Pictures, Revisions and Future Plans

I've gone back and added photos to the India posts, as well as making a few slight revisions and additions to text. My experiment in streamlining my blogging was a success of sorts: I've finished only five days after we got home, instead of months later. Still, it was too much--too much time, too much work, too many words. I don't expect to do again the sort of blog where I narrate the more-or-less complete story of a trip. Any trip blog I would do in the future would consist of isolated events or impressions, not a tracing of the itinerary from Day 1 to Day N.

I don't know that we'll go back to India. There are other places we'd like to see, and we're beginning to run out of time to see them. We'll go to Florida in January or February (I don't expect to blog that trip). We haven't seriously thought about what we'll do next summer. I like the idea of a package tour again(Rick Steves Bulgaria? OAT Japan or Australia?), but that's all speculation.

A 48-Hour Day, Including the Taj Mahal

Originally, our last day in India (Tuesday, November 11th, 2015) had been set to begin with a 7 a.m. pickup of us and our luggage at our hotel, but since breakfast didn't begin at the hotel until 6:30, we had asked for an extra fifteen minutes. So Narayan showed up at 7:15 and we were off to Agra. Narayan had gradually been pulling in the time for our return. It had started at 2:30, then 2:00, now 1:30, and not even that appeared firm. He was clearly worried that, given the traffic we had run into the evening before, it would be difficult to get across Delhi to the airport by 6:00, in time to check in for our 8:50 flight. Narayan himself was going to catch an 11 p.m. overnight train to his home village, where his wife and young son (he showed us their photos) lived. He had a room in Delhi, and didn't get to see them as often as he would like, but would be home for Diwali--he was clearly a Hindu, since there was a little statue of Ganesha on the dash.

Once outside the city, we took the Yamuna expressway to Agra. With a speed limit of 100 kph (about 60 mph) we went much faster than on any other road on this trip. Traffic was generally light; fields rolled by, partly hidden by the smog. At one point early on, traffic was stacked up for about twenty minutes. Narayan suspected an accident--he was right. "A very bad accident," he said as we passed a bus that had its top completely sheared off and sitting some way down the road in front of it. How that would have happened, I have no idea. There were no further delays and after three hours we were in Agra.

There we picked up our guide. He was charming, eloquent, with perfect English, dedicated to getting us the best possible experience of the Taj Mahal. I would rather have done it on our own.

The first thing he did, once we were inside, with our bag of free water bottles and shoe covers, was hook us up with a waiting photographer. No, thank you, I said. It would only be 100 rupees a shot, and the photographer was experienced at just how to pose us to the best effect. Well, 100 rupees wasn't much (about $1.50), so, okay, just one picture. He would do maybe ten different poses and we would only have to take those we liked. Uh, said I. Great! said Mary Joy.

The approach to the Taj Mahal is designed to maximize the drama.

You see nothing of the building until you approach the large gatehouse and it appears in the opening, nothing but blue sky behind it.

As you go through the gate, there it is: a sight that you've seen all your life--the bulbous dome, the four little minarets--but now it's real, and bigger than you'd thought. Mary Joy says "This is worth it all."

The Taj Mahal is the perfect building, light, delicate, but imposing, a dream of symmetry and grace.

The guide took some pictures of us with my camera. The first he ruined by using the flash, commenting that the professional photographer could do a much better job. When that person arrived, he did a number of different poses with us, some of them kind of cutesy. I was becoming increasingly grouchy, to Mary Joy's dismay. When he was done, the guide said that there had been sixteen poses, I wanted to cut it down to ten, but it wasn't practical to do that then and there, and the guide added that the photographer would throw in a free album, and that if we didn't like any of the final prints, we didn't have to accept them. I was getting nowhere and annoying Mary Joy, so I gave up.

The guide did some more poses with my own camera, including a picture of me and the Taj reflected in Mary Joy's sunglasses.

Then we put on our shoe covers and went inside. He was informative, covering the history well, and pointed out the intricacy of the craftsmanship involved--showing how the inlay work had been set in place,

he added that Agra was the only place where that sort of work was still being done, and we could later go to a workshop to see it. The interior was not as impressive as the exterior. The guide pointed out that the only non-symmetry in the Taj Mahal was where Shah Jehan's cenotaph, much taller than his wife's, of course, had been set off-center--he had not intended to be buried there, next to the wife for whom this was a loving memorial, but had intended to build himself a separate tomb. However, he was deposed by his son Aurangzeb, and after his death he was stuck in at her side--both are actually buried down in the basement.

