April 21 – 22, 2013

After all the excitement of the past few days, we were all ready to just relax at Hari’s and figure out where else we should go in India. India is a huge country and trying to figure out what to see in our short time was a difficult task. Eventually, Chandler and Hari came up with a plan that took us down to the southwest state of Kerala.

Cows chilling in the road

We had one mission the next day, to buy our train tickets. The tickets would go on sale at 10am, so naturally at 930, the internet at Hari’s went out. The phone also stopped working so we had no way of contacting Hari to find out how to fix it. We decided to take the metro downtown to find some internet in a café or restaurant or anywhere. Once downtown, we went to McDonald’s for a delicious spicy paneer sandwich and hopefully to buy the tickets. Unfortunately, McD’s required that we have a cell phone number to obtain a password to use the internet.

We finished our lunch and were informed that there was a tourist office with free internet. We headed over to find that we had been duped and just found someone trying to hard sell us a packaged tour of western India. The moment we walked out of that tourist scam office, someone approached us to show us the “government” tourist office. We were getting feed up with people trying to “help” us at this point and headed to anther known internet spot, Starbucks. Again, we were unable to access the web, but found a very kind German girl who allowed us to use her cell phone to call Hari, who got the tickets for us.

With our only goal of the day taken care of, we were free for some sightseeing. We searched the guide book for something close and free and came upon the Gandhi Smriti Museum. This is where Gandhi spent his final days and where he was assassinated. The museum was full of artwork devoted to Gandhi’s life, photographs and quotes by Gandhi and the history of life including a detailed account of his final day. There was a display of his possessions and his bedroom was still intact. This was a very moving place and was good to get an understanding of how much Gandhi did for the country’s independence using nonviolent means.

Gandhi’s possessions

Gandhi’s bedroom

We spent several hours at the museum reading all the information available and left at closing time. We were planning on meeting Hari back at his place, so we jumped back on the metro. That night we had a simple, less rich meal of fried okra, dal and chapattis.