Losing track of time- India and now Thailand

Has it really been three weeks since I last composed an entry!?  Since it is not possible to relate everything I have done, consider these exerpts or highlights from my adventures.

Escape Mumbai by plane.  Passed through the dense brown haze and smog at about 20,000 feet and finally saw blue sky.   Burning trash, polluting vehicles and too many people all contribute to the constant layer of particulates that covers the city.   If there is a reward, it is the few minutes in the evening when the sun, a giant red ball, disappears over the bay and the string of lights called the "Queen's necklace"  illuminate the promenade  along the waterfront.  Mumbai, in spite of its challenges, can provide experiences to last a lifetime, even during a brief visit.  I replaced  my plans at the last minute from a foray to the south to a flight north to Jaipur.  A couchsurfing host responded to my appeal and how could I pass up someone with the same name as a famous golfer, Vijay Singh!  Although I stayed with Ankur Sharma and his family, I was really hosted by he and his two best friends, all in their twenties.   The village where I stayed, Amer, is about 10 miles from Jaipur and has one of the region's most famous attractions, a beautiful castle, a fort and stone walls snaking their way over the surrounding hillsides in the style of the Great Wall of China.  Ankur gave up his bed and bedroom so I could be part of the family; mom, dad, 2 sisters, one brother, Ankur and me!   Tea with milk for breakfast, rice with a vegetable sauce for lunch and a similar meal for dinner, all accompanied by freshly made flat bread or nam.   The cast system is alive and well in India- Ankur and his family are Brahman, his friend Abhay is of the same cast and his family are the priests in charge of the largest and most historic temple of the village, and Vijay who is Rajistani has other obligations and traditions.  Each morning, Ankur went to the temple, usually before I got up, and then came to his room to pray before his personal alter.   He answered many of my questions about Hinduism and I shared trips to the temple.  Other than local excursions, walks on the surrounding walls, a tour of the palace, visits to an astounding observatory created hundreds of years ago in Jaipur, trips to the market and time on the roof watching children fly kites in preparation for the kite festival that I would miss by one day, the experience that is most vivid is a trip to see the Taj Mahal!
I had not planned to go to Agra since it was about 4 hours from Amer, but Vijay saw this as an opportunity for an outing with his friends.  He borrowed his uncle's car, I paid for the gas, and the four of us headed to the Taj Mahal.   Originally planning to share driving responsibilities on a divided highway, I soon changed my mind.  Divided highway yes, but that has a different meaning in India.  There is no limited access, so you share the road with camel carts full of short logs or bulging with giant bags of hay that obscure the roadway, buses in various stages of disrepair and trucks- yes, fully loaded trucks coming directly at you on the wrong side of the highway!!!!    It was an exhausting experience for both driver and passengers, but we managed to survive.  Honking is a national pasttime.  It took all day to drive the 150 miles, so we arrived just as the last tickets were being sold to enter the Taj Mahal complex; closing in 10 minutes!  We paid for a tuk tuk to get from the parking lot to the ticket booths, changed vehicles when the first one wouldn't start, had a guide who rushed us to the booth, paid another person to insert us at the head of the line, bypassing at least 200 people, and then ran for the entrance arch to take photos before sunset.    Worth the effort?  Yes!  It was one of those breathtaking experiences, unexpected beauty in a park like setting.   The sun was low in the sky, a slight misty haze filtered the sunlight and out came the cameras.   Even though it was crowded, I think there were fewer people than earlier in the day.  Reflecting ponds mirror the symetrical architecture of this amazingly beautiful white building.   We agreed on a meeting place and I was off to capture the atmosphere of this world class wonder.   Find the perfect angle, adjust the lighting, fight for position with other photographers, enter the mosque at the side in order to frame it through a doorway and then hurry to the end of the queue of people entering the building.   Daylight is fading, there are no lights inside, be pushed by the crowd,  stumble on the raised steps, follow someone with a lighted cell phone, give up on taking photos of the interior  and find the exit.  The post card photos of the inside confirm that I really did not miss the best part of the Taj Mahal.   Sunset, fading light, a few last photos and taking one last glance over our shoulders, we are among the last visitors to leave.
Where to spend the night?   Ask for directions, find a cheap guest house and then get something to eat . We parked while Ankur and Abhay wandered the streets near the railway station to find a suitable place.  When they returned, we found out there is an additional cast in India, the foreign tourist.   I was not allowed to spend the night in a guest house, and none of them was allowed to share a room in a hotel with me; result, they checked me into the inexpensive hotel room before going around the corner to their guest house.  We then met at the "cafe" in front of the hotel for something to eat.  The weather is cooler in the north of India than in Mumbai and none of us was prepared for the cold night.   I slept in my clothes and piled the three available blankets on top of me.  Even then, I didn't get a good nights sleep because I was freezing. 
At 8:00 am, my three friends knocked on the door, entered wearing hoods, hats and all of the clothes they had brought, we ordered hot tea delivered to the room and all crawled under the covers to watch TV while we warmed up.  The crazy photo taken by the delivery boy will be a treasured memory.   The Monday morning traffic was slightly less hectic than what we experienced on Sunday, but we did meet trucks on the wrong side of the highway once again and plenty of camel carts.  My three new friends continue to call me "dada" (grandpa) and to me they have become "beta" (grandsons)!  We all agreed that we had shared a unique and memorable experience.   Ah, this is India.

