India: Day Two

The second day I had signed up to do the Rotarian Homestay.  We got on a bus and drove to a central location where we met the families that we would be staying with for the next two nights.  A girl named Katherine or Katie and I were to stay with a couple the man’s name was Arul and the woman’s was Sharmila.  They lived in Chennai about 45 minutes from the town center just ten minutes from the airport.  They took us to lunch at a nice hotel restaurant just around the corner where we had a typical south Indian meal.  It was a big plate with a banana leaf covering it.  On the middle of the plate was a small pile of rice with some spices and something that tasted like peanuts.   Surrounding the rice were small metal bowls that each had different sauces in them.  Sharmila instructed us on how to eat with our hands mixing the different things in the bowls with plain rice that was brought later.  One of the bowls that was saved for last had a sweet thick milky substance that was spiced with nutmeg and cinnamon and had a few squishy noodles.  We did not mix that with rice but just drank it instead.   I also tried this “sweet” wrapped in some kind of leaf.  I did as instructed and popped the whole thing in my mouth at once.  The “sweet inside was, as far as I could tell, purely cloves and not anything like the sweets we have in the US.  After lunch they took us to the mall where we wandered around for a while.  Next we went to the Chennai museum that had a lot of statues of the different gods that were very old.  Afterwards we went to Arul’s Cousins apartment for some tea and cookies.  After tea we went to the hotel where the rotary club meeting was being held.  We had snacks there and at the end of the meeting, dancers performed two different traditional dances, one from the north and one from the south.  The rotary club gave us all presents, and were all very welcoming and nice.  After the 45 minute drive to the apartment we were staying in that our host family had only moved into a month ago, they fed us more dinner before we went to bed.