Burma: photos of the impact, the impacted

More of PACT's photos from Burma are here.

PACT is on the ground in Burma, please help their relief efforts with your donation.

c

The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.

The houses are all gone under the sea.

ts eliot, from Four Quarters

Burma - help

The news from Burma, what little can get out, is appalling - it is now estimated that over 100,000 have died due to the cyclone. Rangoon is without power, many regions remain - days since the cyclone - still submerged, there isn't adequate drinking water and petrol is in short supply. Despite this, Rangoon's airport sits practically empty - most relief teams have not been issued permits and planes filled with disaster-relief experts and desperately needed supplies remain grounded, the Burmese government will not allow them to land.

Sarah Newhall (my step-mother) runs PACT - a global community building, aid organizing and community-level impacting organization of enormous reach and integrity. PACT also happens to have been working in Burma for over a decade, with a number of development projects already flourishing including HIV/AIDS prevention and micro-lending programs specifically in the delta areas hit hardest by the cyclone. While the access of most organizations remains, for the time being, blocked by the military government, PACT is in place and so uniquely positioned to truly effect change and implement the aid immediately.

Please contribute what you can to PACT's initiative and pass this post along to friends and colleagues so that they may do the same. (For PACT's tracking purposes, please mention this blog.)




(In Burma in 1997, I trekked outside government boundaries into Shan State; I spent time in a Palong village. The Burmese were to a man/woman/child: kind, hopeful, resourceful – they stole my heart. The tragedies they've known, perpetrated by their own people - ignored by the world, have wrought a nation of all-too-human souls. Demanding aid without implementers, the Burmese government has essentially charged us as global citizens to get step in. The Burmese people must know the world cares deeply, and right the wrongs of our historical inaction.)

By hand

"It is almost as if the decline of the idea of eternity
coincided with the increasing aversion
to sustained effort."

- Paul Valery





Too often I forget the back-story of the throw-away: "hand made".

(Fair Trade,
Organic,grain-fed,
locally sourced,
Unique, Authentic)



We're trying very hard to be good these days and to return to right values -
I've got to keep before me the journey of the piece and
the labor, expertise and generations that constitute its existence.

c - working on getting it, starting with blocks

dry

sheltered cow, kalimpong (india)

A roof of ones own,
in India.
Where the sacred is the everyday.

C - thinking now about cows

Book travel

Because there's not been a trip recently, I've gotten my geography locally...


This from a remarkable Books auction at Stair Gallery in Hudson (the little auction house that, almost weekly now, ROARS.)

Burma

Novice monks in front of monastery,
village beyond May Myo, Shan State Burma (1997)

Burma takes your heart.

In the fall of 1997, my Biman Air flight from Bangkok arrived in Rangoon's Mingaladon Airport a half-day delayed and full of backpackers. We were an earnest crew - un-linked but collectively buoyed by the budget traveler's hubris that, moving low to the ground, our presence in Burma wasn't in direct opposition to Aung San Suu Kyi's wishes. Mounting a noisy front against the enforced changing of currency at the airport, we vowed to get our few dollars directly into the hands of the common man.

More than the dollars (we had few, their impact would be spotty and sparse), we hoped our presence - as we fanned out on our Burmese adventures - would communicate a universal acknowledgement that yes, Burma still existed to the outside world and we - badly dressed + largely unemployed idealists, would bring their stories home with us.

At least, that was the hope.

I left Burma 4 weeks later smitten and saddened - with no idea where to begin helping the people I'd met and harboring the naive assumption that a kind people in a naturally blessed region couldn't possibly in our modern and connected era be saddled with the oppressive military regime for too much longer. Thus did I excuse myself from responsibility and look to the world and ASEAN to right the wrongs.


And now, of course, the world is again standing by - its attitude and actions stymied by the oil interests of enormous nations, the weighting of political stakes and an appalling inconsistency of our standards for what, in this world, can be called acceptable.

I have no authority to write about Burma but here some recent pieces (thank you R for forwarding "What Makes a Monk Mad")

From today's NY Times: You are no longer monks.

And, "What makes a monk mad"

things not bought

Cult Rev flyers, glove forms, gut-strung snow shoes and other items not soon seen in Circa Trade's inventory.

Round Top trip photos here

And actual inventory photos to come.



C

Round Top, TX

I'll fill in details tonight but the gist is: I went to texas and, on a strip of highway 237, found pieces for Circa Trade amidst antlers, figurines and really big grills.

Elsewhere on offer

What I offered.

A little while back, striving to introduce narrative-rigor into my choppy blog voice, I tried to write a piece for the travel site BootsnAll.com.

Drawing heavily from observations made here and doodly notes, I compiled something I'd hoped read as a loosely-joined series of lyrical a-lightings across the sub-continent. The editors of Bootsnall were not lyrically set-alit and beside taking a heavy editing hand to the piece, they also roundly told-me off for thinking myself bigger than narrative conventions.

Here's what ended up going live - my India grab-bag: Pieces of India on Bootsnall.

(Mea culpas made, I do challenge anyone to "write" India as something that could be consecutive...)

c - admittedly not that linear in the west either

Is this a fair use of the blog? Yes, I do think so - roundly self-promoting but travel-related after all and for the worthy end of a trip to Thailand...

Vote objectively but kindly, forward and in the spirit of competition, enter yourself.

More travel tales soon - a busy summer of Circa Trade shop and not enough on-the-road adventures. But now there's the fall and all the momentum that comes with it and stocks are, well, running low.

view and rate this entry in the Novice Monks, Lachung... by circatrade

Thanks to all readers - sign in for travel requests...

ctp

Morocco Photos

Morocco Photos

Photos from the Morocco trip

- a zoom tour of a country that requires less zoom, more wander.

C - perennially zoomer

Trivia

Publishing such a document (Bowles' diary) demonstrates
the way in which the hours of the day
can as satisfactorily be filled with trivia
as with important events.

- Paul Bowles on his Tangiers Diaries


Bus rest stop, Cafe El Atlas, Marrakesh to Essaouira -
- Now there's a troop of piping Berbers with a goatskin tambourine.
- My hair feels like a bush - no conditioner and matted from train and bus seats
- Back amongst the backpackers - wondered what Moroccan gone-ethnic looked like. Talked to aussie couple - 6 months west africa, german with 2 french girls. They're sitting on the deserted side of the cafe and obstinately not ordering.
- Should know better than to think every town on a map is romantic. They're tiny dustbowls.

Hotel Riad El Medina, Essaouira
- Sure once charming, horrible now. Clue from name - dumbly redundant ostentatiously claiming an entire quarter. That it's a riad I don't doubt but with crumbled and frayed nautical/grotto theme rooms, cot mattresses on cement platform, watered down fruit salad. Cafe au lait and baguettes keeping it from the brink.
- Tourists have over-run. The town's for sale. The fish market is full of tourists taking fish pictures.
- Overcast and my room is a cave. Point of beach visit not clear.

Marrakesh - various places
- My god this fruit salad is good
- I think some women pack their smallest shorts in anticipation of a muslim country. Maybe in fez I'll see them flogged.
- Some of the younger girls in the djellabas (no head cover) look so relaxed it could be a beach cover-up.
- They've set a single place for me at breakfast. That I'm writing about it as I'm sitting at it is sad.

Sefi Fatima (Berber barter market)
- Men kiss 5x here.
- Berbers descend with their wool blankets and rugs to buy rubber shoes, polyester tops, soap and tin teapots. Only vegetables retain the authentic.

Fez - train and arrival
- This tour guy may be legit and I may be mean but he should leave a single woman alone.
- Fez seems depressed - repressed? Packed in and layered - voices from below amplified so run the tap.
- Attar of roses. I don't know what that is but that sounds right. It's cloying.
- Nothing's not carved or crenelated here, or tiled.
- 4 kinds of breadstuffs - rolls and puffy crepes, sweet toast and a croissant. Interchangeable starches.

And so on.

C - all minutia, all the time

Lost

...that the more one was lost in the unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there..

- Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities


I was lost twice in Marrakesh (in Fez I had a guide):
First, lunging alley-deep into the medina with a confidence unmatched by knowledge, skills. I was led home by a child who demanded DH 20.
Second time I was made lost by a fellow who said he'd lead me to the Berber auction. I found my way back amongst the tourists by true directions finally canceling the untrue ones.

