Contrasts in Chennai
This entry is a little out of order, but I'm finally getting a chance to jot some of the early impressions down. After a long day and a half of flying, I finally reached Chennai. The airport was impressively quick to move through, perhaps because no one seemed to be manning the scanner as we pushed our hand luggage through the conveyor. I quickly found my driver, who was holding up a sign with my name in a throng of other drivers awaiting passengers from the crowded flight.
We got into the car and my driver was very solicitous – making sure I had a comfortable trip and then launching into stories of all the amazing things there are to buy in India and how he would be happy to take me on a tour of them. He said, “you are now my very special guest,” but not in a creepy way. What was creepy was the ATM we stopped at on the way to the hotel. Surprisingly, there is no ATM in the plush ITC Park Sheraton, so we stopped beside a ramshackle looking building (the only one lit on its block) and I asked the driver if he would come in with me to get cash. This was apparently a branch of a well-known international bank, but the only thing remotely safe looking about the machine was that it was manned by a guard in uniform, squatting on a stool in the booth. I quickly pulled out 200 rupees, much too little to get by on, I quickly realized, but enough to cover tips for a few days. The exchange is 44 rupees to a dollar. Along our trip, the relative poverty to the States was paramount – free-roaming cows were feeding on garbage off the street; everything appeared to be covered with a type of dust or dirt (which you could also smell quite acutely from the cab) and all was dark except for the aggressively bright neon lights that advertised all manner of things along the thoroughfare.