Day 22 Sombre Saturday - not for the squeamish

I went to Chennai Museum today where there were some very interesting items, completely different to those in our own museums at home and some locally discovered things which were very much older than much of our own history. It could do with an internal facelift though, things are not well displayed or lit. They are working on the art gallery just now so maybe it's all to be done.
There were some beautiful musical instruments, particularly stringed ones, but I was very taken with the conch shell in its metal housing too. The two extras are the conch born and a beautiful lyre type instrument in the shape of a peacock, India's national bird. Apologies for the bad reflections of both the windows and the photographer!!!
The main blip though is the most gruesome object that I think I have ever seen and I have had to cobble together a couple of images to show both the object and it's descriptor. Not for the squeamish, it's a human sacrifice post which was in use until the middle of the 19th century. You can read how it works on the label.
I walked from the museum, back past my hotel and right into the 21st century with a visit to Express Mall which is a very modern, upmarket, air conditioned, shopping mall. There's been a Marks and Spencer here for about 10 years but today I noticed to my surprise that there has been a slightly less up market addition - H&M! I enjoyed looking in some of the Indian ttaditional fashion shops and had a coffee in Coffee Day, a national Indian coffee chain who do very good coffee.
I walked back to my hotel - which is really in a very good position in relation to all the places I wanted to visit - and relaxed for the rest of the day. All packed and ready to go back to Tirunelveli tomorrow for half of next week and then it's back to Kovalam for a couple of days and home. My 3 weeks in Tirunelveli seems to have gone really quickly but I have got things done. 14,250 steps today some of which was round and round both shopping mall and museum they are about a mile and a half apart though so that's a good chunk of distance too.