​Sherrill and I visited more than 60 countries and most of the United States during our 52 year marriage.  This is number 72 of a series about our lives and travels, true stories of two people discovering the world, each other, and themselves through five decades of traveling together.  If you scroll down, you'll come to earlier posts in this series.  To start at the beginning of our marriage and travels look at the Archives list in the sidebar and start with May, 2017.  Older posts are a previous series. 

​              From Heathrow to Charles de Gaulle: it felt like cruel and unusual punishment bouncing from one of the largest, most confusing airports in the world to another.  Sherrill and I survived, slept in a cheap hotel at de Gaulle, and the next morning figured out the trains through Paris to Reims—this was the easy part.  We also had to work out when we could continue on trains, when we needed to switch to buses, and when we'd need a car.  French trains had an irritating habit of aiming back to Paris—like a pony who knew that there was no place like home.  The frequent local connections we'd loved in the Italian train system seemed to be missing here.  The entire trip felt like a circus trapeze act in which we might miss the next jump. 

​              We landed safely in the first town, Reims, a handsome little metropolis, with hotel, cathedral, and town center an easy walk from the station.  So far, so good, we congratulated ourselves.  Our view of the Gothic cathedral's gold towers stopped us as if we'd been socked.  We knew that for hundreds of years French kings had been crowned here, but its size and beauty were beyond anything we'd expected.  During the next few days, we hiked from church to palace to museum to Roman triumphal arch to the hotel de ville in which the Germans surrendered in 1945.  
              "We need to take a tour of a champagne cellar," Sherrill informed me.
              She had discovered that Reims was a center of the champagne industry.
              "Well, if we need to."
                We chose Mumm (pronounced moom, apparently) and made a reservation.  We were the only people who showed up, but a charming young guide still gave us an excellent private tour through the chalk caves and tunnels—despite her high heels.  Of course, the visit ended in a tasting room with an opportunity to buy.  

​              No train connected Reims directly to the next two towns we wanted to visit, Amiens and Rouen, without returning to Paris first, so in Reims we picked up a rental car that eventually we'd leave in Rouen.  Sherrill wasn't happy about this, but did acknowledge that the French freeways were good and the drivers superb compared to most countries where we'd traveled. 
              "They may go fast, but they're not insane."
              We'd admired Riems' cathedral, but the one in Amiens was even more spectacular. It could hold, we were told, two cathedrals the size of Notre Dame in Paris.  As a bonus, Sherrill added to her list of the body parts of saints with the reliquary of John the Baptist, which (supposedly) held the saint's head, brought from Constantinople.  As a "collector" of church mazes and labyrinths, as well, she was delighted by the 13th century labyrinth stretching across the fourth and fifth bays of the nave—the second largest church labyrinth in France. 
              "I want to take that home," she told me, gazing down at the black and white labyrinth.
              "Somebody would notice if you dug it up."
              "Maybe you could distract them."  

      Architecture and religious artifacts were interesting, but Amien's Floating Gardens and medieval Saint-Leu area known as the "little Venice of the North," appealed to us in a different way. 
        "Not another little Venice," Sherrill sighed.  "How many have we seen?"
            "A dozen, maybe?" 
            "At least."
            Although we'd encountered "little Venices" across the globe, we still couldn't resist them, just as we couldn't resist tromping through gardens, whatever shape and size they might be.  The medieval houses and shops along Amien's canals, with their half-timbered, brick, and stucco facades and overflowing flower boxes, were obscenely picturesque.  The houses lining one of the canals had been turned into restaurants and pubs, most of them specializing in mussels with French fries, just as if they knew our weakness for them, so a casual walk on the evening of our forty-sixth wedding anniversary turned into a search for the restaurant in which we'd celebrate with a feast of mussels and fries. 

​              "Do you mind eating outside?" Sherrill asked me.
              "Of course not."
              Did she think I was fussy, or something?
              The weather was beautiful, although it was late September, so we ate looking down on the blue and green water of the canal.  The waiter in his black suit and over-sized white apron was friendly and efficient and helped us choose a wine to go with the mussels.  We had no idea, however, how huge the servings would be.  We each got a large black pot of mussels in broth, a big dish of fries, and hunks of garlic bread. 
              "We should've shared one order!" Sherrill said, when she saw all the food in front of us.
              "Happy anniversary!"I replied, raising my glass.  
​              Amiens had turned out to be one of those unexpected delights that sometimes graced our travels -- and a surprisingly romantic place for our anniversary.

​              The next day, before leaving town, we dropped in at Jules Verne's impressive, although strange, house—the sort of eccentric home in which we might expect the author of Around the World in Eighty Days and Journey to the Center of the Earth to live: four levels, the top one where he wrote fitted out like the cabin of a sailing ship.  We skipped the tour conducted by a costumed guide pretending to be a character from one of his books, but the house was an amusing way to say goodbye to Amiens.
              The challenge when we reached Rouen was to find the agency to drop off the rental car.  This ancient city associated with Joan of Arc was a maze of narrow one-way streets.  We knew the address, but couldn't figure out how to get there.  Sherrill was ready to abandon the car on the street.  When we got close, I leaped out, ran around a couple of corners and into the agency, explaining where Sherrill and the car were trapped.  A fellow went back with me and drove us to the agency—in a convoluted route that we never would have figured out.  

​              Rouen probably had more medieval brown and white half-timbered buildings than any other place we'd visited.  We got a room at a hotel in a 17th century building where the playwright Pierre Corneille once stayed.  It had the quirks we'd come to associate with very old hotels: a huge fireplace in the dining room downstairs, uneven heat upstairs, wavy walls and floors, low beamed ceilings, lots of stone steps, no elevator.  We loved it.  Then, out for a walk, we encountered a group of students in costumes—seniors, we learned, the boys in wigs and improvised dresses because it was the first day of school.  Dressing up and acting silly seemed to be a tradition in European schools. 

