#14: Travel Diaries : My " Trip " to Erode

Unlike my Best friend, Fire Drake who had the chance to go explore "Namma" Chennai, I was unlucky and got packed off to a place called Erode ( So much for wanting to be in a active project. Nevertheless! I am not complaining) 

Erode,is a city (er.....Tiny "City" to be precise) , a municipal corporation and the headquarters of Erode district in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu.

Erode "City" ( I'm put up at Pallipalayam )

I had been there a couple of times but never got a chance to explore. My previous trips had been restricted to shuttling between a paper factory and the Railway station. 

This time I made up my mind to explore ( Thanks to the necessity to explore as I am quite sure I would be spending at least the next 3 months here )

After breaking my head pouring over pages and pages of technical data ( Talk about 856 rows of numbers in a Excel Sheet ) I decided to call it a break and go exploring. This time I had  company. My colleague (Male, though I would have been happy with a female for various "obvious" reasons (Read : Shopping & females are the best match)) 

The place that I work ( & stay ) is almost deserted . I wasn't able to find a medical shop or a grocery shop ( Some shop for that matter ). Hence the need for exploration came. We were waiting in the " Bus stand ". Then came along a bus ( No! It wasn't Rickety kind. It was this long distance travel kind). We boarded the bus though we were clueless about the destination. 

My colleague decided we should hit the bus stand as normally in small cities like this the area around the bus stand would be the " shopping " area. To Bus stand it was then! 

Along the bus travel,I noticed that the " city " was divided into residential area which had small shops and shopping area ( Or commonly called as " Market"  in local language). The people were not really the warm kind. I tried strike a conversation with a lady sitting next to me about the city only to be met by curt replies. I gave up the idea of talking at all. I kind of felt out of place.I couldn't see a single girl in my age group and also due to a fact that none of the women wore "Modern Clothes" ( I was attired in a Jeans and Kurta! Call this "Modern"?!). One more thing I noticed was the people here were either too loud or dead quite ( No offense to any of native Erode folks who are reading this). Never between. 

We finally reached the bus stand. We spotted a bakery. My colleague who was from a small town enlightened me various facts about small cities as he was from a small town himself.He told me that small cities like Erode have many bakeries instead of eat-outs and they serve the best Tea/Coffee and snacks. 

We entered a bakery which looked decent enough and ordered tea. Within 2  minutes we were served with piping hot tea which was damn good. It didn't cost much too. 

We decided to just walk along the bus stand road. That road,was filled with all kind of shops. Small sized super markets, Mobile phone stores, Foot ware and what not. But I hesitant to go shop for anything other then necessities 

(Thanks to the absence of a female company! Going shopping with a guy whom you aren't particularly friends with can be awkward). 

My colleague wanted to buy stuff at the footwear shop. We found a shop and he got shopping. I just sat gazing. I noticed that the women section housed almost similar fashionable stuff that was available in Chennai and were priced almost the same. So much for calling Chennai a Metro and Erode a small city. 

He finished his shopping and we decided to head back to factory. There came a nasty surprise. There was not a single bus that would take us back to the factory. We wandered there near the bus stop for sometime completely clueless how to get back.

Thank god, we spotted an Auto stand. And again I made a through underestimation. I thought Chennai was the only place which literally burned a hole in you pocket if you travel in Auto without really knowing you way to your destination. 

But Erode here seems to be the same. I tried " Talking" to the auto driver convincing him that he was looting me and I knew my way to the factory. But alas that guy never budged. He simply kept his stance and wanted us to pay 200 Bucks. Given that we didn't have a better option, we complied and reached our destination. 

There ended my uneventful exploration of Erode. But I haven't lost hope. I plan to explore the place again this weekend ( Minus the male company, a girl needs her own adventure!)