I emerged unscathed, of course - but it wasn't the worst feeling. To be spun in circles brings a clenching and all of a sudden the future, just briefly, is rendered unsure.

C – in a land where even the unfamiliar's on a grid

Sunset at Jemmna al Fnna, Marrakesh

Place Jemmna al Fnna, early eve

Marrakesh is the great market of the south,
not only the feudal chiefs and their wild clansman,
but all that lies beyond of heat and savagery:
the Sahara of the veiled Touaregs, Timbuktoo...
here come the camel caravans...

-Edith Wharton, In Morocco
(Whom I almost wish had traveled to Algeria instead so I wouldn't feel inadequate. Ms. Wharton owns this country, with the slight advantage of being a guest of the Governor General wherever she went.)

The Place Jemmna al Fnna - handy during the day as a center point, assumes its true character at night.

Dusk and out come:
Henna ladies. I got hi-jacked - assaulted with flowers up my arm. I made her rub it off, which seemed harsh till she demanded money.
Snake charmers - ubiquitous.
Witch-doctors/healers with ostrich eggs, herbs, dust of ___ and potions. The popular ones make a big to-do of their powers and draw large crowds with their claims and diagrams of intestinal tracks.
The man with a tray of rubber dentures and a mound of teeth
The numbered stalls of the white jacket men who serve kabobs and fish



Orange and date men (pockets of calm)
Dancing West Africans - various colors and hats and rhythms
The Water Men in funny hats who became redundant around the time of bottled water and now would like you to take their picture.

High above, third floor of the Cafe France, the flash bulbs go off.

C - amidst and observing, trying to take pictures without paying

Balance

Dar Vedra (my riad, Marrakesh),
the courtyard 'neath my room

As riads sprout, an assessment:

The Europeans eagerness to buy such wonderful buildings (riads)
is matched only by the local Marrakesh's willingness to dispose of them.

- Tahir Shah, The Caliph's House

C - fan but wary of french invasion deux

Spanish ate French

grand choix en el medina

Moroccans are taught arabic and french in schools. They switch mid-sentence, they switch and you almost don't register it.

Some also speak Berber - of which there are 3 dialects.

A few, I'm going to guess more in the north, also speak Spanish. Morocco is close after all, a few kms.

I speak English, crummy but animated Spanish and gruesome french.

The sad part's been that my French might have had a fighting chance - given me a little go at navigating this country - but my Spanish ate it.

My Spanish eats every last French word that might live in me.

(Blind cannibalizing the blind)

C - je ne peut pas comprende usted.

Seaside medina

Essaouira, Morocco

Brighton-on-the-beach except with a souk.
Or, Fez's darkest alley except it's one that ends in a beach side cafe.

Odd this: that the ladies are taking the promenade in the djellabas and the men hovering by the fish shack are hooded.

Arrive at Essaouira this evening (from Fez -6 hours on a train then 3 this afternoon on a bus) and it's unsettling me.

My heart might still be in that dark alley, and can't reconcile the call to prayer going out over thatched beach umbrellas...

C – seaside

Fez: doesn't bite

a minaret, a lamp - fez medina

Now that I've left I can say that
many people (Marrakeshis) warned me against going to Fez.

I would get:
Kidnapped from the train station
Knifed en route to the medina
Dragged across the cobbles of the souk
Thrown across a mule
Made into tea

They dissed Fez big time - the two have been going at it for 1,000+ years.

Assumed defensive: antennae up, important papers(!) tucked in close, covered to ankles and wrists, mean to everyone genuinely trying to be helpful.

What I found was:
Absolutely nothing untoward.
In fact, felt safer (Marrakeshis take that) in the Fez medina for the simple fact that everyone there was going about their business. I was not on their list. They did not give a flying because they needed to buy a pound of lamb and pick up the re-soled slippers.

Not that the tourist trade has skipped over entirely (Marrakeshis would love that), but the medina's so big, so old and so essentially working that tourists - even groups of them - are absorbed in just as traders and berbers and heathen have been for centuries.

So - Fez is a yes.

C - no longer there

An olive and a loaf

Loaf vendor (off with dustpan vendor), medina Fez

You can make a respectable meal of a dish of spiced olives and a round loaf of bread in Morocco.
No one will look askance.

(Which is not to diminish a culture's justly famed cuisine, just to highlight its flexibility.)

That you can't have a beer in public is get-aroundable.

C - mint tea-toasting hors-d'oeuvre meals

Muezzin

Church bells and chanting processions and elephants held aloft.
I haven't traveled in a Muslim country in ages.
What I'd forgotten - but here you can't forget - is the call to prayer.

You (I'll speak for me) are a passer-through.
The faithful are called and the faithful gathered in.

It was a strange relief to hear it begin
allahu akbar...
and the veil drops
allahu akbar
and we turn back to tasks impermanent.




C - humbled

Midieval

Buildings, people, customs,
seem all about to crumble
and fall of their own weight:
the present is a perpetually prolonged past.

To touch the past with one's hands is realized only in dreams;
and in Morocco the dream-feeling envelops one in every step.

- Edith Wharton, In Morocco

What Marrakesh is no longer, Fez remains: inwards turned, spooky feeling...
Or so it's seemed in the few hours I've been here.

Its medina is the oldest continually operating medina in the Arab world...
modern around the time of the Crusades.

A Star Wars market cast by Lord of the Rings, propped by Indiana Jones.

I'd braced for the medina in the morning - a better map, day light, a guide -
but seeking a couscous, it was inevitable.

The vendors atop their wares looked through me,
the shrouded forms pushed by me
and only the men at the cafes
(aside: it's creepier to be watched by men drinking tea than beers)
registered me with indifferent disdain...

(This medieval place eats little travelers for breakfast)

I found the gentlest face, attached to a cafe with the highest perch and had my couscous. I looked on with my mint tea.

Tomorrow, I tour.

C - in the medieval

the trick

Horse cart shadow falls across an Audi
coke can beside the thali,
burkha-ed beside the over-exposed,

such ia the modern world and all being dragged along with it.

To these I add another.

With my guide the other day to see this place (Seti Fatma)

What's your favorite music?

(I hold out. It's always loaded, my list never ever overlaps and I'm a loser either way.)

Okay.

And he puts on the Koran, on his iPod.


C - juxtapose

Mint tea protocol

A shopkeeper (of antique jewelry that probably ought to be in a museum) told me there was a new protocol.

Shopkeepers no longer offer mint tea at the beginning of discussions.
This was too forward, implied a debt.
Now they close a chat or sale with the offer of tea.
You choose to buy, you choose not to - we are hospitable either way.

It's a bright and shiny new souk protocol.

Amidst

Varanasi's deepest Papua New Guinea,
Siem Reap's Easter Island.

A few thousand Europeans (French happily following a proper baguette) -
all of whom right now in the medina -
have Marrakesh squarely in their holiday sites.
Americans not yet, not so much - it's still a bit glossy magazine stuff.

Though it's embarrassingly easy to get lost in the medina if various factors are in play (more on that),
the medina is signposted if you follow paddles held aloft by tour shepards,
or stick to alleys densest with leather items and decorative tangines,
or close your eyes and follow the "ooh, that's a lovely lantern..."



A culture/country is a big hit with a world scrambling for the foreign;
that I can't except myself is only tempered by the fact that I take up no space on a tour bus.

Your storieed souk is neatened, chickens hung elsewhere, shopkeepers only mildly wheedling, come-ons mild even as jezebels roam in Ibiza-attire, prices are firmed, nothing suspect's underfoot and ATMs are located in the main Place Jemaa-el-Fna.

Still the burnoosed figures hug the souk walls, the odd donkey cart, dates being bought but little mystery really. (until you get lost as I mentioned).



C - amidst them all (and adding to even as she gripes)

In Marrakesh

In Morocco since Friday but challenged to get online. Now on hybrid french/araabic keyboard. Ny already bad typing to gibber.

While I track down the the "w", a breather:
Voila The Dar Vedra

My riad - Moroccan turned-inwards-to-a-courtyard house - 2 stories, balcony around and a marble fountain in the center, rooms narrow but with high shuttered windows and french doors; all the cooling tricks of the tropics in play.

Riads are like safe houses tucked through the medina (logically, people live somewhere) - indicated by no more than a small sign. In the unlikely chance you've re-found your own, you must be directly in front of it to confirm arrival.

