First Week in Chennai

I arrived in Chennai a fortnight ago and it has definitely been an interesting two weeks! It’s not at all what I expected. I’ll start from the very beginning.

I arrived in Chennai airport at 4 a.m. on Sunday 2nd July after a tiring 21-hour journey. My main concern was for Pepsi and Socks (for those of you who don’t know – they travelled with me on the plane as excess baggage). As soon as I got through passport control I tried to find someone who could help me. I eventually managed to find a man who worked in the airport and asked him where do I pick up my cats from? He pointed at the conveyor belt and told me they would be coming out on it. I was shocked (as you can imagine) and tried to explain to him they were live animals and surely they wouldn’t put them on the conveyor belt! But he was quite adamant that they would come through on it. So, I tried to push my way through the crowds of people to get near to the conveyor belt and when I did I saw their two crates right at the end of the belt on one side with lots of luggage around them. I went over to them and they both seemed very happy to see me! It must have been a horrendous journey for them, as they both seemed pretty shell-shocked! Anyway, happy to have found them and having got them onto a trolley, my next task was to find my luggage. Sounds easy enough, but if you’d seen the amount of people and the luggage everywhere, it was a nightmare! When I did finally get my luggage I then had a challenge to fit two cats (in quite large crates), two suitcases, three pieces of hand luggage and my beanbag pillow onto a trolley. What a state I was in!! I went through to the customs and it was quite obvious that they very rarely get pets coming through Chennai airport, as they didn’t know what they were supposed to do. These two people were just looking at each other and then looking at me. Great start! I asked them if they wanted to see the paperwork (seeing as we’d paid a small fortune to get the export documents sorted), and they were quite pleased about that. The man kept saying “Paperwork, yes, paperwork” and grinning at me. So, I gave the paperwork over and they had a discussion (in Tamil obviously) about what to do. They decided that they would both sign it and put a stamp on it to say Chennai airport and then let me through. Penri was waiting for me in the arrivals – I spotted him straight away, as he was the only other white face around. We left the airport to make the half-hour drive to our house.

The house was lovely … but absolutely MASSIVE! If you can imagine a three-bedroom (four times the size of a normal bedroom), four-bathroom, two-lounge, two-dining room and kitchen with the only bits of furniture being a bed, a sofa suite, a coffee table, TV (albeit a massive one) and DVD player. The house seemed (well, it was) pretty empty. Penri had only moved in the day before I arrived and had only managed to sort out some pieces of furniture.

The first place I wanted to go was a supermarket to buy the essentials – cleaning stuff (mainly) and some food and drink. Penri took me to a supermarket called ‘Spencer’s Daily’ just down the road from our house. I couldn’t believe how little they had in the shop. If you imagine a small corner shop in the UK, that is the equivalent of a supermarket in India!!! It worried me that this is how we’re going to be living for the next year – not being able to buy luxuries such as milk (they only had this rubbish thick cream stuff which even the cats wouldn’t drink) and salt and vinegar crisps (which they don’t have here). Seriously though, there was such a limited choice of things that I was in shock at how people manage to eat healthily here.
Anyway, we bought some things and then got a rickshaw (you know, the little yellow three wheeler motorbike things - see picture below), and went back home. On my first evening in India we were sat watching TV and the electricity fuse box blew up. We lost all our power and had to run the generator (at the bottom of the garden) to keep the air conditioners running. The electrician came out at 10 p.m. to have a look at it and basically said there was not a lot he could do but he would bypass the meter and it should be working ok – the only thing was we were only allowed to have one a.c. running at any one time.

For the following few days Penri would get up and go to work and I would stay at home with the cats entertaining myself by reading and swimming and not much else. I went out a couple of times to meet him for lunch, which was nice as I got to see a bit more of the city.