During my walk, I came across a magician set up outside and working for tips. Although I was a bit sleepy and not in an ideal mood, I let him do his schpiel. The fellow was not flawless - I caught some of his sleight-of-hand at times - but he was decent and entertaining as he did a variety of tricks while telling a story.
Granted, I did not understand all of the story. Partially because I was too busy watching his hands, but partially because his accent was difficult to make out. I'm not sure whether the South Indian accent is more difficult to understand than the North Indian one for my American-English ears (I'm biased as I've spent the last 10 months in Delhi in the north), but people do seem to have trouble understanding me as well. I guess it makes sense because Tamil is the official language of Tamil Nadu. Tamil is in the Dravidian language family, sharing no roots with English at all unlike Hindi, which is in the Indo-European language family.
Having no 100s left, I tipped the magician a huge 500 rupees ($10). Better overtip than undertip, but his show wasn't that awesome.
My driver, who knows how to get everywhere, took me to the center of Madurai to the Thirumalai Naick Palace for the Sound and Light show. After I bought my tickets for 50 rupees (the version in English was twice the price of the Tamil one), there was time to spare since we'd left early to avoid traffic. So my driver and I walked up the slightly sketchy neighborhood street with narrow, narrow sidewalks to a local place. This booth sold a very popular sweet drink that my driver insisted I would enjoy.
He was correct.
I'll describe this as a caramel cardamom milkshake and it was thick enough to eat with a spoon.
I'm sure I broke all kinds of health advisories for foreigners by partaking of this; anything with ice is not advised because the water is often unfiltered and ice cream in general is suspect because power outages cause melting. The glass was... mostly clean... and the guy selling them dipped his fingers in splashy water after touching the money which was far from sufficient to get the germs off. Maybe he was just unsticky-ing them. Yet, the drink was sweet and tasty. Nothing so much as indigestion came my way. Perhaps because this drink is so popular, the ingredients are fresh.
Or I might just be a lucky bastard.
Hanging at the Palace
We walked around the outside of the palace (which is right smack in the middle of the city) until it was getting near time for the show. Then the driver went back to the car while I waited near the entrance.
I have been generally not getting hassled on this trip (from touts, beggars, salesmen, etc), which has been nice, but two people bugged me, selling things, while I waited. I hate it. I mean I get it, but still hate it.
The audience was mostly Indian and I'm guessing that is because the majority of Indians do not speak Tamil and so go to the English show instead. A couple from Kerala with their three-and-a-half year old daughter sat next to me. The young girl impressed me. She knew her numbers, her ABCs, and answered "What's your name?" properly.
But, seriously. These shows are cheesy and dull. I went to a similar show at Agra and this one was no better. You sit in rows of chairs in a, granted, kind of nifty location (this one was a columned courtyard) while a disembodied recorded set of voices narrates a story, mostly talking about the awesomeness of the local king and some scandals that happened during his reign.
The voices come from different locations and various parts of the courtyard light up during the show, often in different colors. Sometimes, the lighting seems to make sense with the story. Other times it's random. It sort of feels like you are hanging out in a palace, eavesdropping around a corner, listening to people you cannot see.
All I remember about the story is that King Thirumalai (yeah, I looked that up later) had two queens. An assassin tried to kill him and the fact that his would-be killer dressed as a woman was something the king referred to as "cowardly" and "shameful" so the guy was not particularly endearing himself to me. There were traitors and thieves and moments where you were just shaking your head, but I didn't pay attention to the whole thing, either.
It wouldn't be so bad to just sit and try to enjoy the story, but these shows tend to start around dusk. So, there you are, sitting still as the sun sets, a perfect evening meal for mosquitoes.
Meenakshi Amman Temple
This is the big temple in Madurai and the main reason this city is on my itinerary.
After my mediocre breakfast, my extraordinarily punctual driver picked me up and drove me the 20 minutes through the city to the Big Temple.
Sri Meenakshi Amman Temple - so big you can see it from my hotel! (With the zoom lens, anyway.)
Similar to my other experiences, this temple did not allow shoes even though most of it was outdoors. I left my shoes with the lady shoekeeper at the entrance, who looked jaundiced due to her yellowy skin.
Unlike my other experiences, this temple does not allow cameras! I was very disappointed about this. I read on Wikitravel later that you can get an exception for a mobile phone (i.e. with a camera) and pay for a permit, but I remember being checked pretty thoroughly on my way in to make sure I had nothing of the sort on my person.
The only photos I have were taken outside the gates, like these for example:
The East Tower (there is one in every cardinal direction) and a close up.