Arrival in Hong Kong.  At the airport information booth, I met a young man from the UK who had just experienced India and the countries I was about to visit.  With the smell of India still in our clothes, we bonded immediately.  He had a general neighborhood in mind for finding a cheap guest house and since I had made no previous plans, we figured out transportation to the center of the city and to the guest house where we ended up getting rooms. You wouldn't believe this massive, complicated building and the variety of things it housed.  Only describable in person.   Stephen and I shared the Hong Kong experience.   I later spent two nights couchsurfing with Ian, another young Englishman who is teaching in Hong Kong, and he showed Stephen and me places we had not yet visited.  Hong Kong, what a contrast to Mumbai.  Clean, efficient and organized, we were able to get everywhere either on foot or by using public transportation.  I had no preconeived notion of what Hong Kong would be like, and had only considered it a stop over on my way to Thailand.  What a pleasant surprise- a little bit of San Francisco, New York, Cape Town, Istanbul.   We never ran out of things to do and interesting places to visit.  One day we walked the city for fourteen hours, almost non-stop, including climbing long stairways, the steep winding streets leading to the observation areas above the city, taking the longest complex of escalators in the world, and descending in a cable car that sometimes hits a 45 degree angle.   It was absolutely spectacular looking down on the mass of high rise building clustered around the busy waterways.  We lingered in a traditional  neighborhood full of street markets and watched live fish swimming in tanks become still breathing segments on a well worn chopping block and attempted to identify strange looking and smelling foods displayed everywhere.  There is the challenge of ordering food  when everything is written in Chinese and  no photos- we just pointed to something identifyable on a neighboring table and laughed with the locals who tried to assist us.  All of this is just down the street from gigantic modern shopping centers filled with designer shops, Prada, Chanel, Louis Vuiton, Versace and surrounded by banks and investment firms known around the world.  Money!  there must be lots of it here.  Rich Chinese from the mainland come here to shop.   For a contrast, we sought the calm and isolation of Lamma Island; a short ferry ride and a world away from the bustle of the city center.   A fishing village with leaning houses built on stilts, trails leading to isolated and deserted beaches, pathways ending at mountain shrines and small restaurants displaying live lobsters, crab and fish in tanks near the entrance.   Only the passing of huge ships loaded with containers gave a hint of the 7 million inhabitants living just around the corner.    Farewell Hong Kong, hello Thailand.

