Paris of the East – Pondicherry (Part 2)

Hello hivers. I hope you are all doing great. Here’s the second part of my trip to Pondicherry. If you haven’t read the first, click here.

After enjoying some dessert at Coromandel, we were out exploring the place again. We were walking through the streets of Heritage Town when we spotted this beautifully sculpted temple.

It is called the Kamatchi Amman Temple and is dedicated to the Hindu Goddess Durga. It was built over 500 years ago and is well-known. It also reflects the intricacy of the Tamil architectural design. The place is open all day for visitors throughout a year but sadly was closed for renovation when we were there.

Source – TourMyIndia
A little further we got to the Police Museum on Dumas Street in White Town. This is right next to the Police Headquarters and is close to Promenade Beach. Here they exhibited variety of preserved arms, ammunitions, uniforms and more used by the town’s police as well as the French soldiers who had colonized the place over the past century.

After this, we headed straight to the beach. Promenade Beach which is also called the Rock Beach is a beautiful place to spend your late evenings at. This stretch of land has a line of great restaurants, stalls, bars, stores, resorts and more. Some of these places are open 24x7.

We spent some time at the beach, took pictures around and had some Charmuri. Charmuri is a quick snack made with puffed rice, chopped veggies and spices. This was originally from the streets of Bengal, India and is now sold by street vendors at every tourist spot across the country. This is usually priced at just Rs.15 (0.21 USD).

While planning this trip, I had come across this eatery called Hope Café and we chose to have a light dinner there. Hope Café has a glow in the dark theme and is a pure Vegan outlet. It is located on the Suffren Street. We weren’t aware of their Vegan concept and were told about it on entering the place.

We were welcomed with their specialty called “Love, Joy, Happiness”. In sequence, left to right is Happiness – a mint lime drink, Joy – iced tea and Love- hibiscus tea. Everything on the menu had these words clubbed. Their theme of veganism and peace was something interesting because of the way it was presented.

Here we had some decent dishes –
Have More Crostini – Garlic Bread slices with toppings of olives, tomato and cheese. This was priced at Rs. 200 (2.74 USD) and tasted fine.

Love Lasagna – My first try at a veg lasagna and it was very cheesy and tasted pretty good. It was priced at Rs.400 (5.48 USD).
Mediterranean Love Pasta- This was sorta dry and the flavors did not add up. It tasted pretty okay. Priced at Rs. 370 (5.07 USD).

Fantastic Fungi – This was my favorite from all we ordered. These are fried balls stuffed with mushrooms and veggies. It was delicious. Priced at Rs.200 (2.74 USD) and would really recommend it.

We walked around after dinner and there was this cool breeze gushing through. We then returned to our rooms and ended the night with some rum and smoke. A pretty nice end to our long day in the new town. We later ordered shawarmas too and stayed up till 3 am.

That was an end to our first day at Pondy but there’s more coming up on the blog. So stay tuned for the next update if you liked this blog.

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