Despite all our reading in advance, but with plenty of warnings from those who have visited India before, we had steeled ourselves for a lot of hard times in India. Here are some of the…
(Part 1 about Bhopal shows what we saw at Sanchi, whose carved gateways from around 2000 years ago astonished us with their profuse detail and sophistication. Click here to see that post. ) In the…
Atop a huge flat-top hill in Umbria sits the small town of Orvieto, a beautiful site full of medieval buildings still being used for public purposes. At the center of town glows the most magnificent…
She was giving us quite an attitude. Her long arms were arrayed in bracelets, her right hand defiantly planted on her hip, which jutted out sideways. She was all sassy, impertinent, take-no-nonsense, and - according…
Old stone buildings, knitted together by webs of electrical lines, crowd the lanes and back alleys near the New Delhi railroad station, as well as the broader Main Bazaar Road, in the district named Paharganj.…
In India, it is customary to use different hands for different important functions. Think right hand pure; left hand, impure. You pass an object over to another with the right. You eat with the right…
We awoke after our first night in India to the Muslim call to prayer, a high tenor voice chanting over loudspeakers somewhere nearby. Sunlight angled through three imposing stone domes , each with lotus decoration…
We had only planned to stay an hour or so, visiting with a Facebook friend in Tairua, a small town on the southeast coast of the Coromandel Peninsula. But it was seven hours and six…
Marcel Proust wrote a seven volume novel engendered, in a way, by the taste of a madeleine cookie: No sooner had the warm liquid [of tea] mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a…
In 1948, two scientists came to the coastal bluffs along the Tasman Sea just west of Auckland, and for the first time listened to the sounds of stars outside the Milky Way. It’s likely that…