Bandra Slum - A View from the Bridge

Wed. 5 January 2011 

View from the elevated walkway that leads to the Bandra train station.  There is a slight breeze, but the atmosphere is very hazy, the sky is gray, not blue, the filtered sunlight is warm.   People pass in a continual stream in both directions, even at this mid-afternoon hour.   Below me, and to the rear, four huge pipelines, at least 10 feet in diameter, parallel a dirt pathway that runs between them and an open sewage canal.  Men come and go from the corner behind the public toilet facility, urinating on the trash to avoid paying a few pennies to enter the official outhouse.  On the other side of the canal there is a green patch of grass and low bushes, bisected by dirt pathways where individuals often linger, squatting to defecate, sometimes in the middle of the path!  Is this related to the term "squatter" when applied to unofficial housing sites?  Next to the brush there is a small cultivated area with squares of low green plants, leafy vegetables that will be harvested and sold along the street.  They must be irrigated with water from the stagnant pond next to the toilet areas, the reason salads don't make up any part of my diet at this moment.  Hey kids, be happy you can eat the green things that make their way to the table in America!  Beyond the extension of this elevated walkway are several multi-story office buildings and my small hotel, the Armor Court.  A busy main street separated this area from the Bandra slum quarter, a dense jumble of buildings, most from three to five levels high.  My challenge is how to create an adequate visual of this scene.   The lines I see are like those left on the screen of an etch a sketch after several people have played with it; multiple layers of lines spreading in all directions.   The rooftops form slightly sloped lines; sheets of corregated steel or plywood.   The short vertical lines that are not always perpendicular, create geometric shapes whose names I have forgotten- trapezoids, parallelograms?  various triangles?  These figures outline single room dwellings and workshops where I sometimes spot groups of men seated at sewing machines or cutting patterns for clothing, women preparing dinner, people washing.    Most colorful are the bright blue plastic tarps draped over openings or covering parts of rooftops, adding color to the predominately  gray and brown landscape  dotted with small squares of faded yellow or pink.  Openings are sometimes filled with recycled doors and windows.  Water spews sporadically from pipes extending toward the sewage canal, adding to the already sluggish, stagnant and foul smelling sludge covered with trash.  Drying clothes, an occasional black water tank and an occasional satellite dish decorate the uneven and multi-layered roofs.  To the left of the sewage canal there is a busy bus stop, a dusty playground which serves as a cricket field in the evening ( the ball often ending up in the sewage canal and having to be retrieve with a pole or by throwing rocks to create ripples that propel it to the edge), a small street market and leanto tarps serving as housing.    Between this walkway and the rail station, women scrub their laundry on top of a cement platform that covers the large pipes where they go underground and cook over open fires.  Their living quarters are a kind of row house development of two and three story buildings constructed almost exclusively of sheets of corregated fiberglass and metal- gray, brick red, green and blue.  Access to the upper levels is achieved  by means of steep ladder stairs resting on the ground.  Children, goats and stray dogs share the trash dump that occupies about half of the open space.  The soundtrack to this panoramic scene- a cacaphony of notes eminating from the horns of tuk tuks (three wheeled motorized rickshaws), taxis, buses, trucks and cars, whose impatient drivers have developed the nervous habit of honking, necessary or not.  The shrill whistle of trains stopping in the station for 15-20 seconds to load and unload passengers adds variety to the musical score.

Time to vacate my seat, one of the three plastic chairs provided for pedestrians at the bend of the elevated walkway.  A maintenance worker, dressed in bright orange coveralls, someone I met on my first trip across this pathway, has been seated at my side watching me write this journal entry.  We have a communication problem, but as I rose to leave, he called someone in his family who speaks English, to tell me hello. The information I gained was basic; he is married and has a 3 year old daughter.   His welcoming smile, his handshake and hug, and the fact that he shared the seating space for nearly an hour conveyed his feelings and message.  Welcome to Mumbai.

Paris: a fifty year love affair!