​              Not far away, we discovered the medieval plague cemetery, surrounded by half-timbered buildings.  Huge-eyed skulls and crossed bones had been carved into their age-blackened wood beams.  A few blocks farther on, we came to Joan of Arc Square—the old market square—where during the middle ages prisoners were pilloried or executed and where Joan of Arc was burned at the stake on May 30, 1431, the modern Restoration Cross and church of Joan of Arc on the site.  Nearby, we came to the medieval tower where Joan was questioned and shown the implements of torture. 
              "I don't understand how supposedly religious people can do all this to other human beings," I muttered.
              "You don't need to understand."  
              A sleek modern train got us to the port city of Le Havre, almost completely rebuilt after World War Two.  The bold design of the new city, a vast pattern of broad spaces and grand buildings, most of it of concrete, was so impressive that UNESCO designated it a World Heritage Site.  Sherrill and I, however, felt that it was as cold and inhuman as similar postwar developments we'd seen in the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries—even if it was better designed and better built.  

​              We checked into a Novotel—nice, but like a place run by robots—near the monster-sized docks on a manmade peninsula, wandered over to one of the mammoth warehouse buildings, and slipped inside.  Far away, tiny people were doing something, but none of them noticed us.  The acre or so of polished concrete floor was so inviting that I couldn't resist launching into a tap routine and a bit of soft shoe. 
              "Idiot."  Sherrill rolled her eyes, but smiled. 
              The next morning, we were glad get on a bus to the tiny town of  Honfleur down the coast.
              Cozy between steep hills, a little port, and a yacht harbor, Honfleur's ancient wood buildings were more our style.  We arrived during the weekend market in the little square next to Sainte-Catherine's church, an all-wood masterpiece with a vaulted ceiling like the hull of an overturned ship.  It was no surprise to learn that it was the work long ago of local boat-wrights.  Our room in a little half-timbered hotel may have had a wavy floor, but we liked it, just as we liked exploring the town outside our window and hiking into hills behind it, from which we could view the entire area: water, land, and new sparkling white suspension bridge. 

​              We weren't sure exactly when the bus to Caen would leave—or, for that matter, exactly where the unmarked bus stop was, but we managed to be in the right place at the right time.  The driver and other passengers all reassured us and gave us advice for the rest of our journey, including how to transfer at Deauville.
              We shouldn't have been shocked each time we saw how badly this corner of France had been devastated during World War Two, but we were.  Caen wasn't flattened quite as badly as Le Havre, but only a few old buildings remained.  On our first trip to London, from time to time we'd seen in the middle of a block a burned out hole where a German rocket had hit.  In Caen, the situation was the reverse: from time to time, we'd see one or two medieval buildings standing amid blocks of much later buildings, like raisins in a cake.  The great castle had survived, but not much else notable.

​              The main reason we came to Caen was to take a train onward to Bayeux so that Sherrill could fulfill her dream of seeing the Bayeux tapestry.  Here, at least, there were plenty of trains going back and forth, so we were able have a satisfying day in Bayeux refreshing our knowledge of the conquest of England by the Normans in 1066.  Probably the most beautiful piece of propaganda in world history—and maybe the most accurate—it was an astonishing achievement.  It also was a miracle that it survived all these centuries.  

                                                                            Caen, surviving
                                                                                 Medieval houses             

​              The city of Bayeux had its charms, too, including its little cathedral, a picturesque mill with churning waterwheel, and buildings from various centuries, but we found it hard to focus on them, knowing that we had limited time to see the tapestry.  It certainly was magnificently displayed in its museum, although it was frustrating that we couldn't linger as much as we would've liked to study certain parts.

​              We finished the day back in Caen, then the next morning continued to Le Mans, where we got the TGI to Charles de Gaulle airport.  Sherrill and I loved traveling and discovering the world, but knew very well that there was no way to escape the boring, grungy parts of traveling—although there were plenty of times when we wanted to sit down on the filthy airport floor like a two year-old and cry.  Or at least swear. 
To be continued....
 
              If you find these posts interesting, why not explore the rest of my website, too? Just click on the buttons at the top of the page and discover where they take you—including a bio, information about my four novels, along with excerpts from them, and several complete short stories.    
              Please pass the posts on to anybody else you think might enjoy them.  
 

​Sherrill and I visited more than 60 countries and most of the United States during our 52 year marriage.  This is number 71 of a series about our lives and travels, true stories of two people discovering the world, each other, and themselves through five decades of traveling together.  If you scroll down, you'll come to earlier posts in this series.  To start at the beginning of our marriage and travels look at the Archives list in the sidebar and start with May, 2017.  Older posts are a previous series. 

​              A perfect blue sky welcomed us to Sophia, capital of an independent, no longer Communist, Bulgaria.  Since the rest of our little group of friends wouldn't arrive for another day, Sherrill and I set out to explore alone.  We walked toward the city center, past a Russian orthodox church built for Russian diplomats and a 19th century palace.  Much of city was bombed during World War II, but we discovered surviving historic buildings scattered around town.  Over all, the city still felt impoverished.  A block from a huge Orthodox church, a flea market stretched for blocks, shabby people of advancing years trying to sell whatever treasures they'd managed to find or acquire.  We bought a flask adorned with the hammer and sickle for our grandson.

​              We watched red-uniformed guards prance in front of the presidential palace, passed a department store that once was a  Stalinist government building, explored a couple of subway stations in which Roman ruins had been uncovered (in one of which three middle-aged women in shabby coats and kerchiefs were playing accordions, a dish for donations by their well-worn shoes), and wandered through a busy 19th century central market, two levels supported by a forest of steel pillars, a glass roof above.  Sherrill found a Bulgarian edition of Alice in Wonderland at a little bookstore. Our stroll ended at an Easter Egg festival in a small park, the first of many holiday events during the next weeks.  This formerly atheist country, it seemed, had embraced religion and especially took the Easter rituals to its collective heart. 
              The next day was Palm Sunday in the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, which we and our friends acknowledged by dropping in at services in the multi-domed Alexander Nevsky cathedral that Sherrill and I had passed the afternoon before.  The streets around it now were lined with people selling flowers that the faithful could take as offerings. In the dark cavern of the giant church, we found crowds of people, mostly women, lighting enough candles to illuminate all of Sophia.  

​              Colorful rituals and elaborate costumes, we discovered, were an important part of religious expression in Bulgaria, many of these traditions extending far back in time to before Christianity.  We saw examples of this when we visited a museum in a former palace: after a room of gorgeously decorated Easter eggs, we were startled by an exhibition showing mummers known as Kukeri, men who put on animal-like costumes and skirts of cow bells each spring—except for some who dressed as brides—and paraded and danced through villages and towns to scare away evil spirits and guarantee a good harvest.  The elaborate costumes and masks were on mannequins, but we saw videos showing actual mummers in rowdy and obscene action.  A month later, the day before Sherrill and I left Bulgaria, I stumbled onto the actual event in Sophia, an astonishing spectacle, more like a giant frat party than religious ritual, but one that I was glad not to miss. 

