Vellaikkaari: Some treasures from the Government Museum, Chennai

Today I ventured out for the first time. Yesterday I had high hopes, but I accidentally passed out for about 12 hours. I woke up at 6:30 PM; it was dark and I was totally confused.

This morning started at 5:30 a.m. At least I managed to sleep 4 hours last night. This morning I had some Tamil chats with some guys in the restaurant, then with the woman at the travel desk who has booked a flight to Madurai for me on Thursday. The Tamil is coming back and I'm feeling less shy about it. I'm very glad to be staying at the Hotel Pandian again. It's expensive for what you get, but the staff is so friendly and helpful that it is worth it. One of the guys who works here told me that when he sees me next year I should definitely be married by then and should have a couple of kids to boot. HA! I appreciate the concern but I'm not sure I can oblige on that one.

Today I ventured to the Government Museum. Certainly one of the best museums I have ever seen in India. It has a very impressive collection of stone sculptures, bronzes (in a very glitzy A/C showroom!), as well as a natural history section with a huge collection of stuffed birds. Because it's one of the best museums around, there weren't that many hysterically funny exhibits as is sometimes the case. Nevertheless, some of the exhibits did not disappoint comically, and I'll share some of the more memorable specimens with you here.

My, what dusty eyes you have!

Detail of a 2,000 year old stone carving...

and the grafitti that Mehtab and Rizwan, among others, felt compelled to carve into it.

Turns out that the museum has an impressive collection of cattle horns,

as well as a number of different dismembered animal feet.

This is an elephant's foot, in case you were wondering.

I nearly bypassed this section on geological time. Good thing I stuck around, however, because I discovered one of the important developments of the Cenozoic era:
the ability to appreciate geysers.