Niamh's Year in India: Pongal Holidays - We spent a long time in buses

After just a week back at school, we were off again! It was a festival called Pongal, where they dress up cows and worship them. A bit strange, but I’m not complaining, we got another week off!

Sarah and I headed to Tiruvannamali first of all. It’s a temple town about 2 and a half hours by bus from Chennai (according to the guidebook). So four hours later, we arrived! We stayed in a really nice hotel called Hotel Ganesh which was so close to the temple. And the hotel was lovely. After a breakfast of dosa the next morning, we headed out to the temple. It’s a massive temple with lots of Gopurams. (I just had to ask Sarah what they were called and for the spelling.) It looks amazing and there are loads of carvings. However, I’ve decided that temples aren’t really my thing. I love to look at them from the outside and I think they look amazing, but going inside them isn’t that interesting. I don’t know what it is but I just don’t get it. I like the outside though! This one at Tiruvannamali looked absolutely beautiful. That night we headed out to restaurant because they had live music. It was the quietest gig I’ve ever been to. It was really good, just strange. I don’t think I was hippy enough to fully appreciate it. But it was really good!

A Gopuram. I think..

A very very quiet gig. People were even sitting on the floor. And they hadn't been drinking all evening.

The next morning we headed up the hill because apparently there were some good views. Now, either we didn’t go up far enough or you had to climb on a tree because we didn’t see much! We left Tiruvannamlai later that day and headed for Pondicherry again! I love Pondicherry, despite it’s slightly expensive food. But to be fair, the burger was only 4 pound and that was for a really good burger. In Pondy, we met our friends Ruth and Tabs again and our friend Anna who we haven’t seen since training! It was so good to see her and to hear another Scottish accent again! You don’t realise how much you miss it until you don’t hear one for several months. It was really nice to just wander around Pondy and just relax. It’s a really pleasant place. We went for dinner at a really nice restaurant and had some lovely cocktails and meat! Which I was really excited over. Then we just headed back to the hotel because everything in Pondicherry seems to shut at about half 10, so we just stayed in our hotel for the rest of the night. The next day we decided to hire bikes, which turned out to be one of the best decisions we’d made. So, led by Tabs, we cycled around Pondy! It was really nice and a really good way to tan my lower arms… Three of our other friends were arriving as well and then later Charlie and Zoe were there as well. We were a massive group of 10 for dinner but it was really nice to be back with everyone.

Trying to be very French

Very arty French photography thanks to Tabs

"Follow me children!"

I was so excited about that burger I could hardly eat it.

The next day, Sarah, Tabs, Ruth, Anna and I headed off to Mahabs! I can’t say or spell the proper name so Mahabs is just going to have to do. After a 2 hour bus journey and a few failed attempts at I Spy and Who I Am I, we arrived. We dumped our stuff at the hotel and went out for a look around. It was a really nice wee place with everything quite close together. We visited a couple of the old ruined temples there which looked amazing. They really were lovely. However there were far too many people about them! Taking pictures of themselves with the temple or trying to take pictures of us, it wasn’t nice. And it meant I couldn’t properly appreciate the ruins. But it was fine, most of the time.. Back to the town for a wee bit of shopping (buying fun trousers) and out for dinner. I got really excited because I thought “yes, this is a touristy place! I can have meat and it’ll be safe!” No. I tried to order a beef sizzler and was told I couldn’t because it was “cow’s birthday.” So no meat for Niamh. Cow’ birthday is Pongal, just in case you thought it might be the birthday of the cow they were going to serve, thankfully not. Ruth did suggest that I just go out and start ripping chunks off a cow in street but I decided that would have been frowned upon. It was really nice not to really do anything but to just sit and chat with people who actually understood you when you nodded your head and didn’t wobble it when you meant yes. But again we had to go back to teaching. It was just as hard the second time around, although the teachers did seem happy we’d celebrated Pongal. Although I didn’t have the heart to tell them I’d not done it the traditional Indian way…