We left the building,

went out the gate and were met by the photographer, who had a small album of sixteen prints. They looked fine, so I paid the sixteen hundred rupees (around $25). We got on a local bus to go to where our car was.

There was an open seat, so Mary Joy sat there. Our guide talked a young man, seated next to his mother, into giving up his seat for me, but I refused it. When we got to the car, it was 12:20. The guide asked if we wanted to go to a workshop. I said no. Mary Joy asked about the Red Fort. He said that Narayan was worried about traffic in Delhi on Diwali eve, so that he said we would have to leave Agra around 1:00. It would take us much more time than that to see the Red Fort, so we would only have time for lunch. The guide had Narayan drive us to Pinch of Spice, which is recommended in Lonely Planet. He brought us inside, greeted the staff and showed us the buffet, then he said goodbye to us. I gave him a tip, but it was smaller than I had originally intended. He was informative and very smooth, but I assume that he got at least 500 rupees from the photographer, and probably something from the restaurant. If we had bought something at a marble workshop, he would have gotten a kickback for that, too (though how did we have time for that and lunch as well?). He has to make a living, of course, but I don't like being taken advantage of.

Traffic in Delhi, though bad, wasn't quite as bad as Narayan had feared, so we got to the airport at 5:15. My last two photos, out of a total of 900, were of a big Diwali peacock display in the airport and the entry to the men's and women's restrooms--the big pictures of two young people, hip and modern, definitely Indian, though their hair, skin and eye color could easily have passed for European.

Though the length of our flights and layovers was grueling (3 1/2 hours in the air to Abu Dhabi, followed by a 14 1/2-hour flight to Chicago), there weren't any problems until Chicago, where we sat in the plane for an hour, because our flight crew was stranded elsewhere, due to mechanical problems on another plane. When we finally arrived in the Twin Cities, when had to wait on the ground for half-an-hour, because a thunderstorm was rolling through, so the ground crews were pulled. I finally got to bed around 6:30, almost exactly 48 hours after I got up. Mary Joy didn't get to bed until 8 o'clock. Both of us had picked up colds on the tour.

Photos to be added later. I may also post about my various impressions of India

Delhi, Old and New

At 8:00 on Monday, November 9th, we were picked up by our driver for the next two days, Narayan, in a white Toyota. He drove us into Old Delhi, where he dropped us off by a line of pedal-rickshaws. There we met our guide, Ritu, one of the two young women who owned the company running this Old Delhi rickshaw tour, as well as our fellow-tourists, ten of us all-in-all. We each were given an audio set, to hear Ritu's narration, and parceled out two-by-two into rickshaws. The tour started across the street from the massive seventeenth-century Red Fort (not open on Mondays), and went up the Chandni Chowk, the main street of Old Delhi, today filled with people doing last-minute shopping for Diwali--clay lamps, electric lights, candy, nuts, flower garlands, firecrackers, etc.

We turned off to visit the Jama Masjid (Friday Mosque), the largest mosque in India. Ritu had slippers for us as we took off our shoes. I decided not to pay the three hundred rupees to take my camera inside, and left it with Ritu. Instead of being a great basilica-like hall, like other mosques I've seen, this is mostly a huge courtyard, fronted by a sort of stage--it's more like a stadium than a church.

We got on our rickshaws and headed back to the Chandni Chowk. The tour took us to a partly-ruined seventeenth-century haveli, or mansion,

the spice bazaar,

a spice and tea shop (where we had a shopping opportunity), a little restaurant (where we sampled sweets and snacks). We ended with a whirlwind ride through the various narrow bazaar streets, each with a different specialty, from jewelry to silks to eyeglasses to shoes.

It was an interesting tour. During the snack stop, we talked with a young British couple, who had met while they were both working in New York, and were now living in, of all places, Zug, Switzerland, with which we are, of course, very well acquainted. In addition, the woman works for the company from which I retired two years ago. The other American couple on the tour were native Minnesotans who had retired to Portland, Oregon. It's a small world.

After saying goodbye to Ritu and our rickshaw-driver, we were introduced to our afternoon guide, Naresh (?), who would show us the wonders of New Delhi. He said that it would take us five-and-a-half hours. In the end, due to the traffic situation, that would prove to be an underestimate. We got into Narayan's car and drove off.

First we went to Gandhi's cremation site.

Then we visited the Agrasen ki Baoli, a very impressive, very old well, with broad steps leading down, down to the well proper.

