Day 9: Exploring Chettinad

We officially have the whole day in Chettinad. To start off my day, I woke up early to get a quick breakfast and get some time at the pool. A lot of us have been wanting to go swimming and this was our first opportunity of ours to actually go since we had been so busy.

After a quick swim, our group headed to our van to explore different mansions. Chettinad is known for their beautiful and large mansions. We went to about three different ones all of which consisted of beautiful tiles, foreign furniture and overall the most stunning details.

After our last mansion, we walked to a local tile factory where we got to see the process of how tiles were made. We were all surprised to see that literally every step was done by hand including even the meticulous designs.

Afterwards, we headed to an inactive temple in the area. However, I did not get any pictures of it since we all got distracted by a fortune teller and his parrot outside of the temple. We spent nearly an hour going one by one to get our fortunes picked by his parrot. I learned that I will have two kids, maybe three, be married by 29 and that I need to work on my short temper…

Anyways, we headed back to our hotel afterwards to grab some lunch where were met with the most plentiful feast ever. The employees came around one after another forever with different dishes and served them on our banana leaf.

Then, we all hit the pool again for a few hours in the sun and to make use of some of our only free time.

After that, we went back to the dining area to get a cooking demo from of their chefs. We learned how to make chicken, prawn, and veg dishes. All of which had delicious aromas and left my mouth watering.

We hit the city again afterwards to go to their market area. Not surprisingly, we all ended up in an antique store to buy souvenirs. I personally bought a small tile like many others to take back home as gifts.

On our journey back to the hotel, we also stopped at a fabric store to see how they embroidered designs onto them.

After all that, we ended back at our hotel for another plentiful meal.

To end off our night, I went with some others to walk to a supposed historic clocktower but it ended up being super small and not historic…

Anyways, it was such a cool day in Chettinad and we had some many unique experiences.