No more room in luggage

In addition to some great school visits this week, we also went to Mahabalipuram and saw some incredible monoliths and rock carvings. Eventually I will put some of the photos up. We also visited a heritage center that had some reconstructed traditional homes (kinda like our Jamestown or Plymouth area). Although the homes were interesting, the big hit of the day was the artists that were selling their handicrafts at the center. Finally, they were not following us around like everywhere else we went. I got a nifty carving/drawing made out of palm tree leaves.

After we returned back to the hotel, a couple of us made the mistake (or brilliant choice...depending on your point of view) to go back to a shop in the mall next door and look some more. The shop keeper was glad to see the 2 of us who had been before plus another person from our group. (I think it is a bad sign when they close the curtain to the store...like they know we are easy targets for purchasing lots of items.) Anyway, I bought a couple of unique blankets with hand-woven beads/mirrors/etc and I am now trying to fit them into my luggage. One well go well with my furniture from Target and the other one...well, I just liked the way it looked even though it won't go with anything.

We head to Cochin in a couple of hours but so far I think Chennai is my favorite city...but perhaps that is because of the mall next to the hotel on one side and a cute little bookstore named Giggles on the other side. (Look it up if you can. Words can't describe the bookstore the size of a walk-in closet crammed with so many books that the owners sits outside of it and is still somehow able to reach in a grab books that they think the person will enjoy. The books are on shelves...just stacked one on top of each other in a series of pillars that fill the space.)

Time to finish squeezing all my purchases in my luggage!