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Feb 12-15: road trip and wedding

We decided to go on a bit of a road trip (with a hired driver and Vig’s Uncle K) while we were in Chennai – just go down the coast a bit to Mahabalipuram and Pondicherry and see what they were like. The first stop, just outside Chennai (once you get past the traffic!) was Dakshin Chitra. It’s a pretty contrived but still entertaining “living museum” of arts and crafts and such.

They have a bazaar, lots of demonstrations and hands-on stuff, and it was really quite fun. We got there pretty early so it was quiet and fairly cool as well. There were various traditionally furnished houses, displays on cookware and household items, and all kinds of stuff. And they had weaving!

This guy was weaving sari fabric – super thin threads, all silk, with a fancy pattern woven in as well. Awesome!

And since yarn is necessary…

So are swifts!

I also tried my hand at grinding rice – necessary for such yummies as dosa.

(Wearing my new Indian-acquired duds.)

Then it was onwards to Mahabalipuram. Its main claim to fame is numerous (and I mean numerous) carved rock temples and shrines. After checking into the guest house (Siva Guest House – highly recommended, they’re really friendly and the rooms are super clean and appropriately basic) we headed out to see the sights.

Krishna’s Butterball – I think it one might be naturally occurring rather than carved, but I could be wrong! It’s not held down by anything except gravity, and it is on a slope. I wouldn’t sit in front of it!

The Shore Temple – pretty at sunset! We got there just in time to get in a look before it closed up for the evening.

A bunch of the sights are all in a row, so you can walk from one end to the other pretty quickly and easily. We got dropped off at the butterball and walked to meet the driver, Xavier, at the lighthouse.

Lots and lots of carved rock. It is pretty interesting, but it started to get a little tedious after awhile. These are the Five Rathas – shrines that were buried until the British dug them up and put them on display.

At least there were some highly entertaining goats, climbing on a pretty sheer rock face! It was crazy, this was at least 20 feet off the ground.

Mahabalipuram is a tiny place, really just worth a day trip from Chennai, but we stayed overnight so we could drive on to Pondicherry the next day without having to double back. I found Mahabalipuram a little too touristy and kinda trashy – everything building’s either a souvenir shop or a guest house! The monuments were really not kept well, there was a lot of plastic trash everywhere and it was just disgraceful.

We had slightly higher hopes for Pondicherry (Puducherry), a former French colony a couple more hours south along the coast.

The signs and pretty buildings remain!

Unfortunately that was kind of it. Not a lot of French charm left, although maybe we just didn’t know where to find it! We walked around a little, just looking at the houses and things, poking in a few shops, being freakily followed by a stray dog (that was scary for a few minutes) and ended up at the beach – which is a rocky shore. It was pretty to look out though.

Random food notes, since it’s been a theme of my trip: we ended up eating both dinner and breakfast at the hotel, and they had pretty good North and South Indian food. For breakfast, yummy rawa dosa, which is made with wheat flour in addition (I think?) to the usual rice and lentil flours. Mmm. I do miss eating dosai for breakfast these days!

We stayed overnight in Pondicherry and headed back to Chennai in the morning, stopping to take a look at one of the big South Indian temples in town. Might be a little hard to see, but it’s all painted up. And it has to all be repainted every couple years!

The next day we got up bright and early to head out to a wedding that one of Vig’s other uncles had invited us to – why turn down an offer like that?! I’d wanted to wear a sari but didn’t have enough time to get a blouse made so I just wore a skirt, top and scarf instead. It worked out well because I think I would’ve been a little uncomfortable in a sari! That’s a lot of fabric to manage.

What surprised me the most about the wedding was how much people weren’t paying attention – stuff with the bride and groom goes on for so long, it’s not like people are all that interested in actually watching every little detail of the rituals. People just socialized, walked around, read the newspaper (!) and went and ate in the dining hall whenever.

There were long tables set up with banana leaf and pre-served with some of the cold stuff, then once you sit down the servers come along with pails of rice and rasam and curry and all sorts of stuff until you say stop – they cook it all fresh there at the hall and even change the menu throughout the day. We had dosa and idlis and things for breakfast when we got there, then rice and rasam and such for lunch a couple hours later!

