Oh Chennai

Some highlights were going through the village area and dancing with the local kids, dinner and beach walk with my host, joking around about my bad experiences, sitting and writing at Café Coffee day, the neighborhood of my host and the family across the street, Marina Beach, Chamandala Art village, amazing vegetarian buffet, and the unique temples.   My host was the highlight of Chennai-such a sweet, kind person who works in telecommunication sales all throughout India.He has many positive experiences to share and he cheered me up with all our joking and listening to some great Hindi music.


Not highlights...

The people were not very friendly and my interaction with locals was definitely not as strong as usual. A local who gave me a motor bike ride to the bus stand was nice, but he was also interested in American girls. He was inquiring about American woman and their likes/interests in an appropriate manner, which was fine.
I was constantly misguided on how to get to destinations and the first night I ended up sitting in front of a BMW dealership crying because I just kept getting misdirected. Being nice does not always work in my favor and therefore there is a fine line between nice and being assertive without being intimidating and/or aggressive. This line is frequently blurred at times because people take advantage of being nice.
With the BMW incident, I ended up being walked to the train station by their own security guard and he paid for my train fare. In the end of the day, India reallly takes care of their foreigners.
The overall Chennai experience was a 6 on a scale of 1-10. I am going to start scaling my travel experiences from now on!