There were many locals, but few (obvious) foreigners inside the complex. There were interior areas and exterior parts, mostly along the outer walls, and even a market in the middle. About halfway through my wandering, a professional-looking man came up to me and offered to be my guide. I thought about it then agreed since I was probably not getting much out of the place by guessing. We agreed on 400 rupees and then he took me around.
Meenakshi Entrance Gate
The guide was decent and gave me explanations of the age and other details about the towers, sculptures, and other holy objects within the temple. I also learned from him that the woman at the entrance was not jaundiced, but just had bathed in turmeric (or something similar.)
I was not allowed in the most sacred area. It was for Hindus only. And, per Wikitravel, they will pull "suspicious" people out of line. That would be me. I did not feel like waiting in a line anyway and there was plenty to see otherwise.
One of the best things he explained was about Ganesh, the elephant-headed God. He said that the reason Ganesh(a) has one partial tusk is because he broke it off when needing something to write with (for composing holy scripture.) I had never even noticed that one of Ganesh's tusks was shorter than the other. Now that's all I see.
What you missed seeing because I had no camera: A sculpture of a dude with a penis so long, elephants held it up, and someone at the other end was playing it like an instrument. The guide said it was Kama Sutra, which makes no sense. Like in Khajuraho, "Kama Sutra" seems to be a term used instead of "items of an explicit nature" in holy places to foreigners. Use of this term does not appear to relate in any way to the actual book in question.
Another thing that strikes me about all these sculptures is that everything from the pose to the muscle ripples to the veins are perfectly captured... but not women's breasts. I haven't seen an authentic-looking boob in this place. Real breasts sag a bit by nature. Even the perkiest breast of the sizes depicted could not defy gravity in such a way. If you can make a bicep bulge, you'd think you would be able to properly droop a boob.
Toward the end, the guide said I could get a third-story view of the whole temple complex. Cool, I thought!
Then I realized it was in the third story of a tourist shop. D'oh.
The guide had departed and gosh darn it if the salesman at the tourist shop did and said all the exact right things to ease my discomforts and disarm my irritations. He implied, among other things, that he did not mind showing me around for hours, even if I purchased nothing. All in a very earnest, natural tone. Yeah, so I ended up purchasing a little rug with elephants. It is very well-made and I don't regret the $150 purchase since I had been in the market for something quality I could have as a keepsake, but it only occurred to me months and months later that it is almost certainly a prayer rug. So I placed it in front of my bookshelf. Pray to the almighty novel!
My driver found me despite that the tourist shop had been outside a different gate than the one I entered and, once shoes were in hand, off we went!
Mariamman Teppakulam Tank
We pulled over beside a large, sunken grass area with an island in the middle. On the island was a nifty-looking temple, but we did not walk down into the tank to get any closer. We just stopped by to check it out and snap photos.
Mariamman Teppakulam Tank: Come hang out, and bring your cow
And here is more evidence of a water shortage. If you Google "Mariamman Teppakulam Tank", almost every photo you see will show the "tank" full of water like a lake (it is connected to city canals, evidently), making the temple on a true island.
But no water here now.
Look, a Church!
Having lived in India for so long, it is a strange sight to see a church towering at the end of a street with autorickshaws. Although Christians are a definite minority in the mostly Hindu country, they are a visible one down south.
St. Mary's
One of two churches in Madurai with that name
Closed!
So, I'm learning that temples like to close early in the afternoon. It was a random Friday at around 2:00pm, but the gates were no longer open. Definitely a waste of shoe-taking-off. I actually got a splinter in my foot to boot! Ouch! Luckily, it came out in the shower.
Thiruparankundram: No Love
I could see stairs in the hillside behind the gate... how I wanted to climb those stairs. (At the least, to get a photograph of the colorful temple with the sunlight in the right direction.)
(If I walked all the way up here, I'm gonna take some more photos even if you won't let me in.)
I headed back. Luckily, my driver was still waiting.
As we traveled, we saw some folk wearing black and what looked like blankets on their heads. I'm told that they are doing a pilgrimage for the Tamil holy month. Some are going to Palani temple 100km away and some came from Kerala, even further, to do the pilgrimage. Many were barefoot! This surprised me because first off, I am wimp and cannot imagine doing a serious walk without shoes. Also because doesn't it sort of defeat the purpose of going barefoot in the temple, then, if the dirt of the mundane world is on your feet? Then again, I have seen people wandering around barefoot while in the general neighborhood of a temple, so maybe being barefoot is more symbolic. In any case, people provide water and free bananas to the pilgrims as they make their way.
And that ends Madurai for me. I finally figured out that the red tassel hanging on my hotel doorknob meant "do not disturb" and that the green tassel meant "please clean." I used the red tassel in the evening and finally did have some tasty food. What I ate was called aval payasam and is like a rice pudding. Yum.
