r u n a w a y m a n g o: Mock Disney World in the Heart of Madurai

It's the Muslim holiday of Bakri Eid on Monday, which means we're having another three-day weekend. When you live in a multicultural country such as India, this is what your holiday calendar looks like: http://festivals.iloveindia.com/festival-calendar.html. Although we can always use another holiday, we anticipate our kids will be running loose for three days straight. As our daily 10am-12pm power outage rolls in, the kids' movie stops working and we have to get them out of the house ASAP.

Eial consults his handy list of must-see places in Madurai and we head off to Children's park. It's either that, or the Gandhi museum, as both are in the same place and we're hoping one of them is open. We are in luck today since the Children's park is indeed open for business. It looks green, shady, and it has slides - that's all we need to burn off some energy.

We start off by exploring various slides and climbing structures. They are not the safe kind that we're used to in the US (where you expect moderate height, enclosed top areas and padded ground) but our kids obviously don't mind. All three of them are avid climbers. As usual, we attract immediate attention as street kids approach us in droves, and families curiously check us out from a safe distance. Eial and me are used to this by now, the kids are oblivious to what's going on.

Then we realize that this is actually an amusement park with operating rides. It takes us a minute to figure things out, for example, we find out that each ride has a separate ticket booth. The price for each ride is nominal, and we're off to some crazy spinning. We even get on a mini-train ride where the attractions to see are sculptures of animals. Only in India, streets are full on live animals, yet in the amusement park you get amused by... sculptures?

By popular demand, we head off to Ferris wheel (called the Big Wheel, over here). I think the only reason we went on this ride was because we had no idea what we were in for. On an Indian Ferris wheel you are seated in an open cabin with simple metal hook latches on both sides. There are no seatbelts or anything of that sort, you simply hold on to your seat. Once the wheel starts going up it accelerates to the speed of a swing. It was more of an unsecured roller-coaster ride that kept spinning and spinning in a circle. I got pretty freaked out when I realized what was going on. Maya and an Indian boy sitting in our cabin where both happy and smiling. I could see Raphael's face in misery in a cabin which was at the opposite end of the wheel. As I was passing by an operator I asked him to stop the damn thing. We did another five rounds, and he sure stopped the wheel so I could get off, but that left Eial with two boys hanging at the highest point. The Ferris wheel was a big hit with Maya, but it was more of a ride from hell for me. We will see if we ever do this again, although Maya doesn't know it yet.

Unfortunately our camera battery died as we were having some post-ride recovery ice cream, but our exploring wasn't over yet. We did end up visiting Gandhi museum which was a beautiful and impressive white building. Yinon called it a castle. We discovered an Institute of Gandhian thought and Eial learned it only takes a year to get a degree in Gandhian philosophy, or yoga, or multicultural religion. He is always up for picking up another degree. It is only thirty dollars a semester to study there, but unfortunately the instruction is only in Tamil.

We ended our excursion at the Big Chick, a local chicken fast food establishment kind of like KFC. The food is made from fresh chicken. We know this for a fact because we saw a lady arrive by rickshaw with a fresh batch of meat in a black plastic bag. We finally got home in the late afternoon. Eial and I were beat, but not our kids, they just kept going...