After the wedding we got the auto to take us on a little bit of a shopping trip – I love the stainless steel store and bought quite a few tumblers and bowls. It was dirty work sorting out what I wanted though!

Of course, all the copper and stainless steel dishware I bought meant that my luggage was a) fuller and b) wayyy heavier. We spent the rest of the day doing laundry and packing up for a flight the next day to Delhi – and cooler weather!

february 8-11: Chennai

From Kuala Lumpur we caught an evening flight to Chennai (also known as Madras, before the name was officially changed a few years ago) and stayed with Vig’s Uncle K for the week, aside from a mini road trip that’ll be the next post! After three weeks of go-go-go, we were so tired and ready for a break. Being in a home and just hanging out was nice! We took it really easy, ate at home all the time, and just took short excursions out.

There are definitely cows everywhere – it was pretty sad to see them trying to eat garbage. There isn’t much grass going on in the city! Along with the cows there were also TONS of stray dogs that would bark and fight at all hours of the night, cats, and chickens.

We visited the neighbourhood night vegetable market, to buy veggies for Mamy (Uncle K’s cooking lady) to prepare. Basically she comes over once a day (twice while we were there) to prepare whatever food for the day. It was rather nice not having to really think about where to get food!

We also went and did a little shopping – I’d packed maybe a little *too* light, and really needed some tops and a lighter skirt. I actually ended up buying a wrap skirt from a little shop near the vegetable market, according to them it was 3/4 length but it was certainly full length on me (and I’m not super short)! The skirts are looooong.

We checked out a few shops in Pondy Bazaar, a shopping street with bazaar-y stalls and little sellers along with larger established shops and things. I did manage to find a good top, so I bought two in different colours – I’m a bit picky, so it took a little doing to find tops I would actually wear (and that would fit).

On the same shopping day we went to Kumeran Silks, a HUGE, multi level store that mainly sells silk saris along with some other styles of clothes, accessories…and silk material!

Prices were excellent and I ended up buying quite a lot of different colours and types for presents – and myself, obviously! We also checked out some different price ranges on saris, from $25 to over $1000!

Crazy tidbit about India – oh, the bureaucracy. Buying things in stores takes so many people! There was one guy who cut the fabric, one guy who wrote the amounts down and took it to a counter, the next guy printed up the receipt on the computer, the next guy checked the receipt again, then you pay the next guy, who gives it back to one of the previous guys to stamp, and then finally you give the stamped receipt to the guy who bagged your purchase and you can get your bag and leave! Takes at least 10 minutes to buy anything.

(Lots of the crazy politicians hire people to paint self-aggrandizing portraits and things on walls and fences all over the place…it was interesting to see!)

Man we took a lot of autorickshaws during out time in India – it really is the best way to get around! They can weave in and out of traffic more easily than a car (too easily maybe) and are really cheap. One that we hired for about six hours took us around whereever, waited while we were in stores and things, for a total of 400 INR or about ten dollars. And although riding around in them was somewhat hair-raising (no safety measures of any sort), at least the breeze was nice!

Although it was actually cooler in Chennai than it was in Kuala Lumpur, we got much more tired of the heat. The houses are concrete and relatively cool, with lots of fans and such, but the bedroom was upstairs and was way too hot to be comfortable at night. On top of that we had to have the window open, but that meant that it was really LOUD in the mornings! People want to get out and do stuff before it gets too hot, but that’s like 6am. Even earplugs didn’t really cut it, and since our sleep was disturbed it was even more tiring.

Later in the week we headed out with a hired driver and Uncle K for a 2-day road trip a little ways down the coast!

home sweet home

Following a crazy airline scheduling thing that had me scrambling to find a flight on Monday (and thinking I might end up staying in Edinburgh a lot longer) I finally flew home yesterday! I have so much still to catch you all up on – all my adventures in India and Scotland, what I knit, and what I bought!

