First day in Chennai

Evening of Tuesday, 29 December 2009, Radisson Hotel, Chennai: Today we hired a driver from the hotel and drove around Chennai all day. One of the places we stopped at was called the Ice House outside of Chennai were Swami Vivekenanda stayed for a week after he got back from the famous 1897 World Religious Conference in Chicago. He was the first Swami ever to visit the Americas. He ended up staying in the US for an extended period, and became all the rage there due to his forceful personality and charismatic speaking skills. Swami Vivekenanda was a disciple of Ramakrishna. This "Ice House" is now a museum devoted to his memory, with a short film, lots of photos, paintings, books and a meditation room that had been Swami Vivekananda's bedroom while he was there. They called it the Ice House because in the 1800's, for the first time ice was brought to southern India by boat from Boston, and stored there. Ice became quite popular to these southern Indian (who had never experienced it before), and the Bostonian who ran the scheme made a fortune. But then a process was developed to make ice locally using evaporative cooling and the bottom fell out of the market for Boston ice.
So while I was there I felt a need to use their public restroom for #2, as some of my spicy lunch was reacting with my delicate intestines. And of course, we're talking Indian toilets here, which is basically a porcelein basin with a foot-shaped area on each side to place your feet as you squat. And then a plastic measuring cup (2-cup size) sitting under a faucet for you to use to wash your privates with after performing the dirty deed. But it takes a very skilled yogi indeed (in my opinion) to be able to perform this operation while squatting with your pants down around your ankles, without getting your pants wet and/or soiled in either the excretion or the washing stages. I finally decided to just take them off before proceeding, and that seemed to work fine, but it takes longer.
The thing you see quite often here that you would never see back home is the 4 person moped scenario. It goes something like this. Dad is driving the moped. Oldest daughter (around 10 years old) behind him, arm around his waist. Mom sitting sidesaddle behind her, holding youngest daughter (about 5 years old). Snaking through dangerous traffic at about 20 mph as everybody (taxis, motorcycles, mopeds, pedestrians, motor rickshaws and the occasional dog or cow) weaves in and out, horns touting periodically as if they were controlled by an extremely talented cosmic teenage video game player, amazingly accident-free.