Run like bed and breakfasts but by French people - ever so slightly disdainful proprietors. A teddy bear on the bed cushion about as likely as pancakes at breakfast.

My Dar Vedra is wonderful, all that said. Proprietor Sebastian greeted me with a pot of mint tea and small cookies. I got a kea to the secret door. The courtyard fountain is bright pink with roses and there's a small turtle who wanders the tiles. There's also a plunge pool but it's in the midst of everything so I haven't plunged.

Pictures when I sort out wi-fi and so return to a familiar keyboard.

C in the medina

Do not require

Do not require a description of the countries towards which you sail.
The description does not describe them to you,
and tomorrow you arrive there, and know them by inhabiting them.

- Emerson, The Over-Soul

C - stopping reading

NG Bias

Morocco 4x
India uncountable...

I have inherited (grandmother and paper-recycling bin at dump) an incomplete collection of National Geographics. They live, spine-side out, as wall-stacks in my library, just in case.

Just in case I'm going to Morocco and would like to find out what the respected traveler has said.

Imagine.

India this, India that, Hindu Kush here, Rajputana there. Morocco? not so much.

Mysterious land of berbers and medinas? not during the years in my library. 80 years - none during the years in my library.

Imagine the National Geographic editor's office
(lined in maps of the sub-continent).
Assisant Editor Graves: Sir, I was thinking __________ for our May issue.
Editor Grosvenor: Nonsense Graves, we'll do India.
(repeat)


C - looking elsewhere

Maghreb el Aqsa - at Africa's edge

Almost on Morocco time.

Studying before Thursday departure: today, by showy gesture and self-evident observation, the establishing of Islam.

Maghreb el Aqsa:

When General Oqba Ibn Nafi rode fully armed
into the Atlantic in AD680 to proclaim,
with sword raised to Allah,
that he could go no further,
it marked the dramatic arrival of Islam in Morocco.
Henceforth, this newly conquered Islamic frontier
would be known asthe Maghreb El Aqsa
'the land furthest west'.


C - a little less in awe of a mansion built,
and state established,
just 300 years ago.
No swords were raised or uniforms wetted
as our forefathers rode into the Hudson.
Young us.

Packing

“You have no right to go about Africa
in things you would be ashamed to be seen in at home.”

Mary Kingsley, Travels in West Africa 1897

(in stayed black silk, black button boots and a hat for her travels)

c - amphibious sandals or the button boots

My trip (photos)

Finally into a lumpy package - photos from my travels...

A Travel Slideshow

None are labeled, but within you'll find (somewhat ordered)

In India
Darjeeling,
Sikkim,
Manali,
Dehli,
Jaipur,
Pondicherry,
Cochin,
Bombay,

In Nepal
Bhaktapur,
Jomsom,
Kagbeni,
Kaligandaki Valley,
Muktinath

In Cambodia
Angkor Wat
In Bulgaria
Koprivshtitsa,
Old Plovdiv,

In South America
Rio
Uruguay
Argentina

and, bruefly to the Carribean for
Antigua and Harbor Island.

seek peace

FERNAND KHNOPFF

I feel the least enlightened of my fellow meditators.

Trying to make light of my fallibity, I share with the short banged woman.

"My mind wanders," I admit, "and my focus is drifty."

"I don't judge myself," she replies.

And puts on her socks in peace.

C - imperfect

Unfamiliar quarters, distant cities

"Marco Polo imagined answering...
that the more one was lost
in the unfamiliar quarters of distant cities,
the more one understood the other cities
he had crossed to arrive there;
and he traced the stages of his journeys,
and he came to know the port from which he had set sail,
and the familiar places of his youth,
and the surroundings of home,
and a little square of Venice where he gamboled as a child."

- Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

C

Be monsters

At the ruined cities of Tulum, Coba, Uxmal: monsters with a taste for insects and talons indicating otherwise.

The trees are too young and the relics beneath glass -
but the iguanas were here when the pyramids were just fresh-built and Mayans walked the Yucatan.

C (the Yucatan's more than pretty haciendas)

The homesickness

For a vacation passed
Is not made better
When yesterday I had mango in my cereal,
And today I run past frozen fields,
and contemplate
my leaking
boiler.

C

Hacienda Uayamon

My family likes other hotels. We declared our Puerta Campeche stunning, then drove east to its brother Hacienda of Uayamon.

To our contained and ordered Puerta Campeche, Hacienda Uayamon was drama and tantrums, flaunting angles good and bad.

The Hacienda's aristocratic facade devolved backwards into the jungle yucatan-i angkor-esque (oy). Its signature attraction: 2 columns risen from a perfect rectangle of blue pool. Point made.

(The hacienda waited, beds made, towels rolled on the chaises at the pool.)



We inspected, cocktailed on the balcony, ate - an island of action amidst a sea of empty place-settings - attended by a skeleton staff.



Evidence of one guest in a room of large chairs and chess edged up to the jungle: a desk, a computer, and an ashtray filled.

Here be writers (stalked off).

The place breaths drama after all.


C

And with its much handled pages, another sign

Many months with absorbtion.
Outside the C train, freshdirect, the post.
Out loud.
With pen.
Holidaying done.

C - thanks to R, whose subscription almost overwhelms, but which sometimes we tumble through.

Range of playfulness

From The Notebooks of Robert Frost - 40 notebooks-worth of 70 years of musings...


"Range of playfulness
proof of real culture."

- Robert Frost

C - pushing playful this year

Bahamas, reflecting

So close to Cuba! So many islands! So like Bermuda in its flora, pastels, shutters and stepped roofs except warmer, and without Bloomberg. How enomrous the cruise ships, and seedy the shops on hand to serve the passengers spewed ashore.

No matter R's excellent preparations - the maps and articles at my dispodal - I landed in Nassau pathetically informed. I'm vacation-lazy; beaches smother my cultural instincts. I may deserve Cancuns and senor frog...

Since our hotel was on the main island of Nassau rather than cloistered on the trippy confection of Paradise Island and its Atlantis or pristinely precious Harbour Island (a Caribbean Nantucket), we were ostensibley in contact with the island's life.

That our little cabin-room at Compass Point had a kitchenette spurred us to grocery shop, to buy rum and beers at the local liquor store, hitch a ride with a British resident, and thus toe-test the rhythm of a Bahamian day.

We did new year's eve amidst the bacchanalian grandeur of Graycliff Hotel - a Maugham-ish villa perched behind Nassau proper. We dined on 8 courses of decadence: foie gras gave way to kobe beef, dense bison steaks, cream-smothered tortellini and a desert of chocolate a-sea in more chocolate.



Between courses we walked the hotel's jungled gardens that, like the mansion itself, teeterd on the edge of seediness, wantoness - the lady flamboyant in dress and manner a whiskey-sour from embarrassing herself and the party. As if the garden, left to its own, would grow right back through the mansion to twine its bannisters and reclaim balconies and so revert Graycliffe to some Garcia Marquez set for a senile colonel.

The night was punctuated with entertainments - a fire-eater/dancer in the living room and a feathered troup – the Junkanoo Parade - that lead us to the roof for fireworks. We gawking guests were their warm-up; the Junkanoo players joined the main event of Nassau town's parade when their exhibition for us was done. Their performace surged through the hotel's halls, just barely sanitized for the our gawking, digital-cameras-aloft consumption.



Obligingly, un-ironically, the dancers linked us party-dressed tourists to the actual Bahamas until the time came for the real party of the parade to begin. And when the tourists were nestled snug in our hotel beds, the Bahamas would, for the night, be reclaimed for Bahamians.

Thinking about it now, I suppose this is what "cultural performances" are made of but the proximity of the 2 performaces, and that the players celebrated in a sense, for us - so that we might have an exuberant New years - were something new.

C - nearly done with Bahama postings as the tan fades out

Life aquatic

If we hadn't been there, I wouldn't maybe believe.
New York may be warm, but it's a far cry from saturated....

C + R - returned to the life-grey

There was sand

Back in the city.

Just this morning, and therefore less than half-a-clock-ago, there was sand beneath the feets and seaweed all about.

As ever, as I brush sand that survived a shower and flight from my cheek, the modern phenomenon of waking in a sunny place only to sleep in a bundled up-one, makes me marvel.