I have lots of photos to go through so it might be a few days of intensive posting, if I can manage it. I’m a homebody at heart and I’m so glad to be back, even though it’s barely changed a bit. Sleeping in my own bed for once was just awesome, with the added side effect of changing time zones so much that I able to sleep for 8 hours and still got up at a reasonable time.

In the meanwhile, take a look at my Errata page – there are a few corrections to the Amelia pattern and a few to Teach Yourself Visually Sock Knitting as well. And on my Classes and Appearances page, something new: I’ll be speaking at the Downtown Knit Collective guild meeting on March 18!

I guess I’d better start writing something to say! Also, I need to find myself a new project or two – as you can imagine I’m just a little bit sick of the 2 projects I worked on (intermittently) for the last six weeks. Time for a little stash diving.

Feb 4-7: Kuala Lumpur

Kuala Lumpur (KL for short!) was a last-minute addition to our trip itinerary – we were going to go from Beijing to Singapore, then Singapore to India, but couldn’t get a flight we were happy with. So Kuala Lumpur it was! Just a short stop of a couple days, but we did end up seeing a lot.

It was darn hot – flying from Beijing to KL was a bit of a temperature shock! It was around freezing in Beijing and 30-35 C in KL, so a bit of a drastic wardrobe change was required. I wasn’t super into staying at the YMCA, but the location was extremely convenient (right by the KL Sentral station, where the airport train and all the intracity public transportation goes). Walking around was tough, because there were very few sidewalks – you’d be walking along and then it suddenly ends and becomes a crazy traffic-y highway! The monorail was decent for getting around.

There were lots and lots of various eating establishments – the normal restaurants and food courts, but also street food stalls and even restaurants that were pretty much just on one side of the road! We did the touristy thing one day and went to the KL Bird Park, which was actually pretty entertaining. There was a show with performing parrots and such (and a decently cool enough place to sit!).

From there we walked to the Islamic Arts Museum – it was actually a really short walk, but the lack of good signage and the heat made it feel a lot longer. We had a great lunch at the museum, then walked by the Nation Mosque. Unfortunately when we arrived it had just closed to tourists for a couple of hours.

The next day, already sick of the heat, we took refuge in a couple of the huge malls. KL has one (or more, possibly) of the biggest malls in southeast Asia. The malls are around 8 floors, usually with a couple of food courts and just tons and tons of stores. Of course, they’re pretty popular to hang out in because of the air conditioning! We spent pretty much the entire day going from mall to mall – not the sort of thing I’m usually into, but the heat was really too much. Some of the malls are more flash than others – the Pavilion mall is really super upscale with pretty much all designer stores.

Our flight was in the evening on the 7th, so we stowed away our luggage at the YMCA and ventured out a little further. We met up with a friend of a friend just outside KL, in a suburb that was pretty easily reached via the Rapid Transit system – as an aside, KL has a really random public transportation system that consists of three different private systems that don’t intersect. It’s very strange.

Anyway, Regina was really awesome and took us to lunch at yet another huge mall, the Curve. We had Hakka food for lunch, then went for Malaysian dessert. I think it was shaved ice with condensed milk or something, and then variations of fruit and flavours. Kind of weird.

Aside from just the heat, the traffic was pretty nuts and the pollution was quite bad. The vegetation was awesome to look at (super lush!) and it was super easy to find vegetarian food. Mostly it’s the abundance of Indian food that makes it quite simple to find stuff that’s vegetarian! We did eat a couple other Malaysian foods as well – pulled roti, which is sort of like a really stretchy crepe, and pulled tea.

It’s black tea with condensed milk – tasty, but it’s a rather deadly combo of sugar and caffeine!

One last iconic image of KL is the Petronas Twin Towers, which used to be the tallest buildings in the world. You can get a free ticket to go up, but we couldn’t be bothered to get up early and queue for one! Instead we just took photos from the outside and visited the obligatory mall at the bottom.

Of course, KL was just the start of the hot-weather portion of the trip…and I still hadn’t really done much knitting, either. Up next, my first ever visit to India!

