Ramoji Film City

Yesterday (17 January) was a long but eventful day. My friends Nina, Darlisa, and I decided to take a day trip to the Ramoji Film City, a largely Telugu movie producing studio. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, RFC is the largest film studio complex in the world. It's just outside of Hyderabad, the city that I live in.

We started the morning with delicious banana pancakes at our dorm and were on the road (which means heading from our dorm to the main campus gate) by 8:15am. The night before I had left my bike at the (20 minute ride away) main gate, so I rode Nina's bike and had her hop on the back, like all the Indians do. We got to a hill that I couldn't pull both of us up so we started walking and all of the sudden our house man, Mr. Das, pulled up on his scooter- so I got my first Indian scooter ride, ha. Took the bus from campus to Medhipatnam (a popular bus stop), and then went on a search for our next bus. We saw it far away so got to run through the crowd of Indians, who were of course laughing at us, only to miss it. So we caught a bus to a place called Koti, where we waited about an hour for a bus to take us to Ramoji, and then decided to take a rickshaw as the bus never came. I prefer a rickshaw anyway though- the buses are often ridiculously crowded and always smell strongly of body odor and other not-pleasant smalls that I haven't figured out yet. Although our rickshaw broke down about every five minutes on the way to the film city, the trip only took about three hours altogether (to get right outside of the city, ha).

We walked up to the entrance of Ramoji and there were lots and lots of excited children running around (we were 3 of them). We got tickets for 300 rupees (appx. $6-7), and were on our way. We then got on another bus, and after about 15 minutes or so riding through the hills and palm trees, we arrived! The first thing we did was ride the free rides in Fundustan. Some pictures showing our excitement:


After the rides we explored the Fundustan area, which is basically the play area. We toured through a ridiculous "magic" house. A sign recommended that pregnant women should not go into this magic house, but once completed I thought that was a very silly recommendation, as all it was was a semi-dark walking path with silly mirrors and fake snakes. Maybe my American mind is just used to more complex and exciting things. We watched a little bit of a show where some people were dancing, ate lunch, and visited the Indian version of the "wild west."
After Fundustan we hopped on a little red tour bus and drove around the film city. We saw lots of film sets and statues and other interesting things. One part that I laughed about was a replica of Arizona- all it had was cacti.

After the bus tour all three of us were exhausted and ready to head home. We trekked to the bus stop outside of the film city and got on a bus to Secunderabad. While on the bus a cute little old lady laid her head on my shoulder and took a nap. And I joined her. From Secunderabad we waited over an hour for a train that never came. By 6:15pm I decided that I was getting home by rickshaw (dinner is at 7 and I did not want to miss that). So we started our long rickshaw ride home. Along the ride I noticed that this one motorcycle with two guys on it kept riding past/alongside us and the fellas kept looking at us- we're used to this, but this time it seemed to be lasting longer than normal. All of the sudden I felt something hit me in the leg. I looked around and found a little wad of paper on the floor of the rickshaw. I opened it and read "Plees Call" and it had a number. After that the boys drove extremely closely alongside us and having a conversation with us for about 15 minutes. One told me that I could come to his house for dinner and meet his mom and dad, haha. So after a long day of travel and some semi-traveling-frustration, the end of the travels made me laugh and had me in a good mood for the rest of the evening.