Hooray for my last post about the India trip! I’m not going to blog about the horrendously long voyage home in which I coughed the entire way and ran fevers. Oh wait, I guess I just did.
So after Thanjavur we drove to the 2500 year old city of Madurai (according to Wikipedia for whatever that’s worth). Madurai is home to the famous Meenakshi temple dedicated to Lord Shiva and Goddess Parvathi (aka Meenakshi) his wife. Unfortunately many of the towers were covered over due to the renovations and repainting that are going on. There were hundreds of people there for Pongal, but luckily we knew one of the priests there (cousin to the priest who married my husband and me), so he helped us shove our way to the front of the line to see the shrine in the center of the complex. Unfortunately, we weren’t allowed to take pictures of that (but it was dark in there, so they probably wouldn’t have come out anyway). (some of these photos are from my mother-in-law’s collection).
Here is the bazaar that is at the entrance to the temple complex. This part of the building has paintings adorning the ceiling, and carved stone pillars.
A monkey at the entrance. We saw millions of monkeys hanging around in North India, but in South India we didn’t see very many, so we were excited to see this one.
A view of the complex from a nearby store. No matter where you are in India, if you have a tourguide, they will inevitably take you to a place to buy expensive souvenirs. It really was a shame that those towers were covered.
A bull on the street eating garbage. Note his colorfully painted horns!
