India 5

India 5 - Hyderabad 2

Well, it turned out that the end of the Ganesh festival was uneventful (in terms of anything bad). I guess 10,000 troops makes one have second thoughts about getting out of hand? Anyway, after the festival was over we went back to our original hotel and continued our sight seeing.

This is a shot out the window of our car as we were returning from Ramoji Film City to Hyderabad. This was a typical drive through Hyderabad, and you can get a sense of why we were told NOT to rent a car ourselves but instead rent a car AND a driver (which was only slightly more than the car only)! These streets would have auto rickshaws, motorbikes, normal bikes, trucks, and cattle all on the same narrow streets! It was quite the experience. Add to this that most of the vehicles had NO emissions controls and you have some pretty unpleasant driving. In fact, every day we had any length of time in the car we had very sore eyes from the exhaust fumes.

This is a shot of the Charminar in the traditionally Muslim part of older Hyderabad.This was a monument built to celebrate the end of the the 1500's by the ruling Shah of the day. You can go up to the middle section to see a good shot of the area (see below shot).

This is a view out of one of the sides of the Charminar. You can get an idea of the level of humans in India in this shot! Most of what you see in this shot are the auto-rickshaws (the black-topped, yellow-sided smaller vehicles) and the open air market (on the left of the auto-rickshaws).The market was a colorful mix of all kinds of produce, and behind the open air market was a series of small shops selling all kinds of stuff! Bottom line is that there are a LOT of people in Hyderabad!

Some of the Hindu Gods are quite nasty! These are some rock paintings in the Golconda Fort of some of these Gods killing their various enemies. It is NOT a pretty sight!

This is one of our last pictures in India. It was after a long day in the car, so we are a bit beat (with stinging eyes!) .Chandra is on the right (next to Steve).We have NO IDEA who the other guy is - LITERALLY! This was one of the more interesting things about the Indian culture. Random people off the street would come up and want to have their picture taken with Westerners! At first when we saw people looking at us and then whispering among themselves we were thinking they must be thinking we were the big, nasty Americans! Soon it was clear that Indians LOVE Americans (for the most part) and most of the Indians we met had either a loved one or someone they knew well living in India! So, it turns out that "knowing" someone from the U.S. (or a Western 1st world country generally) gives one high status in India. Thus, these random people would come up to us to get a picture and then leave with the picture to take back to their town or village or whatever to say "look at my American friend"! In this case, this guy figured he might as well be in OUR picture too! (Hey - look at my INDIAN friend!) One more interesting tidbit: you may have noticed that Indian guys really do NOT smile during a picture? It is kind of strange, but in 99% of the pictures we have of Indians, they are NOT smiling! In fact, it seems the sterner (or more disinterested) you are, the better!

So that is the end of our India pictures! We had an interesting time (we BOTH got intestinally sick, even though we both were being VERY cautious!) and it was great to see another Asian culture and learn more about Hinduism. However, we are not at all likely to bring our kids to India any time soon!

This is a shot of the Chowmahalla Palace (which is actually a series of 4 palaces) which was the living quarters of the ruling Nizams of Hyderabad.The Nizams lived here at the end of the 1800's and into the 1900's. It was quite the opulent place, and many of the rooms have been preserved to see what living conditions were like in those times.