Kollywood and Marina Beach Popular Family Excursions

Posted by admin on October 19th, 2009 filed in Travel

Last semester I was accepted into a summer university exchange study program. I’m a student at Oregon State and am getting ready to spend this summer studying at the University of Madras in India. I’m incredibly excited about the trip, though I’m also kind of nervous because I don’t know anyone else who will be there. Fortunately, the universities take this into consideration and there will be an orientation and support services while I’m there. I’m getting a degree in history, and then plan on getting a Master’s Degree in Indian History, so this is not only a great personal opportunity but it is relevant to my course of study.

My parents and I went on an exploratory trip after I was accepted. We stayed in a nice hotel Madras for a week and toured the university and also parts of the city. While visiting, one of the things I was most impressed with even though I did already know to expect it was the amount of beautiful and historic cultural and architecture landmarks that exist in the city. This is one of the reasons I’m so excited to go and have every intention of thoroughly touring and exploring as much as I possibly can. Actually, I should clarify, the city used to be called Madras, but it is officially called Chennai today. However, much of the cultural elements are still referred to as Madras and so is the university, so I have a tendency to use that name.

One of the places we visited while we were there was the film studio complex. The industry there is known as Tamil film and it is referred to as Kollywood. It was really neat to visit it and get an understanding of various Indian genre films. Kollywood is the second largest film industry in all of India and most of the country’s soundtracks are generated from there. We also went to the Marina Beach, which was really nice and incredibly beautiful. There were quite a few tourists in both places so I was glad we went there while I was there with my parents. I greatly look forward to exploring some of the more intimate and historically significant places when I’m there on my own.

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5. Hyderabad’s Colorful History