​              I'm sure we didn't miss a single religious holiday while we were in Bulgaria, including St. Lazarus Day, which we observed in a mountain village with costumed young people singing and dancing about Lazarus rising from the dead and the yearly rebirth of the land.  Driving through Bulgaria almost to the Greek border, through forested mountains and past hillside farms, blossoming trees, and wild flowers gave us a new appreciation for the natural rebirth that happens every spring.  We stayed in converted old houses in tiny villages, along the way dropping in at churches and monasteries to admire scenes of the damned in Hell.  

​              When I think of Bulgaria, now, I see a parade of fantastic frescoes, some in small country churches, others in remote monasteries, and some in large urban churches and cathedrals.  These paintings graphically dramatized the joys of Paradise, the horrors of Hell, and the struggles of mortal life leading to one or the other.  A short drive to a mountain church introduced us to these passionate warnings with surprisingly three-dimensional 12th century paintings that had abandoned—pre-Giotto—the flat Byzantine style.  








Orthodox Church priest at Rila Monastery,
​surrounded by frescoes.

​              Young people were fleeing to the cities from Bulgaria's villages, leaving them to the old and dying.  A highlight of our trip was a day in Pirin, one of those villages, where we were welcomed by eight old women who were fighting to save it.  The women, all widows, known as the Mysterious Singers, had performed around Europe singing deep in their throats in a traditional style seldom-heard now, wearing antique dresses covered with felt, lace, and embroidery that had belonged to their mothers and grandmothers.  They welcomed us with the traditional bread and salt and sang while we ate lunch on the wide porch of a restored house. 

​              Forty-five widows, we were told, still lived in this shrinking village and at least 30 houses had been abandoned, but the women hoped to get young people to return and restore houses and save the village.  When I walked around the village, I saw many once handsome old houses in various states of collapse. 
              "Look at the men."  Sherrill nodded at a row of old men sitting on benches in the village square near the river that cut through town. 
              She was right: the old men looked tired and bored and content to sit around complaining and gossiping while the old women tried to change what was happening to their village.  As we traveled through the country, we saw this in other villages, too.  Maybe the women would succeed, but it wouldn't be easy.   

                                                ​*              *              *
              "There's no work for us," Ali told us. "because we're old."
              L., our new Bulgarian friend and guide, was translating.  Ali and his wife were only in their fifties, but considered themselves old—and, to be honest, their hard lives had aged them prematurely.
              We had driven much of the day on narrow mountain roads to this Muslim village in southern Bulgaria.  The women all wore the traditional Muslim Pomak dress of pantaloon-like pants with long jacket, apron, and kerchief.  Sherrill smiled at a local woman as they met on the narrow hillside street.  The woman hesitated, looking confused by our appearance. They never saw foreigners in that village.  L. stepped up, explaining who we were.  Shy, but friendly, the woman invited us to her home nearby. 
              Carefully inching on muddy steps past a lean-to animal shelter, root cellar, and storage area, we entered a one-room house hanging on the cliff side.  She asked us to sit on the two narrow beds against the walls and brought a bucket of goat's milk, which she poured into small glasses, and homemade feta cheese. Ali, her husband, joined us.
              "Life is more difficult, now," L. translated for Ali.
             At least, he said, under Communism they had jobs.  He drove a tractor then and his wife worked in the tobacco industry.  The switch to free market lost them their jobs and they couldn't find new ones.  With their goats, growing vegetables, and producing some tobacco, they managed to earn only about 3000 lev a year, about $2000, and prices were higher, now.  She also sewed and wove, making most of their clothes, as well as gifts, carriers for babies, and felt slippers to sell.  
​              "Young people do better, Ali continued.  "They have hope.  Not old people like us."

           In Sophia and Plovdiv, the second largest city in Bulgaria, younger generations did seem to be embracing new opportunities. We saw new businesses ranging from internet cafes to boutique hotels to shops selling electronics.
        "The Militia belongs to the people and the people belong to the Militia."
           L. translated it for me from an old sign on a wall. An ominous message, attributed to Todor Zhivkov, the Party leader in Bulgaria,1954 to 1989.
              Getting around the hilly city of Plovdiv with its streets of oversized cobblestones was difficult (even painful, as Sherrill discovered), but the old city was fascinating, especially the Ottoman mansions with their overhanging second and third floors, beautiful woodwork, and painted decorations.  Once upon a time, before Communism, fine craftsmanship was appreciated. We also found, hiking along Plovdiv's hills, the remains of a Roman forum and amphitheatre. There seemed to be no place in Europe where they hadn't left their mark.

​              Sunday, a couple of days later, was Orthodox Easter.  L. and our friend Hala had arranged for us to spend the day in a small village in the hills between Plovdiv and the Black Sea.  Roma (gypsies) who lived in the area were, we learned, now fully integrated into the village.  (Very different from when Sherrill and I visited Communist Romania in 1988, where they were total outcasts.)  We were welcomed with the traditional bread and salt and shown around the village.  A little later, we saw the lamb that had been cooking for eight hours in a brick and clay oven at the house of one of the Roma men.

​              With great ceremony, he cracked open the hardened clay that covered the opening of the brick oven, releasing delicious waves of rich aromas, and brought out two huge pans, each with half of a golden-brown lamb.  He carried them to a horse cart decorated with streamers and flowers, then at least half of the villagers, with our little group, paraded behind the cart as the decorated horse pulled it to the hall where the rest of the Easter feast was waiting.
              And a feast it was: all homemade dishes prepared by the villagers, plus local wine and rakia—a homemade brandy popular all over Bulgaria, different in each region, but always lethal.  About half way through the feast, which went on for hours, the songs started.  Then the speeches between the songs: they made speeches, we made speeches, we toasted each other.  They took photos of us, we took photos of them.  We took photos of each other together.  Everyone was enthusiastic and happy.