Jan 30-Feb 3: Beijing

(Whoa, sorry for the long break. India happened.)

Our flight from Shanghai to Beijing was on Air China – too bad we didn’t actually bother to order a vegetarian meal ahead of time, because it would have been interesting to see what it would have been! Instead we went to Carre-Four in Shanghai and bought stuff to make sandwiches (roasted pepper and mozzarella, they were good!).

In Beijing we stayed at the Tian An Rega hotel, which was really good – the price was right, there was a rain showerhead, the bed was comfy and the location was awesome next to the Forbidden City…but the temperature was a pretty constant 25-26 C all the time. Not so comfortable for sleeping, and the reception said they couldn’t really do anything about it. That sucked pretty bad. We did somehow manage to get it down to about 24 some nights, but it was uncomfortable. And it was below freezing outside!

Since the Chinese New Year festival was still going on there were tons of fireworks! Our first night in Beijing was the fifth night of the festival, which apparently means a LOT of fireworks. We were just wandering around (looking for a particular vegetarian restaurant which we never found) so we got to see people just setting off fireworks and firecrackers on their neighbourhood streets. Fun, but the noise and smoke got to be a bit much after 45 minutes of pretty much constant celebration!

Unfortunately we left our Beijing guidebook in Shanghai in the apartment (oops) so we had a bit of an adventure trying to figure our way around – we ended up buying chapters from Lonely Planet online and putting them on my ipod touch. It worked okay but having a proper map might’ve been useful!

We were right next to a big shopping street, Wangfujing – it’s full of different shops, a huge fancy mall, a couple department stores, and lots of people! It was really useful to have such a close landmark – it was easy enough to tell taxi drivers to go there, and then we could just walk. There’s also a Wangfujing metro stop which came in handy! Just off Wangfujing was this snack street, which houses a bunch of food vendors and a couple souvenir shops as well. Most of the stuff wasn’t vegetarian, but we did try one that was like a crepe filled with bean sprouts.

We walked around Wangfujing a lot, mostly out of necessity – we went to the department store a bunch of times to buy water and snacks, and we found a really tasty dumpling restaurant that actually had veggie options! The second day we headed down for a walk to Temple of Heaven park, which was a bit further than we had thought and quite a boring walk. At least the temple was quite nice.

Lots of tourists – again, because people were on holiday. Apparently Beijing empties out a lot during the festival but it still felt pretty populated to us! There were even some sheep carved into the marble promenade.

At least, I think it’s supposed to be a sheep – what do you all think?

Afterwards we checked out Tiananmen Square briefly before being shepherded out by the police when the square closed. That building on the left (entrance to the Forbidden City) is where that oh-so-famous portrait of Mao is hung.

We got a great tip from Elyse of iheartbeijing to check out a temple fair that was going on for Chinese New Year in Ditan Park – it was great! Pretty much all locals celebrating the festival, eating from the many food stalls and playing various midway-style games. There were also some performances going on, and lots of people selling stuff. We met up with Elyse in person afterwards, and she took us to a good veggie restaurant for lunch – unfortunately we didn’t take down the name or take photos or anything!

After lunch Elyse helped us book a taxi for the Great Wall (more on that in the next post) and we went to Hou Hai, a manmade lake with restaurants and stuff. People were playing around on the ice, but mostly without skates – they used metal chairs with ski-type rails on the bottom!

The next day we went to explore the Forbidden City, right next to our hotel – it was huge! Quite a compound with tons of buildings. A bunch of sections were closed off to the public but it was still really cool to explore.

(Just some dude, not one of us.)

As for the veggie food situation, it was a little easier than in Japan. There are Buddhist vegetarians, plus apparently people will just eat veggie for stretches of time as sort of a cleansing or religious thing. So there are lots of veggie restaurants! We found one at the top of the street the hotel was on, just by chance – they had some really nice tofu and veggie dishes, as well as nice tea.

