Intense, terrifying culture shock
would be a nice way of putting my first impressions of Chennai (formerly known as Madras).
As I exited the airport, I was greeted by rows and rows of people holding signs, pointing and shouting at me. I felt like a rock star. All the women wore sarees. All the men wore white. It was a trip and a half.

I thwarted the touts' attempts to take advantage of my newly arrived status and told them all
I was "waiting for someone."

I felt a tug on my shirt and a
'Miss Williams?" at my side.
Instead of the hotel driver, there was the man from the foreign exchange office. He claimed that he had given me 1,000 rupees too many when I changed in my traveler's checks. I argued with him in that intense humid heat with the mosquitos and the locals all staring at us. I finally convinced him back into the airport where three unsmiling men surrounded me, demanding the thousand rupees. My books warned me of officials asking for bribes and the occasional dishonest
dude figuring in an extra "foreigner" tip ("foreigner"
being the polite term for

"whiteys"), so I argued with them pretty heavily. One dude had three white stripes of powder painted across his forehead and a blood red bindi in between his eyebrows. I think he knew how scary he looked to a white girl fresh off the plane because he wouldn't take his eyes off me. Finally I whipped out my receipt, saw that I should have eight thousand rupees nine hundred. So I counted, with a rapt audience. Seventeen thousand, eighteen thousand, nineteen thousand...oops! I handed over two five hundred bills and smiled sheepishly. We all breathed a sigh of relief, and as an act of good faith, they showed me to my awaiting hotel shuttle.

Chennai was everything you could imagine it to be. So hot my clean cotton clothes stuck to me like saran wrap. So humid you could see your breath thick as fog in front of you. The billboards were fifty feet high and screamed the most confusing and brilliant colors and slogans. There were thousands of unhelmeted motorcyclists all around us, weaving in and out of traffic, honking their horns and polluting the air with seeping black clouds. The driver blew through traffic, passing trucks and buses within inches. I had to literally keep my hands and arms inside the bus or else I would have been drumming Def Leppard style in no time.

I found myself crying. It was so beautiful and awful.