​              "Nobody will be able to walk," Sherrill whispered to me.
              "We have the pony cart!"
              It all was touching because they were completely sincere and happy that we were there, sharing the day with them.  Nothing like this had ever happened in their village before.  It was hard for any of us to get away.  




                                                           Vocalizing village woman at
                                                            Easter Sunday feast

​              During the next days, we visited a Neolithic settlement from at least 5500 BC, then a Thracian town that became a Greek colony and later a Byzantine stronghold, and several other historic towns along the Black Sea, but it all seemed tame after our fantastic Easter celebration—or maybe we still were suffering from hangovers.  Sherrill, however, did enjoy a day at the summer palace and gardens of that royal eccentric, once the darling the press, Queen Marie of Romania.  Terraces of flowers in luxuriant spring bloom cascaded down the hills toward the sea.
              "See what you can do when you have a money and a staff?" Sherrill told me.
              "You have me," I pouted.
              "I know, sweetie."  She patted me on the cheek.  


Sherrill and 9th century frescoes in
Sveti Stefan church in eastern Bulgaria.
A UNESCO World Heritage Site

​              Sherrill and I had visited the Bulgarian city of Rousse on the Danube, directly across from Romania, back in 1988, when these countries were still Communist and we took a cut-rate cruise on a Bulgarian ship from Rousse to Vienna.  The town was grim and depressing then, but this time it was lively and its 19th century art nouveau buildings were being restored to their former beauty.  A large house in Rousse had been transformed into a museum dedicated to the strength and power of Bulgarian women: women as mothers, caregivers, teachers, and artists; women as movers and shakers, scientists and social leaders; women as the foundation of society.  The women of the village of Pirin would have approved.  Sherrill certainly did.  

​              The Bulgarians were fine hosts, almost too good.  This was proven again when we visited Koprivshtitsa, a village of brightly painted houses, stone bridges, wooden gates, and cobbled (of course) streets.  The village priest and his young wife gave us dinner in their home.  (Apparently, Orthodox priests must be married.)  He was about 50, square-shaped, with a wide florid face.  He began by admitting that he is known for drinking—then proved it. He brought out a huge bottle of homemade rakia—the strongest we'd had yet.  Then homemade red wine.  His wife served a very good dinner, but he preferred singing and drinking to eating and urged us to do the same.  We actually poured some of the rakia in our glasses into flower pots. 

​              Sherrill and I extended our visit in Bulgaria for a couple of days, moving to a smaller hotel in Sophia.  On our last day, while on a walk I came to a large plaza swarming with scores of men.  Some men wore skirts of big bells to frighten away evil spirits, several young men were dressed as brides, and others in animal outfits with horns and antlers, masks and elaborate headdresses were joining them.  

​             These were mummers dressed in the costumes we'd seen in the museum at the beginning of the trip.  Eventually, they formed into a lively parade, moving across the plaza, dancing and throwing candy, shouting and singing.  I was sure that I saw some bottles being passed around, too.  The hotel receptionist later told me that it must have been for St. George's Day, usually only celebrated in villages, not in Sophia.  Originally a pagan celebration to guarantee a prosperous spring, it had evolved into a quasi-Christian celebration.  Whatever its intent, past or present, it seemed primarily to be an excuse for a jolly good time.  

         The people of Bulgaria hadn't completely left behind the gloom of Communist days, but they were working very hard at it, one way or another.
 
To be continued....   
​




​
​
If you find these posts interesting, why not explore the rest of my website, too?  Just click on the buttons at the top of the page and discover where they take you -- including, a bio, information about my four novels, along with excerpts from them, and several complete short stories.

Sherrill and I visited more than 60 countries and most of the United States during our 52 year marriage.  This is number 70 of a series about our lives and travels, true stories of two people discovering the world, each other, and themselves through five decades of traveling together.  If you scroll down, you'll come to earlier posts in this series.  To start at the beginning of our marriage and travels look at the Archives list in the sidebar and start with May, 2017.  Older posts are a previous series. 
​

​              We were old enough to know better, but Sherrill and I were doing it again: traveling like kids with no reservations, constantly changing our plans, missing boats, buses, and trains—and having a good time.  Maybe we would have said that it wasn't the destination that mattered, but the journey.  As we traveled together to different parts of the world, exploring, wondering, discovering, it seemed as if we could do it forever.  Why not?  It was 2008 and we'd already been doing it for forty-four years. 
              A 25-minute train trip from Mussolini's bloated Milan station deposited us in medieval Pavia, where we discovered narrow cobblestone streets, a covered bridge, and a 14th century castle turned into the city museum.  As far as we could tell, no one else was in the museum except us and a young red-haired security guard in baggy orange pants who scurried along with us unlocking doors and then locking them again.  She tried to make conversation with us, despite her shaky English and my worse Italian—and the interruptions of her walky-talky—compensating with smiles for what she lacked in vocabulary.  I had the feeling that she'd keep on opening and closing doors as long as we needed her to do it.  

​              "Berkeley?" exclaimed another young woman at the university's science museum, thrilled that we'd come all the way from California.  "Do you have a mug from the Berkeley university?  For our collection?"
              Sadly, we had to disappoint her, since we didn't travel with a U.C. Berkeley mug.
              We always felt comfortable, at ease, in Italian towns, but we especially enjoyed our evenings in Cremona, the next town we visited, when everyone—families, couples, and individuals—came out to walk.  It was like the paseo that we had seen in Spain, quietly joyous and civilized.  They stopped for a glass of wine and a snack, then later had dinner in a trattoria or restaurant.  Why, we wondered, didn't everybody live like this?  

​              We'd arrived in Cremona on Saturday morning when the piazza by the Duomo and campanile—reputedly the tallest in Europe—was full of stalls and tables.  Eventually, we found a room, left our luggage, and continued exploring in this town famous as birthplace of Stradivarius.  While Sherrill checked out the weekend market, I climbed the bell tower and gazed out at the centuries of history below me, then we wandered around town together.  In a galleria under a glass dome, a young couple was giving ballroom dancing lessons to a dozen other couples of all ages, the women in the spike heels that Italians seemed to love. 

