We're very spiritual people

Well, we're staying in a community called Auroville which is designed to be an ideal city dedicated to promoting human unity anyway. For us this involves staying in a tree hut with no electricity and a toilet 100 mts away through the long grass. Well obviously I had to tell Paul that we were doing well on the whole illness front with just three really bad days between us which meant that my stomach problems occurred the night we moved into the hut (without a torch!) - a manic dash through the darkness to an equally pitch black toilet with a soundtrack of howling dogs and the large book on 'Common Snakes of Auroville' I'd seen earlier in the day running through my mind wasn't exactly the ideal introduction to the place but since then it's been great. It has a fantastic swimming pool, a nice beach, really nice food....yeah I guess I'm missing the whole spiritual side! Well, we did do some work on one of the farming projects here today and it was wicked, will be doing some more tomorrow. And we did visit the giant meditation building which looks more like a giant golden golfball than anything else - they were doing some building work which meant we couldn't go inside. So Auroville - a great place but maybe not 'Auroville - the city the Earth needs' as the leaflets somewhat grandiosely claim.
Before we got here,we went to Chennai which was a cool city - the highlight was definitely going to see a Tamil film which was just as ludicrously overdramatic as you could hope with loads of random dancing and singing, ridiculous fight scenes and a scene in which the evil woman of the piece was electrocuted in a comedy (well we thought so) style and then spent a few hours dying dramatically. It was really entertaining and it was surprising how much we understood. Then we went to Mamallapuram which was a pretty, sleepy little seaside town. We loved the Crocodile Breeding Centre just outside where me and Paul paid about 50p to feed the crocs, which were in very crowded pens with not very high walls, and then kept running away screaming like little girls when they jumped with their jaws open to get the food. We felt particularly stupid when we noticed some local women doing maintenance work in one of the pens, barefoot and with only a large stick for protection. We also had a kinda weird evening with some fellow travellers including a relic called Mickey who had been coming to India for 18 years and seemed quite nice until he revealed his rabid hatred of Muslims, claiming the tornado that hit Birmingham deliberately targetted Muslim areas (?!). Time for me and Paul to take him to task....oh no we just stared at the floor and muttered (we are actually getting a lot of practise at this as a lot of Hindu Indians do tend to assume we hate all Muslims as they do). Then onto Pondicherry where I had a baguette with loads of butter for the first time in two months (very important for me) but which was a bit depressing due to the very rich Westerners everywhere and the equal number of drunk/destitute Indians, which we haven't really seen that much elsewhere. And then to here, where we are developing our spiritual sides by joining the Om choir and the spiritual healing dance sessions which I'll let Paul tell you about next time.

Love Sophie xx