12:58pm- I woke up this morning at 6:05am to the smell similar that to of smoked wood. It ended up being the air coming through the vents. At 8am we ended up having a diplomatic briefing where we learned the Tamil (people/language of the region) greeting of “hello”, which was vanakam, and the Tamil word for “Thank you”, which was nandri.
I got off the ship at 10:30am along with Steve, Ari, and Kira. As we exited the ship we were bombarded by cyclo drivers and after figuring out that we were in the middle of nowhere, we bargained and got the price to be 25 rupees for the each of us. When we got to the port gate, about ¼ mile away, we then stopped and were told to get out and to get into a rickshaw (we later found out that the rickshaws were not allowed to go into the port so the cyclos had to bring customers out to them).
As we got into the rickshaw and the driver introduced himself as Salang we confirmed that the price was still the same. It all started off pretty nicely as we had just given him the directions that we had an hour and just wanted to go around the city. He insisted on bringing us to shopping places and all the places he took us to were similar to that of small department stores. At the first place we saw a bunch of SAS students so we figured that it was a tourist trap. Not what we were looking for. We kept explaining to him that we wanted to go to a marketplace and the third place he brought us to was a department store in the middle of a marketplace. The two drivers and the one armed cyclo driver that came along insisted that we go inside but we just went around the corner to the marketplace instead. This is when they began to get irritated. We figured that they probably get a commission. We then told them that we had to get back to the ship and they said, “Ok.” Halfway back they insisted we stop at another department store. I told our driver that we had to get back to the ship immediately because Ari and Kira needed to get back in time for their field trip. They stopped at another department store anyway and I told everyone to stay in the rickshaws. This made them angrier so they started driving and just stopped in the middle of a street and got out. They walked down the street and started cigarettes behind a wall. I got out of the rickshaw and approached Steve and Ari’s that had the cyclo driver still in it. I asked him what was going on and told him to get the drivers. A few minutes later when we were about to find another ride the drivers came back and took us back to the port, although it was the farthest entrance away from the ship and not where we had agreed upon, back at the entrance to the ship. As Kira and my rickshaw died we got pushed to the other entrance that was closer. Ari and Kira ran off to try and catch their bus and left Steve and I to pay. To make a longer story short, they tried to argue that the price of the trip was more and that the agreed upon price was for the cyclo. We ended up giving them 100 extra rupees.
9:00pm- In the afternoon I went on the Chennai City Orientation. We started off by going to our guide’s house. It was a modest middle class home. After that we went to a Hindu temple and then off to more department stores.
Some Random Stuff on Chennai
- Chennai was known as Madras until it was officially changed in 1996
- Population- 6 million people – 4th Largest City in India
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