​              "Babies.  Toddlers," Sherrill pointed out.  "All over the place.  And their daddies."
              How could I miss them?  And she was right about the daddies.  Often, it was the fathers who were caring for the little kids.  Italian men did seem to be good parents.   
              "Look."  Sherrill nodded toward a young father and his two-year-old daughter barking at each other over and over after a dog had passed them.  A little later, she pointed out another dad and his tiny son saying "ciao" repeatedly to a friend trying to leave them.
              "Ciao!"  "Ciao!"  "Ciao!"  
               We could still hear them as we wandered down a narrow street lined with violin-making shops, passing three young musicians playing violins together, an open violin case on the cobblestones in front of them. 

​              It was hard to say why, but Mantova (Mantua) a couple of days later felt quite different than Cremona—maybe because it was larger and surrounded by three artificial lakes, maybe because it was crowded with palaces and other splendid buildings, and maybe because it seemed more sophisticated and less family focused.  After visiting the ducal palace (and seeing the Mantegna murals portraying the powerful Gonzaga family as if they were conspiring Mafiosi) and the duomo, we wandered around town, peering into shopping arcades, the display windows full of expensive clothes and underwear, and passing Italian couples discussing both the fashions and the underwear.  Our favorite display showed life-sized statues of well-fed pink pigs among the elegantly garbed mannequins. 
              Spontaneously, one morning, we hopped on a train south to Modena for the day because Sherrill wanted to see the Romanesque church there, but when we arrived couldn't find the way from the station to the center of town.  When I asked a young local fellow for directions, he took a city map from his backpack, opened it to show us the route, insisted that we keep it, and walked part way with us to make sure we were heading the right direction. Despite our impetuousness, it turned out to be a good day.  

​              Back in Mantova, we wandered into a collection of life-sized 18th century wax figures at the university's science museum, including a female with her guts and other internal body parts on display as if they'd just been scooped out by a sadistic doctor and a scrawny male with no skin.  Walking back to the hotel, we encountered two groups of young people, in each a guy dressed like a medieval fool, the others chanting "Il Dottore!" at him and then laughing.  The two young men had just received their doctorates and were being paraded through town as fools.  We liked that their friends weren't going to let the new "doctors" take themselves too seriously.

​              We tossed aside our plans again the next day, taking a boat to Sirmione on Lake Garda because we remembered that some friends had enjoyed it.  Well, it wasn't really that simple.  When we left Mantova by train, we intended to hop off at Peschiera and jump on a boat for Sirmione, but our hopping and jumping didn't quite work out.  After a 20-minute walk to the lake with a friendly British couple, we reached the Peschiera dock just in time to watch the boat churning into Lake Garda.  The next boat was in three hours, so we explored Peschiera's old town, had lunch in an osteria we found on a side street (a delicious mushroom soufflé), and wandered around the waterfront area. 
              "If we hadn't missed that boat," I told Sherrill at lunch, "we wouldn't have had this wonderful meal."
              "Okay, Pollyanna, if you say so." 

​              Eventually, we did get to Sirmione, a small, ancient town on the end of a skinny peninsula, filled with picturesque old houses, a 13th century castle with moat and drawbridge, and a Roman ruin overlooking the lake, but crowded with German and British tourists, including at least two dozen middle-aged German bikers in helmets and black leather jackets with their oversized motorcycles and lots of good cheer.  We found a tiny hotel in which the rooms were named after flowers instead of having numbers.  Ours was circliamino—cyclamen.  The place was run by a very old woman with bow legs, a cap of white hair, and a face like Lionel Barrymore.  She was helpful, talkative, and humorous and we had a good time whenever we talked with her.  

​              "You like it here," our hostess insisted on the second day we were there, "so you should stop wandering from town to town and stay with me."
              "Why not?" Sherrill asked me, mischievously. 
              "You see?" said the old lady.  "The signora agrees."
              While we were there, we also got to know a young woman from Venezuela who had lived several years in Hawaii, married an Italian, and now was happy in Italy—although it did take her a while, she admitted, to get used to the Italian way of life.
              "Not like Venezuela or the United States."

​              We didn't spend the rest of our lives in Sirmioni, the way our hostess wanted.  Sherrill and I preferred to keep moving.  We always were aware of how much more there was to see and experience—in Italy and around the world.  Something wonderful, we were sure, was waiting around the corner—and around the corner after that and the next corner....
              On the bus from Sirmioni to Breschia, however, we decided to stay there for a bit, instead of immediately going on Bergamo, as we'd planned, so we got a room in a hotel by the station, left our bags, and set out.  Breschia, we discovered, had not one, but two cathedrals—a new Baroque one and an 11th century old one (Sherrill's favorite), in the Lombard Romanesque style with a domed interior plus several lower levels that descended to an even older crypt.  We allowed ourselves only two days in Breschia, but made the most of them, hiking to the remains of a large Roman forum, up a steep hill to a medieval castle, and among narrow winding streets (more cobblestones) and odd-shaped piazzas.  We were glad not to have missed any of it.  

​          On the other hand, Bergamo, our original destination, soon became one of our favorite Italian cities.  We were lucky enough to get a room in a converted convent perched on a cliff in the upper medieval city—which was separated from the newer city below by massive fortifications.  To go between the two cities we rode a funicular up and down the cliff.   
           A couple of happy incidents:  When Sherrill and I slipped into a small church in the upper town to see a Titian polyptych behind the altar, the place turned out to be empty and dark.  Nevertheless, we stumbled through the church toward the altar, trying to peer through the gloom at the painting.  An elderly caretaker limped up out of the shadows and—instead of telling us to go away—explained in Italian that we could go behind the altar and climb the steps that the priest used.  We hesitated, but he urged us  to go on up. 
              "Si!  Okay!" he said, using what I guessed was the only English word he knew.
              Obeying him, we reached a spot where the light from the side windows illuminated the Titian so that we could see it perfectly.  As we left, I tried to give him a tip, but he refused with a sweet smile, saying that he was glad to do it for us.  

​              Later that day, we met a young woman from Australia who was in Bergamo to study at a Montessori school training center. 
              "I have my teacher certificate," she explained, "but I want this one, too, because I believe in the Montessori approach."  She was excited when Sherrill told her that our grandson had gone to a Montessori school and loved it.  "Most people I talk with," she told us, "have never heard of Montessori." 
              She was there for six months, taking classes in both English and Italian, studying hard, hiking from a room in the lower town to the training center in the upper town except when she splurged on the funicular. 
              "I feel encouraged, now," she said, as we separated, "after talking with you."
              Sherrill and I celebrated our forty-fourth wedding anniversary by taking the train to Lecco on Lake Como, where we walked along the lake front, had lunch at a restaurant crowded with crusty local people who apparently ate there often, toasted each other with sparkling wine, and then rode the train back to Bergamo—all very spontaneous.  Afterwards, we wished that we'd asked someone to take our photograph, but at least we had the memory. 

