Way in, way out

Tina and Maria started their day with yoga, Gail and Jean slept in since the full moon energy made it hard to sleep last night, although Tina and Maria are to be commended for getting up since they had some kind of animal scurrying around in their rooftop all night. Today we ventured beyond the grounds of our hotel into Trivandrum. We visited the Puthen Maliga Palace. It took over a thousand years to build and the raj only lived in it for one year. He died from natural causes at the age of 33, the palace closed for 150 years until they opened it to the public in 1991. It was considered to have bad feng shui. Next to the palace was the temple which we were only allowed to view from the outside since we were not locals.

On our way back we stopped at the spice market to buy banana chips, potato chips, coconut oil, saffron, tea and vanilla. All things we should have bought more of at the spice plantation in retrospect (except the chips, they were making them fresh right there, who could resist?).

The next part of our story turns out to be fairly typical, but not something you want to experience while you are here. Our driver hit a pedestrian who ran across the road unexpectedly. The way things work here is the village people (not the musical group), surround the driver and accuse him of driving recklessly. Thank goodness the police came and handled it in a way that was favorable to the driver. We were fearful that a riot could have occurred, and we did lock our doors and call our local contact just to be sure. Now that we got that experience out of the way, we don't have to revisit it.

A quiet evening at our hotel and Ayurveda tomorrow! Namaste