Trip to the Beach

We have Sundays "off" so everybody kind of does their own thing - relaxing, shopping, or whatever. The closest beach to our hotel is Marina Beach, so I took an auto rickshaw the 3 km this morning. It is an extremely wide sandy beach that leads to the Bay of Bengal (pic 1). There were tons of people there, not going much past their knees in the water, unless they were fishermen in boats. The women would wade in ankle-deep in their saris and men would pull up their trouser legs. Some little boys were out playing cricket in the sand (pic 2). Environmentally, India still has some work to do, trashwise. Every city we have visited has garbage piles along the sides of the roads, medians, etc. One of our professors said that Indians were very fastidious about their own personal hygiene, but thought nothing of throwing their trash in a neighbor's yard! The beach hasn't been spared, either. Every now and then I have seen a sign saying something like Our City is Clean and Green, but haven't seen much evidence that people are jumping on board! Indians would come up to me on the beach asking if they could have their picture made with me, where I was from, etc. In our orientation, we were told that people would be very interested - not to be rude, just that they were curious. I'm glad we had been warned. There were (of course) numerous tarp-booths set up selling everything from fish cooked on the spot to bangles. (pic 3) We had also been told that people would follow us around when we shopped just to see what we bought. I noticed that everytime I stopped to look at something, a few folks would gather. Strange, huh? One little boy was making drawings to sell using what we used to call a Spirograph! (pic 4) Picture 5 was interesting to me in that you can see Jesus in the middle row, mosques above that and Hindu deities underneath. That is so much like Chennai and Kochi - you might find a church, mosque and temple all within sight of one another! It was an interesting afternoon of seeing how people spend their free time and yet another opportunity being seized to make a few rupees.