C - spinning to bed (where there'll be sand)

Air-Cooled Indian fashion

I'd read about a place - beyond the fish market and off backpacker routes, where the fancy Indian designers kept shops. and company turned inwards and away from the street outside. I donned my best cleanest and brought my fan-cooled India to the air-cooled world of The Courtyard.

A journey from the lowest, lower east-side bodega to Bergdorf's main floor, multiplied by the India quotient.

The shop assistants appeared collectively convinced that I couldn't afford a barrette: eyed me, returned to conversations.

Which allowed berth and time to rifle the bejewelled pouffs that, dwell - state-side - in stores in states I don't get my wardrobe in. Then there were relvant things as well - I bought two (A Abraham + Thakore, a gray/lilac silk blouse with buttons up the back and PRATAP label, a shruggy thing which may wear me till I get the upper hand.

C - not really equipped to fashion-report

Enough about me

I'm back a week now and my days of utter solipsism have encountered some lovely interlopers:

like Rus my still-new fiancee,
friends like visiting Cin, Ian and baby Henry,
New York,
my shop,
life.

If you're into it (I appear to be), solo travel on the relative-cheap is invigorating - each day dawning with the new-driven-stimulus of primordial to-do's:
feed, clothe appropriately, push oneself out in to the world (vs. hibernating in a crappy hotel room, drinking banana lassis and watching BBC) and, as extra credit, enjoy the journey.

Life then is reduced to its barest-bones of you and your suitcase - and not a very big one - which is pretty cool, for a spell.

But at some point you do realize that you're writing yourself in a circle of writing, up to the moment itself.
That you can't - not on this trip, not ever (not no one) - capture all of India in your blog/diary/camera and bring it home.
And that someone, very far away and a day behind, is waiting for you to come home and emails and a few phone calls won't bridge it.

And you're ready to be there, share, let down the high guards and look after someone other than yourself for a while, and be looked after too.

More reports and photos to come, a lot more on the shopping front especially. But on home turf now so not quite so many.

Love to all

C

Home again, home again

And it's good.

Though not so very good the night of - endless flight, endless circling of Newark then endless immigration line as a 747's worth of passengers were fed beneath the stamp of one immigration official - but good coming out the other end with Rus there, the taxi ride to the upper west, unpacking treasures (my estimation) and stories with glasses of wine...

Amazingly easy settling right back in, as if iffy bathrooms and my own mile-high defenses were never there. The head-space and personal space begin to breathe again, find they can stretch in various directions and encounter no obstacles.

I'm back and, with jet lag tapering and friends including Cin, Ian and new baby Henry here (upstate) for the weekend - got good stuff ahead.

More Indian tales and photos as I go, but also home tales too.

Love to all

C-on-the-Hudson

From the menu

From The (my) Hotel Metro Palace's Room Service menu:

Chicken Salad Hawaiian - Cooked chicken strips pineapple and celery twined in mayonnaise. Rs. 80 ($2)

Then the pairings section - many things the chef pairs with coffee (one with minestrone) including:

Fish Tartletts accompanied with Coffee - Shredded fish touched with garlic mayonnaise, filled into crisp shells. Rs. 145 ($3.50)

In a country a-flood in divine cuisine...

C - eating out

Closing

And it's good.

Though not so very good the night of - endless flight, endless circling of Newark then endless immigration line as a 747's worth of passengers were fed beneath the stamp of one immigration official - but good coming out the other end with Rus there, the taxi ride to the upper west, unpacking treasures (my estimation) and stories with glasses of wine...

Amazingly easy settling right back in, as if iffy bathrooms and my own mile-high defenses were never there. The head-space and personal space begin to breathe again, find they can stretch in various directions and encounter no obstacles.

I'm back and, with jet lag tapering and friends including Cin, Ian and new baby Henry here (upstate) for the weekend - got good stuff ahead.

More Indian tales and photos as I go, but also home tales too.

Love to all

C-on-the-Hudson

Fragility Index

Fragility Index: Back to low.

Fragility index spiked off the charts yesterday: brought to near-tears that there wasn't coffee beyond domesic airport security, or internet. I must have had DELICATE writ large when I enquired about the logistics of crossing back out - the woman manning the security desk offered to send her boy to fetch me what I wanted.

But I'm safely in Bombay - my back/neck are unclenching, I've worn a skirt for the first time in India, and am re-introducing myself to my knees and ankles.

My whole being was tensed on the defensive for these past week. Good and necessary - handy as a woman on her own - but I can feel my body now unwinding.

My hotel's (3x price of last) is decent, I've done what i came to do (that's another report, all good), I completed the circle and
even if my stomach goes south ,
or I lose all my rupees,
or I don't source/buy another thing,
I will almost inevitably be able to get myself to the airport, onto a plane where I'm guaranteed a fine bathroom, and home to R with a trip I can call successful.

C - almost home, but enjoying Bombay in the meantime

Tiny tastes, Manali

Briefly, and expensively, on-line at the Taj Hotel's business center...so up go the photos.

A few little bits of Manali...

C (air-conditioned)

Linds Dad and Bombay

I can't believe I had this photo in my computer - scanned in ages ago.

But that's Lindsey, and dad and me in Chor Bazaar, Bombay 1979.

I'll be there again tomorrow.

C - in Linds and my birthtown, our history all around

Closing the circle

Tomorrow: Bombay, and the trip winds down to Tuesday's departure.

I'll leave Delhi a little whooped but laden.

C - off to pack

Bengalaroo (to you)

"Even old New York was once New Amsterdam
Why they changed it I can't say
People just liked it better that way."
from Istanbul (not Constantinople), They Might be Giants

Lots afoot in India today.

In my neck of the woods, not good stuff. Strikes have closed down all but Delhi's autorickshaws and those annoying fellows who follow you trying to give directions. (Here called touts.) I can do NOTHING WHATSOEVER until the traders are appeased and return to work. They're in day 3 now - striking against government's orders to close down illegal shops - which would seem to me a good thing but I don't want to toe-into Indian political waters here and so shall wait.
(A better informed traveler, one who watched TV say, might have known not to travel 16 hours to a city basically in lock-down. She might have stayed in the hills...)

But the bouncier news is from the south where Bangalore, to honor its state of Karnataka's 50 years of independence and stake some claim to their fast-westernized city, have gone with the vernacular original: Bengalooru .
Which, I learned, is derived from Bendakalooru, meaning a town of boiled beans. (The Boston of India.)

C - frustrated and not feeling one with the workers today

Friends with delhi

Delhi almost beat me yesterday.

City-wide strike +
my middling-to-crappy hotel +
various messily wrong stabs at trying to walk from my hotel's (crummy) neighborhood to Connaught Place (including asking directions of a police man who then summoned a rickshaw and tried to convince the rickshaw-wallah to charge me double, pay the policeman his Rs. 50 cut on the spot, then take me to what I now undertsand was around the corner.) =
me ready to high-tail it, pride in shreds, to more familiar Bombay.

Was quite sure it was me - that I simply wasn't made of Delhi stuff and it was personal for Delhi to run me out of town.

Today, thank all gods, dawned far better. Strike over I had a thorough round of shopping, organized a car far-afield buyingtomorrow, made peace with my hotel's neighborhood (can now navigate on foot), on very many smiles terms with hotel's front desk staff and got my hands on a map of the city.

So - Delhi 1/CTP 1.

C - looking up at a gecko watching the florescent tube for his dinner, and sign that reads: please dont open porn sites.
Fromacafe we are.

Hotels in my budget

I thought I'd stay a step ahead by booking my Delhi hotel on-line. I also thought it said "wireless". And I thought that, for $17 a night, I might straddle the line between really crummy and not so bad if you squint.

I was right, except about the internet - they seemed stunned I'd ask.

But I know now what my budget level ($10-$20) gets:
Your tv's remote - its buttons worn to unmarked stubs - will be delivered, along with a small towel, a matchbook size bit of soap, and a roll of toilet paper, only after you've checked into your room.
There will not be any actual tourist info at the front desk, even at the counter marked "Tourist Info" - you'll be directed to a "sister concern" around the corner (where I am now, waiting for their tourist info person).
The room service menu will have dribbles on it.
The decor: all marble - everywhere. Smudgy white-ish marble is the linoleum of India.
The bathroom will not inspire you to wash.
The hotel's halls and lobby will be filled with men who seem to be on the hotel payroll but whose jobs are unclear - security? elevator operator? bell boy?
Your room will be so very dismal that - on the upside - even sleepless from another bus-ride, you'll still go straight out into the Delhi streets rather than stay in it.