​              Bergamo's botanic garden, a quiet paradise overlooking the rooftops of the upper city, could be reached only by climbing 141 steps.  Primarily a research and educational garden, it exchanged seeds and plants with similar gardens around Italy and Europe.  We wandered through it, reading the labels when we could.  The sounds of the bees and of the wind playing in the trees and the smells of the flowers and freshly dug soil, even of the fertilizer, were comforting in their earthy way.  The garden wasn't the largest or the most exotic we'd ever seen, but up there above the city and countryside it felt magical.   

​              Other cities were more beautiful, but Torino (Turin, in English), one of the financial engines that drove Italy, surprised us.  Like Bologna, the buildings along many of its streets, both old and new, were fronted with arcades, often with shops, restaurants, and bars peeking out from behind them.  The streets were straight, as in Paris, with skinny orange trams running on them like Milan, and lively young people everywhere, like Berkeley.  The city was crowded with museums, including the third largest Egyptian museum in the world (after Cairo and London), several fine art museums, and a twin-towered Roman gate that in its long history had been turned into a castle, then into a palace, and finally ended up as a museum.  However, our favorite museum in Torino was the Mole Antonelliana.
              Started in 1863, this strange building with an elongated dome topped by a Greek temple topped with a pointed spire grew until it reached the height of 167 meters, the highest brick building in the world and the tallest building anywhere until the Eiffel Tower.  Now, it housed the greatest museum in the world dedicated to the history of the motion picture—six of its floors around a central atrium, full of endless movie clips, still pictures, and more.  We took the glass elevator to the top, gazed out over all of Turin—at the red tile roofs, domes, towers, palaces, office buildings—then went back down to the spiraling ramp and the history of the moving image, starting with shadow dramas.   

​        We could recline on lounges while gazing up at movie clips projected onto a sloping ceiling above us, but plastic-topped tables in the restaurant also showed movie clips and rooms around the edges played films on different themes and from different historic periods, including the development of special effects.  Gazing up through the huge atrium, we were encircled by a parade of movie posters from around the world, from Luchino Visconti's Il Gattopardo (The Leopard) to Cabiria, Italy's first movie epic (1914), to Gone with the Wind to Hitchcock's Vertigo to Cameron's Titanic. 
         "We can't do all this in one day," Sherrill told me, lowering herself into a chair.
          She was right, so we returned the next day.

              In the evening, while she recovered in our hotel room, I went out for a bite to eat and discovered that for the modest price of a glass of wine in one of the bars or little cafes around town I could fill up on happy hour snacks.  I even took something back for Sherrill to eat.  On the way back, on the bridge crossing the Po river, I watched a costumed juggler go out into the crosswalk in front of cars, juggle while they waited for the light, then collect money from the drivers as they drove away.  He was good, too. 
 
To be continued....   

​              If you find these posts interesting, why not explore the rest of my website, too? Just click on the buttons at the top of the page and discover where they take you—including a bio, information about my four novels, along with excerpts from them, and several complete short stories.    
              Please pass the posts on to anybody else you think might enjoy them.  
              

​Sherrill and I visited more than 60 countries and most of the United States during our 52 year marriage.  This is number 69 of a series about our lives and travels, true stories of two people discovering the world, each other, and themselves through five decades of traveling together.  If you scroll down, you'll come to earlier posts in this series.  To start at the beginning of our marriage and travels look at the Archives list in the sidebar and start with May, 2017.  Older posts are a previous series. 
​

​Why, people wanted to know, since Sherrill and I had survived one trip to India, were we going back?  Maybe that was why.  We had the opportunity, so in January 2008 off we went, this time to the southern part of that vast country, again with our friend Hala.  
"But it's dirty," people told us, "you'll get sick, you'll die."  This, of course, from people who'd never been there.
"Think of the stories we'll have for them," I told Sherrill, after one of these conversations. 
"Yes.  Especially if we die." 
​
The previous post, A MARRIAGE IN MOTION 68, told about the first part of our visit to south India, beginning in the east coast city of Chennai and continuing eventually to the west coast city of Kochi, which is where we pick up the story here.  

​              We were lucky to be in Kochi (Cochin) for the great elephant festival—special elephants given to temples by rich donors.  Cleaning an elephant so it will be ready to wear its finery, we saw on the first day, was not easy, even when the elephant cooperated, and sometimes they got a little frisky.  Crowds of Indian families came to admire both the elephants and the paraphernalia they'd be wearing.  The next day, we rode a boat to the part of the city where the festival was being held.  The streets and temple grounds were filled with thousands of people, but we didn't see any non-Indians except those in our group.  At one intersection, three elephants waited in all their gold and feathers and beads, a pair of Brahmin priests on each. 

​              Slowly, a dozen decorated elephants moved into position on the temple grounds like a chorus line about to start dancing, their giant India-shaped ears flapping as crowds surged around them, pushing Sherrill and me so closely to them that we began to feel nervous.  Nearby, firecrackers were exploding.  Nobody else seemed nervous, however, although we'd heard of excited or frightened elephants stampeding.  Sherrill and I had become separated from the rest of our group, ending up directly in front of the twelve spectacularly attired elephants just as the priests began raising tall, gold parasols above them.  We could feel a proud, godlike aura radiating from the magnificent animals.  Eventually, our group came together again and we made our way to the street, which had been decorated with countless rows of silver streamers in honor of the festival.  

​              Indians, we'd learned, loved rituals, costumes, and high drama.  All of this was combined in a production we saw while we were in Kochi of the Kathakali, a 400 year-old dance/drama performed by elaborately costumed men.  Hala and our guide had arranged for us to see first how the performers were made up and costumed for the performance, a very long and elaborate process.  The stylized performance—of an ancient tale of a female demon who disguised herself as a beautiful maiden, a noble prince, and an innocent princess—was very dramatic, although slow-moving.  At the beginning of the show, the theater was full, but not everyone in the audience stuck it out to the end.  Fascinating as it was, I think we left after about an hour. 
              "We got the idea," Sherrill agreed, as we walked out with the others. 
              Maybe super titles would have helped.