We visited the Gurudwara Bangla Sahib, a large Sikh temple, which was very interesting.

We had to leave our shoes and socks in a sort of cloakroom, and put on orange headscarves.

The Sikh holy book is displayed in a room covered with gold, while music is sung and played.

Just outside is a large pool, with supposedly miraculous powers. Sikh mothers bathe their infants there on five consecutive Sundays, to protect them against disability.

Before that is a stand where a volunteer dumps a glob of sweet, sticky food in your hand. There is a large dining hall, where large numbers of people enter, sit in rows on the floor, are quickly and efficiently fed a vegetarian meal, by volunteers, then are ushered out and replaced by the next group. We went back into the kitchen, where these meals were being prepared. It is a very impressive operation, run by volunteers, and anyone who wants can have meal: there is no means test or religion test. We were greatly impressed.

We saw the President's House,

at a distance, and India Gate, from all sides.

We saw the tomb built for the second Moghul emperor, Humayun, in the 15th century, by his widow.

This was one of the models for the Taj Mahal. A group of uniformed schoolgirls was leaving as we entered.

Next was the Baha'i Lotus Temple. We couldn't go inside, but our guide told us that it was a bare meditation space, that the interest here was in the shape of the modern building, built to look like a huge lotus flower.

By now, around 3:30, traffic was horrendous, with everyone out doing Diwali shopping or visiting friends or family. It took us about an hour to get to our last stop, which the guide insisted would be the most impressive thing we had yet seen in India. This puzzled me, since I assumed that our last stop would be the Qutb Minar, a thirteenth-century minaret, from the very earliest days of Islamic rule in Delhi. What's impressive about a minaret? This one was very tall (the second-tallest in India) and beautiful. The pictures I had seen online hadn't done it justice. The simplicity and grace of Islamic architecture contrasts with the exuberant excess, in figures and colors, of South Indian temples like Sri Menakshee in Madurai. I don't like Baroque--St. Peter's in Rome annoys me. The two most beautiful buildings I saw in India were the Taj Mahal and the Qutb Minar.

Nearby, amid the ruins of a mosque built from Hindu temples, is a 23-foot-tall 5th-century iron pillar, apparently brought there as plunder in the early 13th century. Metallurgists have studied its corrosion-resistance properties.

At 5:30 the site closed, we said goodbye to our guide, who lived near at hand, and spent nearly two hours in wall-to-wall traffic before Narayan got us home and bade us farewell until 7:15 the next morning.

To Delhi

On Sunday, November 8th, we got up for 6:30 a.m. mass, in Malayalam. We were among the first there, sitting on the left side of the chapel. Later, during mass, we realized that everyone on that left side, except Mary Joy, was male, while everyone one the right side was female. This realization made Mary Joy uncomfortable, so she asked Father George afterwards if she should have been sitting on the other side. He said not to worry about it. That was only how people did things at their home parishes, so they brought it here, too.

By nine o'clock we ready to go, so we and Father George hopped into the car, and Father Denny, the director of the retreat house, drove us to the airport, taking about two-and-a-quarter hours to cover the approximately fifty miles to the Kochi Airport. There we said goodbye to the priests and caught our flight to Delhi via Hyderabad.

Sitting next to me on the plane was a young man who introduced himself toward the end of the second flight. His name was Vishnu, and he worked for a Dutch firm, certifying organic farming programs. While he travelled a lot, he lived alone in Delhi,and was looking forward very much to getting back to his home village to visit his parents for the Diwali festival. When he learned that we would be leaving India the night before Diwali, he said that that was unfortunate. Diwali is the Festival of Lights, commemorating Rama's return to his kingdom after fourteen years in exile, the definitive triumph of good over evil. Everyone buys little clay dishes to use as oil lamps, colored electric lights are strung everywhere, fireworks are going off on all sides. In northern India it is the closest equivalent to Christmas in the United States--several days of visits and gift-giving and parties and sweets and nuts. Vishnu said that we would be missing an amazing time. He also said that our three weeks would be too short a visit to his country. There were so many places in India that we should see, so we would have to come back. He was a very nice young man, devoted to his parents, especially his mother, though now he would have to take time from work to prepare for another major festivity--he would be married in exactly thirty days, on December 8th! As we left the plane we said goodbye to Vishnu and wished him good luck.