So - ultimately, cheap hotels are a tourist's friend.
Mine too.

C - again in Delhi

Of buses

I'd forgotten about bus travel in this country - they don't charge one quarter of the price and allow 14 hours of travel time for nothing.

Indian roads have improved unbelievably but better roads do not quieter drivers make. The trucks and other buses and other vehicles with horns didn't simply poof or shush- they moved onto the highways a-beeping too. And we fended off ALL of them last night - our driver sort of sat on his horn and that's how we made our way north.

His horn-leaning energy was fuled by chai, which we stopped for every few hours. Chai on Indian roads comes from 24 hour, florescent lit, invariably turquoise, dabbas - Indian chai and cheap eats places frequented by bus drivers with midieval bathrooms. Wherever and whenever we pulled over to one, no matter if it was the 9pm chai stop or the 4 am one, out we emerged. Whole bus disembarks, another 15-20 for the whole bus to re-embark, head-count, locate the straggler and we're off again.

No one paid the least attention to me. Not even a "madam from which country". They were in family pods, I was in my personal space bubble - so it was. Maybe Maharashtrians and Bengalis are more/chatty curious?

Anyway - all worth it to arrive here this morning and find the air cean, the fumes minimal and escapable and temp near perfect. In a valley and, all around, snow capped peaks.

For real, this was worth it. Now need to get my bearings.

Love from Vashisht (backpacker hangout) across a small river from Manali

Final gossip

For those following, Brad and Angelina announced they'd adopt an Indian baby.

Of course.
About time.
I was going to wonder what on earth was un-lovable and un-adoptable about Indian babies if they hadn't.

C - cut, no more gossip

Bobble heads and oranges

What they were selling through the bus windows last night, at the intersections way, way outside of Delhi:

A tray of bobble head dogs, various sizes.
A plastic kashilnikov
Oranges.
Salty snacks in baggies.
Puris

C (reporting bus-side but with non-matching photo)

The last week

It's flurried newness and movement for the first 2 weeks but now (8th hotel room), entering the last, I'm very ready to head home.

And see R.

And unpack in one place.

And have more than a pair of pants to choose from each morning. Wear my engagement ring and jewelry generally beyond a sports watch.

And stop washing my underwear each night. And hiding rupees in all my pockets.

Other than that though, full steam onwards and Manali is - once again - stunning this morning.

But I bet New York is too.

Love

C

Oddest wi-fi

From within the Jet Airways ticket office - on one of the high stools facing out. The only place I could find in the entire Jaipur Airport with a safe plug and, after much discussion with a large part of the airport's staff, managed wi-fo too. But now my much delayed flight is boarding...

So, I'm off (I think)

Again

C

Rajasthan in crafts

Yesterday a whirlwind of Rajasthani crafts - traveling out of Jaipur to the messy city of Sanganer.

Sanganer back story: Mogul ruler Raja Man Singh brought the Kagzis - a paper-making community that traces routes back to Turkey via China (!) - and planted them by the (then) clear waters of the River Saraswati to be his in-house paper producers. His go-to's for the sheaves.

Paper's still a-making there, though of a quality the great Mogul poets and calligraphers would have swooned for I don't know. Regardless of how many lumpy pieces of paper pressed with rose petals (I've always hated), each papermaker still claims generational links to those early guys. And then, because it's Rajasthan and crafts are the thing, the also standard spill-over Rajasthani crafts of blockprinting and pottery are also represented.

GOD is it painful to upload photos....

C

Finally, photos

Have a little window of wi-fi and battery - rare combo - and so a few photos to add some visuals to this dry stuff.

C (now leaving)

Eric Newby

Eric Newby, I understand, died today.

Almost missed in the Times of India - a spec of a photo and this:
"He struck out for Afghanistan armed with British resoluteness, a pair of new boots and an exquisite taste for the absurd."

His best known book - to which the quote refers - is A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush. Justifably famous and so self-effacingly modest that Newby shines as much as the incredible journey.

Then there's Slowely Down the Ganges - possibly even more wonderful and warm as Newby's accompanied by his wife Wanda and so we get two keen perspectives on India.

I never met Mr. Newby but did spend a night in the Eric and Wanda Newby room at Fairlawn in Calcutta. Just a little brass plaque on the door and some black and white photos of Newby on the staircase. (Sadly, he didn't appear in my dreams that night, perched on the bed's end to relate a tale.)

I've got lots of Newby quotes sribbled about - will find and get some up as a sliver of a memorial.

What a really wonderful man and writer - can't communicate anything more eloquent than to recommend all of his books.

C

Himalayas, perhaps

Tomorrow
(hopefully)

Stay tuned.

C - leaving this desert and heading for the hills

Solo travel is to diving

Me at almost high noon, Jantar Mantar, Old City, Jaipur

Sometimes, this happened the other day on the drive from Pondicherry to Chennai Airport for instance, I will take a step out and above myself and then get a little scared.
Not that the perspective reveals a perceivable threat.
It's just that all of a sudden I'll realize
I'm alone
in India
and I'll be emotionally winded.
Like when you're learning to dive (as still am) and you suddenly realize there's some 30+ ft separating you and the atmosphere that you know (and require).
But then it passes. And I return to my happy self, in an Ambassador car, overtaking buses that are overtaking trucks and we're all overtaking the rickshaws, whipping by rice paddies and copses of strange wispy pines, and I'm on my way to Rajasthan,
or wherever.
And I go back to being in me and the moment.
That's all.
(I toodled around Jaipur today, went to the marvelous Anokhi Museum of Blockprinting in a restored haveli and now I'll have some food overlooking the Mughal's pink city...)
Love to all everywhere.
C

Jaipur, airport

Reached the outskirts of the pink city a few minutes ago - long haul up here from Pondicherry but nice that things are dry again, pillowcase not clammy, pores take a break.

Got behind on hotels as I got on top of the airline bookings and now have to sort out a hotel for tonight and tomorrow. And one that wants me at 6:45 in the morning. And one on a street a rickshaw might know/I can pronounce.

Good news is, I'm here and - since shops can't possibly open for a few hours still - I have some sleep coming.

C in Rajasthan

Air deccan - opinion revised

Okay, I'm on a roll now - India's domestic airlines are fascinating me having, depended on them with this too fast trip. And they present a refreshing context from which to examine our own, flailing, carriers.

But that's for another post (another you may skip) - here, an ode to Air Deccan.

In a previous post I'd called Air Deccan "meek" based wholly on their up-thrust hand logo and tag line, "Simplifly".
I take those snide-isms back - I get it now.
Air Deccan is the people's airline, so their earnestness makes perfect sense.
As I roughly understand it:
Kingfisher Airlines is the high roller, a tiny bit flashy but knows how and where to get things done.
Indigo (haven't flown them yet but they have a very *wallpaper font/logo thing going) is the techster
Spice (also haven't flown but they're all color and zoom) is the hipster
Jet is for the arrived - the established but not rooted, the page 6-ers and the foreigners who had their entire trips booked from overseas.
Indian Airlines is for the stalwarts, the traditionalists, the old hands and the foreigners with travel agents unaware that there was another option.

And Air Deccan, bless its populist soul, is the civic minded ascetic, and the super cheap, book-as-we-go, foreigners.

Air Deccan's mission (crudely paraphrased here) is for every last Indian to emerge from his/her village, field, maligned territory and - by Air Deccans' extraordinarily low fares and thorough + far-reaching destination list (5 in the remote 7 sister states) - step aboard an Air Deccan aircraft and experience for themselves the fruits of these modern times.

Their mission actually talks about such goals.
They give you a free additional ticket if your flight is delayed.
I may be imagining but the folks on my flight seemed less hoggy with the bathroom, more polite to the hostesses (I felt guilt for taking extra toilet paper) - as if each inspired to keep in brusque step with this exemplary new thing.

Indian security is its own issues, Air Deccan's ground-staff not most charming, and we were just slightly delayed, but there was a clarity to their mode and, for the first time in some while, I didn't feel resented by the carrier paid to carry me.