​              We had no idea what was going to happen to us the next day because all the roads in the neighboring state of Karnataka had been shut down by striking truckers so that we wouldn't be able to reach Mysore, our next destination.  No buses, taxis, private cars, or even trains were allowed to move.  There were threats of violence if anyone tried.  After breakfast, we unexpectedly had the morning free, so Sherrill told me to go exploring instead of driving her crazy with my fussing. 

​              I followed zigzagging streets deeper into the old import-export area of Kochi, waves of exotic aromas pursuing me as I walked past 17th century spice warehouses.  Many of the bustling people were dressed in traditional Moslem clothing, some women completely covered except for their faces.  I had to make my way among hand carts, loaded wagons, and three-wheeled trucks piled with rice, tea, and spices.  A few goats wandered the area, but I only saw one cow, and it was asleep.  A couple of young tea wallahs were navigating the crowds with surprising dexterity while carrying their wire containers holding glasses of chai.  

​              I was back at our hotel in time for lunch, but news about the strike and our transportation options kept changing.  Finally, Hala and our guide, nick-named by the group the "Knight of the Burning Cell Phone," were able to get us seats on a plane to Bangalore in Karnataka.  We flew on "Spice Air," our plane named "Mustard."  When we arrived in Bangalore, however, we learned that the city still was closed off by the striking truckers, the roads to Mysore blocked.  Bangalore, a major computer/IT center, had a population of five and a half million then and it seemed as if most of them were at the airport.  Many of the stranded travelers were Moslem families returning from pilgrimages.  Since it was impossible to get out of the airport, Hala and our guide ordered box lunches for us.  

​              Finally, some hours later, we got to a hotel, had some food and rest, and the next morning discovered that the strike had ended and our guide miraculously had got us onto a bus to Mysore (since all the trains were overbooked).  By the time we reached Mysore, we were almost back on schedule.  How he had energy to do it, I never knew, but he immediately gave us a tour—during which we saw a group of young men with shaved heads in dark red robes—Tibetan refugees. 
              India is so huge that it encompasses many landscapes and climates.  As we drove north from Mysore toward the fifteenth century capital of Hampi, the terrain grew drier, studded with cactuses, agave, palms, and massive boulders deposited by ancient glaciers.  At lunch time, we pulled into a rustic truck stop, where we ate box lunches we had with us—although some of us bought additional snacks from the truck stop cook.  The cross-country trucks in India were smaller than in the United States, but brightly decorated, each truck proclaiming its owner's personality.  Several pulled into the stop while we there.  When we were back on the road, we saw lines of them stretching into the distance because of the just-ended strike, their gaudy colors making them look like a parade of carnival wagons.
              Along the way, we saw a farmer digging up his field with a wooden plow—only the blade was steel.  Dazzling white egrets hopped around after him, eating insects and worms that he turned out of the rich brown soil.  

​              Monster boulders and ancient temples seemed to drift around each other in a surreal dreamscape on Hampi's dry hillsides.  Although some of the temples were older than many others we'd seen in India, the simplicity of their design gave them an incongruously modern look—rather like Frank Lloyd Wright's wide-eaved "prairie houses," but made of stone.  Others were covered with massive, grotesque sculptures, showing different perceptions of the divine.  Monkeys greeted us and rhythmic chanting drifted down the slope as we climbed a rocky hill to a small shrine.  A sadu lived there, we discovered, spending his life praying and chanting, depending on others for what he needed to stay alive.  He had turned his back on worldly existence to focus on the eternal, whatever it was.  

             For two days, we explored this extraordinary place of colossal temples and palaces and huge step tanks to store water cut deeply into the granite hills. From time to time, bas-reliefs and statues seemed to reach out, almost as if they were trying to grab us: oversized images of Hanuman, the monkey god; Ganesh, the elephant god; and Narasimha, half-monkey and half-man.  In one temple complex, a gypsy woman suddenly jumped out.  Short, gaudy in multi-layered skirts, scarves, and spangles, she complained angrily and shook her fist at us.  

         Sherrill and one of our friends in the group waited in the shade of a tree while the rest of us explored a hilltop temple.  While we were gone, they were unexpectedly entertained by an eccentrically costumed man doing magic tricks.  At the end of the performance, our friend gave the magician ten rupees.
             "He was pretty good," Sherrill told me, "but we couldn't understand a word he said."

​              Part of our exploration of this vast city was in woven bamboo basket boats along a meandering river, four of us per boat.  Since the boats were round, they weren't easy to steer, but the ride downriver brought out the child in us, whether we saw everything that we passed, or not.  

             After Hampi, we visited more palaces, temples, and towns, renewing our acquaintance with Hindu gods and goddesses.  Kali, the goddess of destruction, seemed very popular in the south.  Small, dark, and fierce, she was considered good to have your side.  One day, we passed close to a large camp of gypsy caravans, but when we stopped some of the men made it clear that they wanted us to move on. 
             A traffic jam of bull carts was a new experience, but we ran into one at Badami's great Harvest Festival.  The cattle auction also was new to us, but the rest of the fair seemed like a U.S. county fair, with hundreds of colorful booths and stalls selling food, souvenirs, and produce, plus bells and decorations for cattle.  When we reached our hotel later, almost the first thing we saw was a sign: "Beware Monkey Menace."  We did see quite a few monkeys, but weren't bothered by them, not even when we visited some cave temples the next day. 

​              Continuing up and over the step-like mountains known as the Western Ghats, we reached the coastal state of Goa.  The architecture we passed now showed Portuguese influence.  Although the area was conquered repeatedly by various rulers over the centuries, the Portuguese came to stay in 1510, using it as the launching point for their spice trading empire.  The colonial town of Old Goa still showed some old world charm, with its monasteries, convents, churches, and seventeenth century houses and shops.  We looked in at the great Basilica of Bom Jesus, with the tomb of St. Francis Xavier, whose body supposedly remained in pristine condition long after death—except for pieces that were stolen by other churches.  

