India Trip Photo part 01 of 02

Here are some of the photos taken during my stay in India in June, without any orders.

1. My henna, yes again. I got it while visiting the culture village (Dakshina Chitra in Chennai). The culture village was really worth the visit. It showed a vast traditional rituals and housing architectures etc. And there was a few simple workshops, such as the making of the traditional music instruments, knit work, henna, pottery making, colour painting etc

This henna did not stayed vivid for long, it started to fade within a day. But the smell of it was really fresh, it doesn't have those artificial aromatic additives in there, there are even some hint of the bitterness from the crunched fresh leaves. The ingredients are more original.

But the trace of it lasted longer than any of the other henna I got previously. The henna on my hand now is more than a week already, it is not as vivid anymore, but the traces are still on the hand.

This picture was taken on the day it was drawn, after everything was peeled off.

There was this place in Thanjavur, where the Maratta Palace is located. It is actually a little museum that kept all the belongings of one of the king. I find this music scores rather interesting.

This is the outside of that Maratta Palace Museum.

During a boat trip in Chedambaram, Back Water. This is where the tsunami hitted India few years back, and the Mangrove trees have saved them by slowing down the impacts of the waves.

Some salt was found on the tree leaves during the Back Water boat trip. These were caused by the morning dew that condensated by the sun.

This is the shore temple in Mahabalipuram. There were supposed to be 5 temples there, but somehow only left this one. The carving was really amazing, and it puzzled me how did they have so much time and strength to decorate the place with such large stones.

This is another temple, but this is in Chedambaram, no photos allowed after this arc of the door, which shows many dancing steps of the god. The whole temple was about these dancing steps, and apparently someone did a PhD on these dancing carvings.

There was a tale that comes with this temple. Long long time ago, there was this male god who is very good in dancing. He has a female counterpart who is also a great dancer. She was unhappy that people only worship him and ignore her, so she challenged him with dance.

The competition was fierce, and eventually the god won the competition by lifting his leg to put on his ear ring. She was defeated, because in Indian culture, female cannot lift their legs like that.

So this temple was for that dancing god.

Some local delicacies in a typical sweet shop.

Live wedding band for the Indian wedding.

This is called the Krishnas Butter Ball. It is man-crafted, they somehow managed to find a centre of gravity of this strange rock, and placed it there...

There were three monkeys walking towards the camera in the picture below, and I saw two goats while hanging around there too.

This is the tree leaves that used for making the henna paste. This picture was taken while visiting the Dakshina Chitra.

This is one of the beautiful sand painting made at the wedding hall entrace. I only managed to take photo of this one, as others were having bad reflection from the sun, shining through the glass.

This is the Five Rathas in Mahabalipuram. There are five carving items in this area. All these are carved from the rock which was already in that place. It looks like some armeteur trying to practise their skills behind the master, went to the sea side, pick some large rocks, carving it day by day.....

This is one of the temple that was next to the Maratta Palace Museum. Couldn't get in cause the lousy tour guide spent too much time in the Museum, and missed the last entrance for this temple. So only can take some photos from the outside. It somehow reminded me of the game -- Prince of Persia... you will see later...

This is one of the beaches in Chennai, so crowded. Not many people played in the water, as the waves are really huge, and the shore seems to have a sudden drop, like a cliff underneath the sea.

This is a botanical garden in the heart of Chennai, it is actually a very nice area. Perhaps the heat in the summer has made it rather hot, and most of the plants are suffering from the dry and hot weather.

This is one of the oldest tree in the botanical garden, a Banyan tree. The main stem of the original plant has already rotten away, but branches of it, and the extension of it survives until today. It covers a huge area, can't remember the exact value and unit.

This is a metal chain, that disguised like a rope. It was so long lasting, it doesn't look damaged after witnessing so many generations.

Got confused by the sign -- Highly Inflammable. Checked my dictionary after returning home... it was actually correct. A quote from dictionary.com:

Usage note:Inflammable and flammable both mean “combustible.” Inflammable is the older by about 200 years. Flammable now has certain technical uses, particularly as a warning on vehicles carrying combustible materials, because of a belief that some might interpret the intensive prefix in- of inflammable as a negative prefix and thus think the word means “noncombustible.” Inflammable is the word more usually used in nontechnical and figurative contexts: The speaker ignited the inflammable emotions of the crowd.

Also, notice the Air Bus next to the lorry? I wonder how would Airbus felt?