C - chatty in Jaipur as I wait to hear from a hotel

Aspirational India

Sign (outskirts of Chennai):

Computer Education
Typerwriting, Tailoring
Personality Development

(Soup-to-nuts for the aspirational.)

C - still waiting on a hotel...

Thank yous

While stomache stays the course, rupees hold and no nation-wide strikes are declared, I wanted to say my thank yous.

(mostly not in order)

Ruslan, for emails that give me a secret smile and make me work hard and fast so I can hurry home (also his love, support, rings on my finger...)
KEEN all-terrain sandals - screwy-sporty to look at but doing job of 2 lesser pairs of shoes
Glue stick + moleskin lined 8-1/4" notebook - together allowing me to be a whirling sticky thing that collects and clips...
Bottled water - iodine tablets handy and plastic bottles evil, but stomach sacred and time short.
Underwear that dry over night.
Ceiling fans that do the drying
Timex ironman - watch, alarm, constant on my arm
Single serving, Rs. 1, shampoo packets sold at every Indian tiny shop
Bananas + papayas + pineapples = safe (peelable) fruit and always in season far as I can tell
Mom + Dad for linking me to Mother India, Dad for continuing his own affair with India, and Linds for still being here
William Dalrymple - for inspiring much much better writing
NYTimes.com - so I can keep a toe in it
Canon D70 - for being forgiving
Secret Platinum something solid - doubles as on-the-road perfume
LP India - hefty, oft-berated but when you need to know when the bus goes, invaluable
My great-great-great ___ for steering our genes into english-speaking waters. Navigating India in Japanese would be a bitch.

And to everyone who's still reading - especially to you.

Love and thankful C
(still in Pondicherry)

Pigeons, for Cin + Henry

Neither as prevalent nor as loud as its crows, pigeons are neverthless everywhere in India.

Taking this photo in Bombay the other morning, two guys who'd just purchased food for the pigeons stepped over when they saw me:

Pigeon lover1: Madame, are you not having pigeons in your country?
Me: Oh yes we have them. We just don't often feed them and most people speak badly of them.
Pigeon lover2: But madam why? They're so cute.

ahem.

So here's to pigeons Cin - and a piece that puts them in a properly romantic sort of light.

Up on the roof the men discuss the different breeds of racing pigeon:
the golays that fly low over the roofs, but in a perfectly straight line,
the fast and high-flying kabuli-kabooter,
or the slow but beautiful, fan-tailed nisarays...
- from William Dalrymple's City of Djinns (referring to an earlier book, Twilight in Delhi)

C
(Cin - hoping you pass on your love for them to your little H)

Monsoon Rains

Lonely Planet's got it gloriously wrong on Pondicherry.
NOW is monsoon, not in the summertime with the rest of India.
Pondicherry is IN a monsoon, as is the rest of the southeast as the monsoon completes its full circle of the sub-continent (coming first to land on the beaches of Kerala in late May).

Doesn't really matter or effect plans so much. Just means everything's never-quite-dry and the gutters more fragrant.

Either way, plans have pushed up a little and am off to Delhi this afternoon, then onto Jaipur tomorrow morning.

C – damply

Malabar to Coromandel

Reached - though walking spaced.

Traded in a Portuguese town for France's sole claim to India: the lovely but diminutive, Pondicherry.

Ambassador taxi + Kingfisher Air (more on them soon) + ambassador taxi + 4 hr bus + rickshaw and...

The tricky part of course was at the very end. In spirit of had-good-luck-till-now, optimistically directed rickshaw to L'Oriental. I gather I appeared dishevelled, (arriving by rickshaw is never a good start) and unlikely as a paying guest even with reservation, so - declaring themselves full - the front desk of L'Oriental gently directed me to a cement block (by the beach!) that's 1/4 of their price.

No matter. Sleaze for the night and, having secured valuables and brushed my hair, have found an even lovelier one that will have me and booked it for tomorrow eve and the next...the Villa Helena.

More once I've slept and absorbed east coast locale.

C

Little airlines of India

Like bunnies.

When I was in Pune (1998 - 2001), Jet Airways was the new kid on an airline block that had eaten or run out its previous upstart arrivals. A true competitor to the behemoth that is/was Air India/Indian Airlines (domestic + international arms of the same beast), Jet challenged Air India's years of market dominance that had rendered Indian airtravel neither sexy nor fiscally feasibile.

You took the train.

Then along comes JetAir with foreign trained management and a yellow rose for every female customer and flash new planes and India's a-flutter. Suddenly, flying's an option.

I imagined all the desk clerks, asleep for decades in the Air India main office in Nariman Point - a cavernous two-story affair with desks sort of wherever - dusting themselves off as they came to.

Now, Jet Air's as legit as they come, the choice of all - but the little upstarts are nipping.

I took a tiny, 5 plane, upstart to get here - GoAir (handsome website but professionalism begins/end with the site's design) and now have my choice of 5 or so, that I can book myself, on-line and with no huge financial slap for being a foreigner.

Favorites based on name/logo:
Kingfisher Air - owned, run and using the very same logo as the popular beer of the same name. Their matching motto: "Fly the good times." I fly them tomorrow to Chennai.
And the meeker Air Deccan whose motto "Simplify", and logo of upstretched hands, seems to represent a wholistic spa or aid group.

Stay tuned for which gets to booking Chennai - Delhi.

C - still in Cochin but wrapping up

Color, India

Checked in for my Chennai flight on Kingfisher. Eating cashews and drinking milk coffee and wondering what journey musak took to get here, and why.

Smart red jackets with brass buttons - sort of bell-hoppy - on all related to Kingfisher, lots of helping and handling of your luggage. No beer served on board, though the question got a smile.

And I'm off. Unscripted from Chennai airport to Pondicherry, by bus so must sort that out on arrival. Hope to check in this eve from the lovely Hotel de L'Orient. (or maybe not)

C

Smart jackets (no beer)

Checked in for my Chennai flight on Kingfisher. Eating cashews and drinking milk coffee and wondering what journey musak took to get here, and why.

Smart red jackets with brass buttons - sort of bell-hoppy - on all related to Kingfisher, lots of helping and handling of your luggage. No beer served on board, though the question got a smile.

And I'm off. Unscripted from Chennai airport to Pondicherry, by bus so must sort that out on arrival. Hope to check in this eve from the lovely Hotel de L'Orient. (or maybe not)

C

Fantasy

I've been in a different cafe for each post (especially speedy and tidy one at Fort Cochin's Post Office yesterday, currently generic airport chain).

Which means a different computer and logging in fresh to post each time.

Fantasy: I go to type fromacafe.blo...
and it autfills.

C – dreamin'

India's hat trick

(photo has nothing to do with this post btw, placeholder till the more relevant is downloaded and up)

Today is Ramazan (or Ramazan Eid) - the end of the Muslim month of Ramadan and fasting.

The field that was yesterday full of boys at cricket, abutting India's oldest church where Vasco de Gama was briefly buried, is this morning full of Fort Cochin's Muslims. They've been pouring in by rickshaw, car and foot, bits of carpet and seating cloths beneath their arms, kids in holiday best, to attend the celebration. The ladies walk to the field's far end and sit on the side closest to the church, blocked from the men's view by a plastic sheeting, the men take their seats before of the main platform.

It's an Indian hat-trick then:
Diwali began on Saturday, we're in the midst of it now.
Eid today.
Many of the shops I needed to visit in Mattancherry closed yesterday, their absent owners with names like Jose George taking the Christian day of rest.
And, for all I know, India's some 7 million Buddhists are up to something of their own.

Yes it's the land of a million languages, but it's the everyday overlapping of religions that's really stunning (when peaceable that is).

C (trying to get to Pondicherry today but buses booked with holiday makers of every persuasion)

Cochin and the Malabar Coast

Arrived last night.

(what shopping looks like here)

Fort Cochin (the tourist-ish area by the Chinese Fishing nets where every residence advertises homestay rooms, internet consisting of the single, family's computer, a cafe of a table), is looking fine this Sunday morning. Just so slightly more hospitable than Bombay.

Notes last night, in from the airport:
By Cochin airport's environs, you've started to believe in India's eventual neat-ification
Nothing here is seething as in Bombay, here there's a stillness - whereas in Bombay even rags have lives.
I might smell cardamon.
Crossing the bridge onto Fort Cochin, we passed a mahout aboard his elephant.
I did better for myself with this arrival and am met by a man with my name on a placard who leads me to a fine white Ambassador, its interiors sheathed in starched white cotton.

