Traveling with children: Auroville

Auroville, The Utopian city. Built to accommodate 50, 000 inhabitants, currently accommodating 2500 Aurovillians.

It has a library, a Town hall, a financial department running its own bank, its own intranet, a Kitchen that feeds up to 1500 people each day ( with solar powered cookers.). It even has a 15m diameter golden orb at its epicentre purely for Meditation.

Outside Town Hall Financial department

Mirimandar

The Solar Kitchen cooks for up to 1500 for lunch using produce from the Aurovilian farms and cooking, using for the most part, sunlight.

On a personal note, coming recently from a land of Dahl baht and MSG with Noodles. It has very very lovely food. Organic food. Fresh bread with a crust that can withstand squeezing. Pizza made by Italians! Drinking water available in the guest house and actual Recycling. Actual reusable refundable and returnable egg cartons purchased from the store for 30 rupees that are ( importantly - this is still India) rat proof . !!

Auroville has a network of cyclepaths and small roads that connect the major institutions to the many small communities that house 4-10ish families and the paths are completely litter free. In fact they are SWEPT daily. There are Auroville guards at various posts throughout the city reminding one to lock ones bike, or to leave ones bike at the gate or to remove ones 3 year old from the top of an exhibit.

There is even a play park ( this is completely unheard of in the rest of India), full of little Aurovillians of all different shades. And whit-ish middle class-ish mothers chatting in European around the edges......as the children play before whisking them home 2 or 3 or 5 to a motorbike to immaculate, exclusive homes of earth bricks and European architecture embedded in ponds to discourage creepy crawlies that have fish to eat the mosquitoes

We have heard so much about Auroville, from friends, from fellow travellers and one of the comments I didn't understand at first, but I do now was
" You have to poke around in the hedges to find anything of interest"

There is a beautiful visitor centre filled with information but , in contrast to the rest of India there is nothing flung in your face, at all. So to find the Earth Building Institute we cycled for an hour poking around suburbs and Stumbling through peoples houses before finding a tiny sign and then spent a happy half hour playing in ponds fed by exquisite water vortexes in 2 metre perspex towers that turned out to be experimental sewage treatment ponds , before finding an information section within the complex.

Demonstration vortex similar to the ones we found feeding into a sewerage treatment plant.

Its sooo, reserved, soo clean, soo ..,......EUROPEAN. True I am looking for insights of India and this is NOT India. And true I am fascinated by the workings of a community that has governing independence from India's Government, that has created incredible infrastructure and has industries recognised by UNESCO.

But the suburban housewife in me says " BOREING!!!!!!"