Pondicherry

On Thursday we left for a weekend trip to Pondicherry.  The first stop was at DakshinaChitra, a living museum of the culture and architecture of southern India.  We walked through various styles of houses and looked at cool old stuff.  It was a really neat way to display the culture of the area.  Much more interesting than walking through a normal museum. 

DakshinaChitra

After that we traveled to Crocodile Bank and looked at more species of crocodiles than I ever needed to see in this lifetime.  We also saw some snakes and turtles and other reptile-y things.  Then we went to a super fancy hotel and spent the afternoon in the pool, which was nice after walking around in the heat most of the morning.

Friday we saw the temples at Mamallapuram, which have been declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site.  The temples were really neat and each of the panels told a different story, but there were A LOT of them.  We also stopped at the Five Rathas (more temples) and Shore Temple.  That night we stayed at the Dune Eco Resort, which also had a nice pool. 

Temple at Mamallapuram

On Saturday we went to Auroville, which is a SUPER weird hippie attempt at a utopian society, although I'm pretty sure they wouldn't appreciate me calling it that.  It's a community dedicated to achieving human unity, which is a neat idea, but they're still kind of weird.  They call the woman who founded the community "the Mother."  If that's not creepy, I don't know what is.  They also have a giant golden ball where they do meditation.  We weren't allowed in.  It was also an  interesting place because there were so many different countries represented in the population living there.  I think it was more of a melting pot than the US.

Matrimandir aka completely unnecessary giant golden ball

They were doing some good things at Auroville.  We visited a place called Upasana, a social business that tries to help men and women gain livelihood.  That was nice.

On Sunday we went to the ashram of the man who inspired "the Mother" to build Auroville.  I think we saw his body and people were sitting around it.  We also got blessed by an elephant, which was...cool and sad.  After checking into the hotel in Pondicherry and eating lunch we went shopping all afternoon.

On Monday we visited Neyveli Lignite Mines, which I didn't think would be that interesting, but was actually pretty cool.  It was a huge open pit mine and we got to go into the mine and see the areas undergoing reclamation after mining. 

On Tuesday we saw Chidambaram, a really big temple and Pichavaram, a mangrove forest.  We got to ride on a boat through the forest, which was fun.  Then we came back to MCC.