Day 5 - Chennai Trip - Visiting Velankanni ... and back again
5:30 am
We woke up to the joyous singing and celebration that could be heard even though we were atleast a kilometer away from the Church. The entire place seemed filled with divinity and purity and for a moment you actually felt waking up in Heaven.
7:30 am
We headed straight to the Church Canteen for breakfast. Idlis and Dosas were available at very low rates and I was amazed how they could feed atleast 2000 people on any given day and tens of thousand on special days.
We decided to visit the museum from where we could take some pics of the Church. We thought that we would just spend 5 min looking at the artifacts and then rush to the Church. But we were simply amazed at the sheer number of thanksgiving letters, petitions from people around the world. The museum seemed small but hosted an array of letters in praise and thanksgiving to Our Lady for all the blessings and favors received. Some said that they were blessed with a new job, some thanked Our Lady for enabling them to build a new house. There were some letters which had pictures of people standing next to their new house. Some even built miniature models of their house and cars. There were numerous photocopies of degree certificates attached with some letters. Some even sent photos of their new workplace, a captain on a ship, a pilot in the air force, a retired army personnel sent his badges and thanked Our Lady for being there with him always. I can’t remember the seeing so many pictures of little babies and children that were born to parents after many years of marriage. And as many letters that I read, there were atleast 100 times that number of letters that I couldn’t understand since they were in Malyalam, Tamil and other regional languages. Our Lady had touched so many people in so many different ways.
9:30 am
We headed to the Church for a quick prayer and then to the souvenir shop, where we bought a delicately crafted artwork resembling the Last Supper of Jesus and his twelve disciples.
10:am
Quick visits to the Confessionary and the place where Our Lady was first seen to the little buttermilk-boy. Every place that we visited was simply immaculate.
10:30 am
Our Final stop was the Our Lady’s Tank, the place where we collected Holy Water and said our final prayers. As we were looking at the entire campus, we were angry at ourselves for not being able to spend more time in God’s place. On our way back to our waiting car, we saw people making a wish and tying a handkerchief to several low hanging trees, something very ethnic, yet very beautiful to see.
10:45 am
We were back in the car driving away and we made a small wish that we would come back and spend more time over here.
11:15 am
We took a different route and passed Nagapattinam beach this time. The telltale reminders were still there, as we watched several boats and houses completely wrecked by the Tsunami. Bridges lay completely destroyed as we sped past on newly constructed roads and flyovers.
12 pm
Got an SMS and then a call from the Airlines, informing us about a delay of around 2 hours. Damn!! If only we had known earlier then we could have been there for some more time.
12:30 pm
We passed the industrial belt SIPCOT that simply reeked of bad chemicals in the air. Zipped pass many engineering colleges and ofcourse an MGM college too.
2 pm
Strangely we decided to stop at the same place for lunch and we simply enjoyed the meal. No more complaints from me about eating off a banana leaf and without a spoon. The meal was delicious as before and we thanked the couple of people who ran the restaurant in the middle of nowhere.
5:30 pm
Reached Chennai and stopped over at an old couple whom we met in Mumbai. We hungrily devoured their sandwiches and gulped down the tea and had quite a bit to tell them about our trip.
8 pm.
Made our final journey to the airport and luckily there were no delays. Our flight which was scheduled at 830pm finally left at 10 pm. There was an earlier flight at 6:30 pm which I was tempted to book before undertaking the trip. That flight was also delayed and only left at 1:30 am in the morning. Thanked the Lord for our good luck.
12 am
Touched down at Mumbai which was mighty scary since the plane bounced a couple of times, but no one seemed to care and everyone was rushing to the door even before the plane stopped. Now the tricky part was finding a rick that would take us home. One of the curses of staying close to the airport :)
posted by Nev @ 12:33 AM
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