More Nerds than a Tolkien Fan Club Meeting

A bit of a catchup blog here, as we had a long series of travel days followed by a packed first couple days in India. We’re in India, for the wedding of a friend and colleague from the University. That would be exciting enough, but in the week leading up to the wedding, she’s leading all of her nerdy friends and family on an art history tour of Tamil Nadu in India. But, I’m getting a bit ahead of myself.

We left Minneapolis on New Year’s Day, and flew to Amsterdam. Thanks to a lengthy layover in Amsterdam, we were able to head into the city and grab a quick visit to the Rijksmuseum. Kat had never been outside of the Amsterdam airport before, so it was fun to show her a place that I’ve gotten to know pretty well. We got back to the airport in time to grab a shower and change clothes, then we boarded our flight to Dubai.

Our Dubai connection was a bit tighter, and the Dubai airport was properly chaotic – I don’t understand how a newly built airport in a place that is, ahem, not exactly resource constrained, manages to function so poorly. We made it to Chennai around 8am on Friday, the 3rd and got picked up and taken to meet some members of our tour group. Then we all set off for our first tour stop, Mahabalipuram. Mahabalipuram is home to a series of rock cut temples and other shrines, dating from the 7th century. They’re really cool structures, each carved from a single boulder made of a very hard granitic rock.

Visiting our first historical site, the Tiger Cave, also gave us a chance to start feeling out the specialities of the group members – the art historians interpreting the meaning of the site, the geologist explaining how the rocks came to exist there, the new world historian drawing parallels to the Inca, etc.

By around 8pm, Kat and I were feeling the effects of having been awake for 50 hours, so we called it a night early.

This morning (Saturday) we all got on our tour busses and visited a few more rock cut temple sites in Mahabalipuram. Our first stop was the Five Rathas, which is a somewhat mysterious site – it’s a series of carved structures, some incomplete, and all vastly different styles. One theory is that it was essentially a showroom where you could go and shop for a temple for yourself.

After lunch, we drove about two hours south to the French colonial town of Pondicherry, where we’re spending the night. It’s a gorgeous town which reminds me a lot of some of my favorite places in Southeast Asia. Kat and I got some ice creams, waffles, and wandered the town before our group meetup for dinner. It’s lovely, if a bit intimidating, getting to know everyone. I suppose a destination wedding in southern India is somewhat self-selecting for people comfortable with travel, but I’m not sure I’ve ever been around a more well-traveled set of people.

Tomorrow we head to the temple city of Chidambaram – I’m really excited, because it’s a site I’ve been learning about for years as part of my work in this area. Also, I promise to write more compelling and coherent blogs once I’m a little more caught up on sleep.