(None of which is to say that I do not like Bombay btw, it's just more of an exhausting and dirty challenge to love and I will continue cleaning it off my face for the next few days. )

C - off to the shops of Mattancherry

Happy Diwali

So begins, with many deafening bangs, the Festival of Lights.

This post would have gotten up sooner, and with more photos, had not others in this land of 1 billion wired-well-wishers also been on-line.

The internet was near-standstill.

Guess it's working now...AT THE AIRPORT. Yes indeed, our own terminals (JetBlue excepted) could learn a little wi-fi from Mumbai's domestic terminal.

I'm off to Cochin and 2 nights at this pretty hotel in Fort Cochin.

Love to all, divali firecrackers in all your chappals.

C

Jolie reprt

There was the much bigger news in India today. The waiters at Leopold's wanted to discuss the TATA take-over of Corus, which made them beamingly proud to be Indian as they gathered around my front page.

But there was also this...

From Diwali lights welcome Jolie, Pitt to Jodhpur in today's Times of India

Reporting that the Brad + Jolie crew are leaving Pune for 5 days holiday in Jodhpur, the writer prods the young pilot-to-be of the departing celebs:
"So what is flying a Hollywood personality like?"
He replies:
"I starched and ironed my uniform..the aircraft was thoroughly cleaned and disinfected, the seat covers changed and the cabin decked up with rose bouquets and plates of cookies and pastries - which, of course, were left untouched."

And though Brangelina's security team failed to get Pune airport's main entrance closed off, they:
"Nevertheless went around and picked on whoever appeared suspicious..."

Fresh gossip, one time only this is happening as special Diwali treat.

C

Addendum to this. In today's Times, and article on the frustrations of foreign filmakers in India. From it:
"It takes four days to get equipment cleared from the customs. If the foreign crew is informed about this and organises itself accordingly, lot of heartburn will be avoided..."

Bombay's fine

I landed in Bombay mid-day. Swirl, sweat, sharpen my reflexes to include all directions and now am installed in Colaba (south Bombay): at Bentley's Hotel and this internet cafe. With linolium partitions, still air and fellows like ashu_guddu1 it seeking a partner in matrimony (on-line) beside me, it's all coming back to me.

I'd worried from Dad's reports - from the world's actually - that India might have changed beyond recognition. That, improbably, the route in from Chattrapathi Shivaji International Airport - generally as good a re-immersion into India as one can hope for - might somehow have been rendered tidy and India's fullsome chaos contained and spirited elsewhere. This happened in Bangkok, arriving into Beijing. The world's cities (except New York City by way of Queens), are quite good at air-brushing your first impression.

No worries. Though the route's tidier, sprung with more billboards and congested with more cars with window-up-AC; still there are amidst it all bullocks, goats, rickshaws and papaya vendor carts.
Many fewer squatters on the route's edges, and ragged-wrapped hovels, but still the ladies squatted to sweep dust with twigs, a road-workers baby suspended in a bit of cloth from a tree branch, a garland for everything and everyone.
Marigolds and firecrackers and door-to-door chappal vendors and the immaculate ladies in saris and their male counterpart: the pressed gentlemen on black bikes in snow white lungis and well-creased topis.

Signs of ahead-moving from my taxi window appeared good vs. deadening - the portal-sponsored potted palms on the medians, a road with lines and lanes, though my driver used only hand signals.

The boys who sell books through car windows were touting:
Freakenomics
Blink ("by the author of Tipping Point, madam")
Inheritance of Loss,
The World is Flat
Something by (on?) Musharraf
How Opal Mehta got Kissed...

And it's hot as Bombay's so freakishly good at being seeringly hot. Heat-haze so thick you can't make out one end of the Queen's Causway from the other. Watch sweat trickle down the neck of my sidarjhi driver (I've chosen - some sweltering cheapness - to save @ Rs. 200 and not take an AC cab).

Tomorrow and saturday morning in Bombay then Cochin by Saturday eve.

Let the sourcing, and looking, begin.

Love

C (bombay-wallah-ish)

A sense of place

I can't transmit that India smell, or link-in a streaming soundtrack from amidst the stalls at Crawford Market. But, with last-year's photos, I'll try for one sense.

Fresh ones to follow. I'm toting all manner of camera-to-internet-cafe-computer-linking options, one's just got to work...

Bombay then

It doesn't seem possible, or even very timely, for a freshly engaged one - but in a few hours I'm off to India. The trip was planned pre-proposal, the trip goes on.

3 weeks of mother India - by road, rail and air - sourcing for Circa Trade (the new site should be live any minute).

In wishlist form, I'll hit the shopping highlights: Bombay-Bangalore-Cochin-Pondicherry-Ahmedabad (Gujarat's a maybe)-Delhi-Jaipur, more Rajasthan. If there's time and spirit after all that, I'll stop the sourcing and head north to Himachal Pradesh for exploring.

The blog, of course, will follow. I go with laptop, 2 cameras, batteries and adaptors and drives.

I go with a less-tempting/blingy ring on my ring finger as the actual one gets resized.

I go with R's love and understanding that this is a part of my odd make-up. Maybe not a favorite part that would take me so far for so long, but a part nevertheless. (He gets me that way.)

So - from the road then; and fromacafe becomes, again, a travel log.

Love to all

C

And it fades

  Morning above Arbanassi, Bulgaria

There's still laundry out from the trip, vestiges of the Black Sea tan. In R's fridge, one final bottle of Bulgarian champagne and probably still some leva (or stutinki) in a pocket, somewhere.

With the final threads of a perfect trip, and imagination, will hold onto Bulgaria a little longer but I can feel New York taking hold. It's turning to fall here and that seasonal switch is a rigorous one.

Labor Day watershed.

C - nostalgic 

What arrowheads are to us

"All archaeologists working in the area have already joined their colleagues at the site, and are working without rest, adrenaline rushing through their veins."
- From Sofia News Agency, "Bulgarians Unearth Unique Thracian Gold Treasure"

Bulgaria's ancient culture made front pages elsewhere (though not registering on our own domestic screens).

Thracian priestess burial mound found on Black Sea Coast, just south of Sinemorets, not far from Veleka River head. Thracian = 3rd cen. BC., found intact - an univestigated mound left alone for over 2000 years.

R and I were there two weeks ago. Just a little early and without our Thracian tomb radar on, we drove right by the mount.

What they found, and this is even more stunning if you're getting the frequency that these tombs are being turned up, is an intact burial chamber full of lovely things to accompany a priestess on her journey into the underworld.



(What we don't know about Bulgaria could fill more than one Thracian tomb.)

C - hoping priestess reached and reigns

Not yet celebrated

 
Nessebar (Black Sea Coast), interior The Church of St Stephen

I've spent too many bulgaria posts dwelling on the ideosynchrosies of an ancient country poised to join the EU in 2007, and maybe not enough on its very rich, too little known, and everywhere evident history.

Which is plain lazy of me I suppose - like the guide book writer pointing out the horse cart beside the SUV, juxtapositions aren't exactly journalism.

So, we're celebrating from here on in.

And starting with this gem of a church in Nessebar. Painting to the rafters and I had it to myself to wander.

Love, and much respect, C 

Signs

Diligently pitched into our modern era (on course for EU inclusion next year), signs of the new Bulgaria are about.

Bigger-than-Sam's-Club super stores on city's outskirts.
Swankier-than-our-own gas station shops stocking liquors and gourmet coffee.
Little girls dressing like Nicole Richie.
Japanese tourists.

To the mix add SUVs. Fortunately and like their western counterparts, they keep to urban areas while in the countryside, soviet-era cars continue do the heavy lifting.

And displaying.

(Out of shot but the mellon-purveyor-car-owner was shifting produce from the front seats to the back display as I walked up.)

C missing Sozopol, as is R

Treats on wooden sticks

The way Cracker Jacks might make me nostalgic, these sugar squirrels in an Etara shop window took R right back.

Which, in turn, made me sort of misty for a past I couldn't possibly have had, not having been raised behind the curtain that separated R's childhood from my own.

That his boy-years had featured treats like these - more mid-19th century than late 20th.

Cracker Jacks pale. (Madeleines come to mind.)