Lots has happened since my last blog, but currently I have Paris on my mind.   It has been 50 years since my first trip to France and an academic year of study in Paris that changed my life.   How many times have I returned?   I have lost track, but I know that each time I arrive, it is like a homecoming.  In spite of the cold weather, I lost no time filling my schedule with interesting things to do in the "City of Light."   It was unofficial couchsurfing and having the keys to the small apartment of my former student Chris Wolter that made it seem like I was really living there.  Since Chris was still working, I could come and go as I pleased, although leaving in the morning, I rarely went "home" during the day. 
It still amazes me that a city with as many holes as a piece of Swiss cheese functions- the metro, the regional rail system called the RER, the sewers, the catecombs, pedestrian tunnels, underground rivers, all of these tunnel under various parts of the city.   In spite of the efficient and extensive public transportation system, many Parisians insist on driving their cars and are willing to sit in massive traffic jams each day while pedestrians, bikes, scooters and motorcycles keep moving. 
What did I do?  My goal was to view some of the photo exhibits that were  part of the November "mois de la photo."  I went to displays at the Maison europeenne de la photo, the Jeu de Paume Museum, the Museum of Modern Art and the Petit Palais.   Some were exhibits of photo journalism that captured shocking scenes of wars, hunger and other human tragedies that we do not usually see in newspapers and magazines.  The French are much more likely to include these in publications and on TV news than Americans.   Other photos were more artistic in nature.  
My personal photography goal was to find interesting street art and grafitti and to visit locations I had been previously to see how the art had changed.  The areas I visited were Belleville, a working class neighborhood on the Right Bank, the rue Mouffetard, on the Left Bank and the canal d'Ourq, a working class neighborhood on the north edge of the city.   The artists have been busy and I will return with hundreds of interesting photos to edit.  My Beta friend, Robert Ulmstadter, spent one day with me as I showed him many of my favorite parts of Paris, and helped spot grafitti art along the way.  I think he is now "hooked" and will be scanning walls for street art during the rest of his travels.  Early New Year's Day, I left at 8 am to investigate the northern outskirts of Paris.  Seeing a few tags in a parking lot, I soon found an opening to an abandonned freight yard along the canal de l'Ourq and stepped into a veritable living gallery of grafitti.  Street artists had covered all of the exterior walls of this delapidated five story building with a variety of designs, but it was the wall surrounding the area that was most interesting.   The most talented and skilled artists had painted a Halloween series, portraits and geometric designs.   With my fingers numb and not able to change settings on my camera, I decided it was time to return to the apartment, take a warm shower and get ready for the walking lecture visit that we had scheduled for the afternoon.  Beginning at the elegant Place Vendome, location of the Ritz Hotel, fashion houses and the most expensive jewelry boutiques, we walked the neighborhood with a guide who explained architecture, history and personal anecdotes about this historic area.  Two hours later we quickly found a local cafe where we could order a much needed cup of hot coffee.
Then it was off to celebrate the new year!

My favorite walking areas:  everywhere in the Quartier Latin because I love the small streets, numerous art galleries, coffee shops and book stores.  Even if I am not in the market for a new book, I wander through Shakespeare and Company where there are steep stairways, old couches, quiet hidden corners and a view of Notre Dame from the upstairs window; hangout in the 20's of American expats such as Hemingway.  Around the corner is the Hotel Esmaralda, where the 93 year old owner still greets her guests each evening before taking a walk in her long fur coat.  For Christmas, there is the antique and food market in front of the church of Saint Suplice, and other stands along the Tuilerie Gardens near the Louvre.  I walked through the courtyards of the Louvre at night, never tiring of the illuminated facades constructed during the reigns of numerous kings of France.   Stroll through the Marais district, down the rue des Rosiers passing famous Jewish delis and linger in the Place des Vosges where the arcades are lined with art galleries.   Recent rains and melting snow caused the Seine to flood so that normal boat traffic had ceased; there was not enough clearance  for boats to pass under the bridges; however, I pause to watch the raging courant just the same.

Although |I have added favorite cities to my list- Istanbul, Barcelona, Cape Town and Buenos Aires among them, Paris still tops the list.  In spite of many changes over the past 50 years, this city that has been around for 2000 years, retains a beauty and fascination that will keep me returning.