to rip us off, asking twice the normal price, because we were obviously foreign tourists.

While we were inside the market I felt disgusted but also shocked by the beauty that existed surrounded by the filth. The vendors arrange their fruits into perfect pyramids, The women wear beautiful clothes and keep themselves incredibly clean. I wish I had taken more pictures that capture this contrast.

In other news… John is feeling sick today and spent all day in bed with a fever. We are worried that his illness might be mosquito related because or the enormous number of mosquito bites that he has somehow managed to get. Hopefully he will feel better tomorrow. If he doesn’t we are thinking about bringing him to a hospital to get checked out.