C

Bulgarian Bagpipes

A great deal of uncertainty, conflict and controversy surrounds the questions of the origins, evolution and distribution of bagpipes. At risk of throwing gasoline on the fire, the following opinions and speculations (with stress on those words) are offered here.
from: Hotpipes: Some notes on the history of the Bagpipe


Because he's a romantic, and possibly very old, soul, and because there's some tartan in the genes, my father has always had a thing for bagpipes.

Perhaps many do.

(I've seen bag-piping men amidst small-town-America parades, awkwardly abroad in kilts and knee-socks.)

With our hereditary link and gross-cultural-assumptions, we'd never questioned that a bagpipe was a Scottish thing. We imagined, I suppose, that the highland shepherds must have muddled into the making of the first with a stretch of hours, a goatskin, some pipes.

R entered our lives and set us straight.

Apparently, Bulgaria's charted a parallel claim - it's own very rich folk/traditional music heritage filled full of bagpipes.

Which would make some sense as their land supports a similar cast of shepherds, pastoral farmers and gypsies amongst whom (it's said) the instrument is much favored.

Dad remains a sceptic so for him, and the rest of the Scott-attributors, I post these photos as evidence.

C (adding fuel)

Bulgarian marketing

 

A wine display in the beachside cafe.

R reports the tag line is:

From my land.


C - bossed into wine-drinking 

Live and let

A favorite quote from Bulgraia Blue Guide's, James Pettifer:

"...Bulgarians are generally broad-minded, moderately hedonistic and tolerant."

He refers to family and relationships, but I'd say the Bulgarian live-let-live (have a rakia, lose the top, park on the highway if there's a phone call to take) spirit runs through more.

Walking the eastern sea-edge of Sozopol's old town one evening glanced down (pretty light on the beach) and spot these guys.

If they were aware of how vividly, symbolically, eve-affirmingly picaresque they were, they didn't let on.
They never looked up from beers or game.



C - toasting Bulgaria, though sadly not from a table amidst the evening-tide.

Bulgarian bagpipes

The way Cracker Jacks might make me nostalgic, these sugar squirrels in an Etara shop window took R right back.

Which, in turn, made me sort of misty for a past I couldn't possibly have had, not having been raised behind the curtain that separated R's childhood from my own.

That his boy-years had featured treats like these - more mid-19th century than late 20th.

Cracker Jacks pale. (Madeleines come to mind.)

C

Fish sausages, jams and lace

R, father Vladimir, and I returned from the Black Sea yesterday. R and I are very tan and a little fatter. We have only a Bulgarian day left.

We came home the long way - mapped so that I'd have extreme exposure to history and sites. First along the Black Sea coast north of Sozopol to Nesebar, then inland, across majestic gold fields that could be any stunningly bucolic land where Americans spend lots of money and compose books about living off the grid amongst the locals (by authors with last names starting with "M").



Whereas the Black Sea Coast is - at its most popular beaches - package tourist-to-sweaty-shoulder by package tourist (not so much Sozopol, but generally), the acres just inland are untouched and un-populated save for the shepherd, or the scant evidence of a farmer - a Vlada parked by a field. No pick-up trucks here, the eastern european tin/cardboard autos-of-old continue to boldly service the agricultural community. The Vlada-by-the-field motif is a quick location check - this is not Provence).

Cross these Thracian Plains then take a right and pass north through the Balkans (mountains), on a road built by the Bulgarian youth in the 50's. There's a monument to the teen-builders at a high pass: brave, brawny and stunningly patriotic.

Then you arrive at Arbanassi, where we spend our night in a farmhouse hotel...

But that's for another post, I should get this up while I still have battery.

And with so many Bulgarian stories to tell.

C in Sofia...

beaches and sand

Sozopol - view from our hotel towards Old Town.
(From favorite guide, conservative with compliments save for when writing up local liquors: "...a remarkable and evocative little town with some of the most attractive and best preserved buildings on the whole Black Sea Coast.")

And in case they get a mention no where else on this blog:
all hail Bulgarian PEACHES.
God smiled on the fruit trees of this country...

From sozopol

SOZOPOL

R insists he told me Sozopol but I'm quite sure i heard "Varna". No matter, we're in the former - so no dracula sitings and a much lovelier, charming-er and smaller Black Sea-side town to report from.

I'm on a clunky hotel computer with a faded keyboard, so can't get my own photos up yet, but leave reders with yesterday's favorite word.

stutinki

100 stutinki = 1 lev (bulgarian currency).

C - wishing the country was even cheaper so I got to say "stutinki" a lot more

Off

To where cars are made of cardboard and the bacteria's a national treasure.

And to where dear R, Maria and Vladimir wait.

More soon, possibly from a Balkan land (or possibly from JFK).

Love

C

A plume too many

When Mountbatten was Commander of the British Navy in the Mediterranean, spit and polish often allowed the British to outshine other fleets, Lady Pamela observes:

"Our pageantry is so marvelously done because it doesn't become comic opera," she noted.
"With some nations, it's too over the top - one plume to many."
From "Born a Lady" in W Magazine

(Context: Mountbatten was Lady Pamela's father, the Last Viceroy of India, friend to Gandhi and Nehru, rumored to have shared his wife's affection with the latter.
Lady Pamela is widow of late interior designer David Hicks, mother to designer Ashley Hicks and social beauty and sometimes coffee-table-book auteur, India Hicks.)

Bend of the twig

(back of car picnic with with dad and linds in trunk, turkey 1974)

“How odd that one bends one's own twig
and it stays bent.

Who could have foreseen the permanent effect of childhood journeys ... "

- Martha Gellhorn, Travels with Myself and Another

(read it all though, quotes no substitute)

Of wind, the waves and train travel

Aboard 12:45 Empire Line (last stop Albany, mine Hudson)

All the way up the Hudson's run brown, slashed with whitecaps. (Surmise: river's taken this less-traveled mid-week day to attend to its own business of churning, too few passers-by the get blue and pretty for.)

Now, as the train stops just out of Rhinecliff (near empty and compartment sad quiet now that the ladies doing crosswords aloud have disembarked), it starts to snow.

More aware these days of my luck, to have this split city/country life. I travel weekly and so anticipate train trips as a matter of course. I still feel a pull back towards whichever habitat I've just left. But it passes and my attentions are amplified like a tourist's in the new one.

Like hurdling to and fro between plots across a fence - before one side's hinted at losing luster - BAM – I'm on the other.

Encased in the gray-brown world of this Wednesday's Hudson landscape, en route home to country portion of my week, I miss the city a little in this in-between stage. It's fresher and I wonder at the parochialness of what I see. To other passengers, thinly, discreetly scattered through the train, I think:
“City for the whole week: too much for you?"

C - waiting for own stop.

Jet-lagged spirit

"Here I am, safely returned over those peaks
from a journey far more beautiful and strange
than anything I had hoped for or imagined -
how is it that this safe return brings such regret?"

- Peter Matthieson

C - Legs bowed round phantom sheepskin saddle, notebook smelling of eucalyptus, sipping crude Starbucks stand-in for cafe con leche.

Horse stage, delayed

Cintra and the eucalyptus

3 days on the estancia = 6+ horse hours, making me some sort of middling novice.

Considering the hours were logged crossing eucalyptus-edged, roadless pampas, once pursued by the wild-maned stud-steed, once witnessing cattle called to mass by a human's bellow, perhaps they count for more?

And after the hours astride: the unsaddling.

(Indulge me, I took up no one's time in my teenage years. Having sat out the Black-Beauty/Misty stage, the animal's blissfully new.)

Returning a horse to its natural state after a ride taps something primal. It encapsulates man's history with the animal in a morning's span: saddle, domesticate, control and then unsaddle, un-bridle and, with the gate unlatched - return to freedom as if the imbalance can be re-righted daily.

C - suffering that "horse thing" too late for sleep-away camp

Uruguay: discuss

"Meat is what remains,
when nothing else is left."
- Unknown (assuming Uruguayan/Argentine persuasion)

More meat posts to come. Como no when reporting from a land of herd-dotted hills, where life centers on the asado (grill) and steak knives out-number butter.

C

Meat remains

"Meat is what remains,
when nothing else is left."
- Unknown (assuming Uruguayan/Argentine persuasion)

More meat posts to come. Como no when reporting from a land of herd-dotted hills, where life centers on the asado (grill) and steak knives out-number butter.

C