Delhi smelled of smoke. This time of year, farmers in the surrounding states burn their fields, causing very high levels of particulate pollution, a constant gray haze that leaves grime on your handkerchief when you blow your nose. This is in addition to the Delhi's normal car-exhaust and other air pollution. Mary Joy took an immediate dislike to the city, which was enhanced when our pickup by a car from our hotel was bungled by my decision to follow an e-mail by the hotel that said that we would be picked up at Terminal 3, though it turned out that our plane actually arrived at Terminal 1. However, after an unnecessary shuttle bus ride,some phone calls, lots of waiting, and a drive through traffic, we ended up at Shangri-La's Eros Hotel, a very classy, modern hotel in the heart of classy, modern New Delhi. Mary Joy was surprised at how pleasant New Delhi is, sort of like Washington, D.C., with broad, tree-lined boulevards and impressive public buildings. We are not used to staying at this level of hotel, with seemingly dozens of people standing around eagerly for the opportunity to wait on us hand and foot. We had thought that the Radissons we had stayed at in Tamil Nadu and Mysore had been very nice, but I set up our hotel in Delhi under the assumption that we would want an oasis from the high level of culture shock. Normally, we couldn't afford a hotel like this, but while it was a little pricy for India, in New York City it would have been at least triple the price.

On the way in, Mary Joy remarked to the driver that Delhi was very different from the south. "Yes," he replied, "there they're black and speak other languages." This was the first time that anyone had mentioned the skin-color difference between northern and southern Indians, though in the south it feels strange that everyone in the billboard ads is much lighter-skinned than the people on the street walking under those billboards.

Backwaters Again

On Saturday, November 7th, we started around 10:00 a.m. with Father George and another of his colleagues, Father Shaji, to go to the backwaters again at Kumarakom. We were expecting something very similar to our houseboat cruise, eight days earlier, but this was actually very different. We got into a small, old-fashioned, covered boat, with six seats and a grizzled boatman running the engine, then headed off into the canals. We were much closer to the water this time, and the route was different: a two-hour circuit that coincided little, if at all, with our previous trip. We floated along tree-lined banks, past houses large and small, past women doing their Saturday wash, slapping clothes against rocks, past other boats small and (very) large, past kingfishers and a kite (sort of like an eagle) that I saw dip into the water, in full flight, to grab a fish.

At one point we came to a pool where red lotus flowers floated. Father George pulled some out of the water, to grace the common table.

About halfway, we put ashore at a place where they were selling coconuts. There were two varieties, yellow and green. Four were chosen out, a hole was chopped with a machete in one end of each and we were given plastic straws to drink the coconut water, clear and a little sweet. When we were done, our coconuts were chopped in half and the meat was scooped out and given to us to eat.

Then we got back on the boat, shoved off and cruised on, heading into Lake Vembanad. The boatman said that when there was wind, it piled the lake up into high waves, but this day there was absolute calm, as we glided amid clumps of floating, flowering plants (the invasive water hyacinth?). All too soon, our two hours were up and we came back to shore.

On the way back, we stopped at an experimental state fish farming station, where Father George bought a back of water, containing a number of tiny tilapia, along with fish food, to put in their fishpond. In six months they'd be big enough to eat.

When we got to Kottayam, we visited two more churches. First was Good Shepherd, where Pope John Paul had visited in 1986.

The second was the cathedral, designed by a Spanish architect and built in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It's neo-gothic design was unlike that of any of the other churches we had seen.

Finally, Father George took us into a jewelry store. Mary Joy's jaw dropped at the amount of gold and diamonds on display, and clearly being purchased by crowds of people. In India, most of the billboards are either for clothing or jewelry, and instead of putting savings in banks or stocks or bonds, people buy gold ornaments, especially for weddings (as a part of the dowry and gifts or simply for display). There are at least 20 jewelry stores in Kottayam alone. In this one, Mary Joy was shown an elaborate gold and diamond neckpiece, for sale at 900,000 rupees or $15,000.

That evening, there was a Syro-Malabar Rite mass at the small church at the bottom of the hill, the culmination of a week of celebration of the feast of the church's patron, St. Martin de Porres. That felt sort of odd: a Latin-American saint for a church in India where services were based on a middle-eastern model. After mass was delayed by a massive rainstorm, Father George dropped Mary Joy off there to hear the music, then picked her up 45 minutes later--eastern-rite Catholic churches, like their Orthodox cousins, tend to have lengthy masses. Up the hill, We could hear the heavily-amplified singing. At the end, as in most Indian celebrations, there were fireworks, but they ended before Mary Joy and I were able to get around to the other side of the building to see them.