My first Thali - i can get use to this, it lies good in my belly, i feel great, we step outside the restaurant, and get met with 35 degrees and sunshine - perfect... so now what, well what else can you do on a sunday than to go an see a temple, so we decide to do a 30 - 45 min walk (who cares about time, its sunday and i am in Chennai) to the temple, which is a temple made for Shiva, one of the Gods, - now i will not give you to much story here, but it here comes a bit ...:
Tirumayilai Shivastalam,
There seems to be many legends around this temple. However the one i found the most interesting is the one about the Goddess Parvati that was distracted during her daily ritual by a beautiful peacock dancing at a distance. Lord Shiva a bit upset about this and in order to make her realise the importance of total devotion to him, turned her into a peahen and sent her to the earth. The peahen arrived at this temple and started a penance in order to prove her devotion (how about that..). After a long and severe penance the Lord Shiva finally took her back into his fold. As Goddess Parvati was living in this place as a pea-hen, the place came to be known as 'Mayil-puri' (Mayil means pea-hen in Tamil) which was later anglicised to Mylapore.
And there you have it .. i can tell you some of the stories i have been told already about Shiva and Khrisna - are so facinating... okay so one more thing about the temple, we had to walk around the temple the symbolic "3" times before we could leave, and of course we had to take of our sandals.. - it was really a cool place, and i almost forgot to mention it, it was full of a very special guests, it was full of COWS... - you heard right folks, cows, holy cows .. coming from Denmark - having a slightly different point of view on cows, it was facinating to see the respect the indians showed to these cows.. - that wouldnt go to well in Denmark .. - we would end up eating the poor thing
So after finishing the 3 laps in the temple and finally getting our sandals and shoes back, it was seriously funny, one lady took our sandals and shoes hostages "noooo moneeey, no shoes"... it wasnt until one of the team members, coming from the northern part of india started to get involved did the "hostages" get released .. - this was by the way another funny story... remind me later to tell you this one .. Anyways, Fred, Ralph and i decide to walk home to the hotel, great idea boys, map, idea of direction, water, compass anything useful to navigate - nope we do the only thing you can do, as a man, we go with our "gut" feeling on where we think, believe and hope the hotel might be, needless to say we get lost, however you will not hear me officially admit to that, my take on it is that "we werent lost, we just didnt know where we were"... anyways we end up having a soft drink at a local shop, put in the address in the iphone, and the 1,3 km to the hotel - so we were close, yeah well "close but no cigar".. what did we learn from this experience, a couple of things did become more clear to me, traffic - forget about making sense out of it, it is instinct based - so look left and right, up and down, and accept the fact that the horn is beeing honked at you anyway you cross, besides accepting this fact we also slowly became a bit more brave on how to close the street - it doesnt take a long time for India to push it-self onto you ... - it is an incredible overwhelming feeling of how you become sucked into it, it absorbs you, and it will eventually get you - there is no reason or purpose to fight it, that is what i have realized, so guards down, and enjoy... - live and let live... As our facilitator Gavin would put it, be flexible and open minded - and thats what i am trying to do..
so along side this trip Fred, Ralph and i come up with this great idea, and the idea is "a 100 things to do in India" ... needless to say that the list is not complete yet (so if you have been to India - let me know what to add in your opinion) so i will start to list some of them here ... and folks your comments are always welcome ... - oh as you might have noticed, i dont take myself to serious, so guess what the list will be, okay in case the question was to hard, heres the answer, the list will not be tooo serious...
.... - so friends here goes, "a 100 things to do in India" ... first 10 things ...
1) have a fast ride with a Rickshaw
2) get lost in Chennai
3) get "spiced" up with some local Thali
4) be ripped off by a taxi driver
5) See some status of Shiva and Krishna
6) have a kingfisher (local beer) or two
7) tap a rickshaw on the roof while it passes you by and almost hits you
8) address all rickshaw drivers as "boss"
9) get chased by a wild dog on the street
10) try yoga
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