Museums and Beaches

Two weeks ago we visited the Government Museum, Citi Centre Mall, and Marina Beach. We already wrote a blurb about the visit to Citi Centre, so now it's time to fill in the blanks for the two more interesting parts of the day.

The Government Museum was quite interesting. The exhibits are contained in six buildings on about 15 acres of land in a part of the city called Egmore. Like everything else we've encountered so far, it was a fascinating mix of extremes. The architecture was amazing, but many of the buildings were run down and in disrepair. The grounds were either lush and green or under some sort of construction with debris piled everywhere.

We were greeted at the entrance by a man running the ticket booth. He was sitting behind a rusty metal screen that had obviously been painted with a brush and a can of black paint many times over the years. Of course, it doesn't seem so odd to me now that I've seen the paint crew at my office slap white paint all over wood trim and the most amazing granite floors I've ever seen, but back to the story. When we asked how much tickets were, he pointed us to a sign that had two separate pricing schemes - one for foreigners and one for everyone else. Great!

We paid our fee, and even managed to get a student rate for Luanne by showing her Kendall student ID. That made me feel a little better about the pricing scheme.

The first building we went in had incredible Hindu stone statues and carvings from ~500BC on. You can see from the picture that they're completely exposed to visitors, and it was obvious from smooth spots that they were handled often. Noah was terrified of them, so we had to carry him the entire time. Micah kept trying to pet everything, so we had to carry him too. Between the kids and people hitting us up for "donations" it was a busy little tour.

The highlight of exhibit, though, was when we got to the very end. One of the museum guards walked Micah over to a 2000 year old stone cow, picked him up, and plopped him down. We weren't quite sure what to make of the situation, so we took some pictures. Then Noah got on and we took some more pictures. Nothing like spending an afternoon playing on ancient artifacts - that's what I say.

After this exhibit came the Zoological gallery. We had a very eager museum employee walk us through the entire gallery giving us information on the displays, taking pictures, and being generally too helpful. When we were ready to move on he hit us up for a tip, of course, right in front of a sign proclaiming that museum policy forbade tipping employees. Very classy. I gave him 40 rupees, which he said wasn't enough, and we had to agree to disagree.

Luanne's favorite exhibit was posed human and horse skeletons (not really, she thought it was a little creepy):

Mine was an 11 foot tall skeleton of an elephant that had been hunted down after killing two men in a stampede 75 years ago (complete with original newspaper article):

We buzzed through a bronze sculpture exhibit after this one, but that was the kids' limit (or our limit with the kids, depending on how you look at it).

Next was Marina Beach. I would later find out that this is a public beach, and not someplace that someone "like us" would normally go at any hour. We suspected as much when we noticed that people were following us as we walked towards the water. By the time we got there we had a crowd of about 30 people watching our every move. The kids were a big hit, as was Luanne's bold display of sleeveless shoulders. I'm not sure what the Tamil word for "hussie" is, but I'm sure Luanne has been the talk of many a dinner table over the past few weeks.

For some reason, Micah was terrified of the water. He wouldn't let it touch him, and if it did, he let out a blood curdling scream similar to the one he used on the airplane when we tried to get him to do anything he didn't want to (good memories). He quickly discovered that if he backed to far away from the surf he would get within reach of the crowd of observers, and someone would invariably try to pick him up. He spent his time trying to balance the two evils, not really being successful at avoiding either completely.

Noah dove right in, and was up to his neck in water with no delay. By the time we dragged him out he was sand and water from head to toe but had a good time in the process. All in all a successful outing.