It was at the corner of Beiheyan St and Wusi St, if anyone finds that helpful! We also ate at a veggie buffet restaurant near Yonghegong Lama Temple which wasn’t all that great, and kind of expensive compared to other restaurants. All in all, it was definitely doable to find veggie-friendly food. And if we’d been able to speak the language we probably could have ordered veggie dishes in pretty much any restaurant!

The Great Wall gets its own post coming up next!

Jan 26-30: Shanghai

Oh, Shanghai. What a weird place.

We stayed at my cousin’s place in Shanghai, which is on the east side of the river in an area called Pudong. He wasn’t even in town, so we had it all to ourselves! Big, lovely apartment (with kitchen! and washing machine/dryer!) which made us feel really at home. And there was a great supermarket just down the street. The downside was that it was a little bit harder to get to the other side of town – we had to take a taxi to the metro station, then the metro. And to get back, obviously the reverse! We took a heck a lot of taxis. But they’re really cheap!

Our flight from Japan was extremely un-full – probably only about 50 people on a whole 777! It was a really pleasant flight. I really recommend Japan Airlines, the service is great! We landed on Chinese New Year’s day and were bit afraid of crowds travelling and such, but it was actually eerily quiet. I think everyone who was going to travel home for the holiday already did!

There was a lot of fun stuff going on in China for CNY – lots of decorations, lanterns and such, festivals, and fireworks! The only bad thing was that lots of places were closed or had odd hours over the holiday – I don’t think we had any trouble though. Oh, and there were lots of crowds at stuff because people were off work.

The first full day we walked along East Nanjing Road, which is a big shopping/tourist street, then the Bund on the river along to People’s Square. (The Bund is pretty gross. Very dirty, crowded, full of hawkers and not a great view either.) We found a vegetarian restaurant on the first try, which was a good find, but the food was only okay. It turned out that we had a little bit of an easier time finding veggie food in China than Japan because of the strong Buddhist tradition. Walked around a bit afterwards around Renmin Park, then we headed home to cook and do laundry! Hooray!

The next day we went to Yu Bazaar and walked around lots of little streets with junk shops and tourist wares lining the roads. Walking off in a different direction though towards the French Concession, the atmosphere quickly changes and you emerge in a reconstructed traditional area which has become super trendy shops and restaurants.

Anyway. The last day was rainy, so we went to the Urban Planning Museum and the Shanghai Museum. And did more laundry! We also made a return visit to an AWESOME vegetarian restaurant we found the day before, near West Nanjing Road metro station, called Vegetarian Life Style.

It was really good food. Lots of mock meat, but the mock meat was actually really tasty! We had a mock roast pork which was extremely tasty (and we have been talking about it ever since) – very similar to the real thing, sweet and crispy on the outside and eerily close on the inside. (I’m not opposed to mock meat, I’m not vegetarian because I don’t like meat! I don’t eat it often, but I do miss eating meat sometimes – this was a good compromise!)

They don’t use any MSG or much oil – which can be a big hazard in Chinese cooking – and emphasize local and organic ingredients. The picture menu is extensive and easy to order off of! The second time we had some green veg with mushrooms, sweet and sour “pork” and dumplings. Yum yum. Seriously, highly recommended.

Conclusions? Shanghai is a weird place. It’s trying to expand and grow and modernize, but it’s trying to do too much, too fast! The entire city is pretty much a construction zone. It’s a very grimy, polluted city as well. First impressions in the taxi from the airport weren’t very good – the buildings look really worn and gross. The pollution has a lot to do with it, finishes on the buildings break down fast and they don’t seem to have been appropriately chosen in the first place.

In the city, traditional housing (which hasn’t been kept in shape and was really slums) is being razed and replaced with trendy, expensive condos and office buildings which the inhabitants are shipped out of the area to cookie-cutter government built low income housing.

Overall we had an okay experience, Shanghai isn’t my favourite city but it does have some fun…staying in the apartment really elevated the experience since we had somewhere nice to call home! Food was good, the transportation was okay (so many taxis though, we used maps to show the drivers where we wanted to go) but a couple of days of the pollution was more than enough!

(P.S. If you’re interested, there’s lots more photos of all my travels at Flickr!)