​              A short flight took us to Mumbai (Bombay), India's largest—and most chaotic—city.  Of course, we visited the usual places, the  "Gateway to India," symbol of the city,  the astonishingly ornate Victorian train station and neighboring market, and the open air laundries at which scores of men labored all day for pennies.  The best times, we sometimes felt, as in most great cities, were when we just wandered, looking and discovering on our own.  Once again we were lucky.  Just months after we were here, terrorists took over the Taj Mahal Hotel and other buildings in Mumbai, killing many people. 

​           The ancient rock-cut temples in the caves on the island of Elephanta made a spectacular conclusion to our month in the south of India—even though early Portuguese colonists had used the enormous statues for target practice.  Fortunately for the nearly two-thousand year old statues, they seem to have been poor shots.  Many of the statues showed the divine faces of the god Shiva, destroyer, creator, and preserver of the universe.  Maybe his powers helped save the statues.  

​           Sherrill and I walked from the brightness outside, past giant rock-cut columns, into the darkness of the central cave, eventually discovering a sculpture nearly 20 feet high and wide, the divine image of Shiva, eyes closed, silent and serene, damaged but still magnificent.  From each side emerged the profile of another of Shiva's aspects, first the Destroyer, leading to time and death, and then the Creator, beautiful with a suggestion of the feminine, the here and now, forever.  As if hypnotized by the statue, we gazed at it for what must have been a long time, then slowly walked back into daylight and the path down to the waiting boat.   

           ​People sometimes asked Sherrill and me if we weren't afraid when we traveled to places such as India and Iran, Turkey and China, those decades ago.  We always said, No, we weren't afraid of either the places or the people—although cliff-side roads did make me nervous.  We were glad to be there, happy that we were having these experiences.  People everywhere, we'd discovered, were welcoming, kind, and generous.  We could have added, also, that we weren't afraid because we were exploring the world together. 
​

​To be continued....  
 
              If you find these posts interesting, why not explore the rest of my website, too? Just click on the buttons at the top of the page and discover where they take you—including a bio, information about my four novels, along with excerpts from them, and several complete short stories.    
              Please pass the posts on to anybody else you think might enjoy them.  
 

Sherrill and I visited more than 60 countries and most of the United States during our 52 year marriage.  This is number 68 of a series about our lives and travels, true stories of two people discovering the world, each other, and themselves through five decades of traveling together.  If you scroll down, you'll come to earlier posts in this series.  To start at the beginning of our marriage and travels look at the Archives list in the sidebar and start with May, 2017.  Older posts are a previous series. 
​
             One of the pleasures of exploring India is the feeling of existing simultaneously in several different worlds.  There Sherrill and I were, after another marathon journey (including six hours in a transit hotel in the Singapore airport), still on California time, in the coastal city of Chennai (formerly Madras) on the Bay of Bengal near the tip of the Indian subcontinent, surrounded by Victorian-era buildings from the days of the Raj, about to explore some of the most ancient and dramatic sites in India.  Once again, since I couldn't sleep, I went for an early morning walk the day after we arrived.  

​              Even at 6:30 a.m. the air burned my eyes—one reason probably the ancient buses ferrying people to work.  Mount Road, one of Chennai's grand old streets, still was lined with buildings from the Raj.  My favorite was the brick and stone "Higginbothams Printers and Publishers, Booksellers and Stationers" from 1844, although "Khan's Cricket Academy" was a strong contender.  Since the sidewalks were crumbling and sometimes disappeared and the traffic was getting heavier, I had to watch both my feet and the pavement, dodging three-wheeled tuk-tuks and smoking buses, as well as growing numbers of beggars and vendors, including men furiously squeezing sugarcane juice into dirty glasses.  The only non-Indians I saw were three freckled young missionaries in gingham dresses and kerchiefs.
              Religion, power, and business had been stirred together into a lumpy curry during India's long history.  Our exploration started with Fort St. George, built by the East India Company in 1653, and the accompanying British Anglican church, then moved on to the first Catholic cathedral in India: dueling European churches in a Hindu land?  Then we plunged into the colorful chaos of a seventeenth century Hindu temple, where we watched a Brahmin priest with his sacred string across his bare chest reciting prayers, followed by a non-Brahmin repeating them in the local language of Tamil—a recent development.  

​              Sliding further back in time, on another day we hiked among giant seventh century rock carvings and temples, including the world's largest bas relief, a dramatic picture of how the god Shiva sent the Ganges river down to earth.  However, judging from the way people drove, I was starting to believe that the combustion engine had become India's supreme god.  On our way to the French colonial town of Pondicherry, we passed a gasoline tanker lying on its side by the road, leaking gas.  Each trip became a terrifying pilgrimage that we prayed to survive, but we looked forward to those adventures.  We never knew what we might discover along the way.  A group of women dressed in red that we saw hiking along the side of the road belonged to a cobra-worshipping cult.  They built miniature temples around the termite mounds (the mounds could grow to three or four feet high) that cobras had moved into to escape the heat, and left milk and fruit for the cobras.  

​              A visit to the sprawling Chidambaram temple south of Chennai introduced us to the dramatic Puja ceremony of washing the sacred crystal lingam.  Crowds of worshippers weeping with emotion pushed through the huge building to get as close as possible when the priests poured milk, ash, and water over the lingam while they chanted prayers.  The lingam represented the generative power of the god Shiva.  (In north India, Vishnu was the more popular god, but there in the south people preferred Shiva, destroyer, creator, preserver of the universe.)  At the climactic moment, the priests waved fire in front of and behind the lingam, illuminating a sacred ruby within the crystal and causing many of the faithful to sway and moan and slap their faces in ecstasy. 
              Sherrill took my hand and together we maneuvered our way out.  The smoke and incense were making her sick.  Neither of us was comfortable among people working themselves up into such a frenzy, probably because we didn't understand where it might lead. 

              Our friend Hala and our guide had arranged for us to participate in the annual Pongal Festival in a remote village in the hills outside Tanjore—another unique religious experience.  Young men and women played drums and danced up and down the village's meandering dirt streets.  Sometimes, the festivities had to move aside for buffalo carts or local buses. Village women had used colored powders to create lavish floral designs on the ground in front of their houses.
           The word "pongal," we learned, means "boiling over."  We watched some pongal rice being cooked its special pot.  When it boiled over, people looked to see which direction it spilled over—it would foretell their future.  
              After several hours in the village, we left on one of the crowded local buses, riding it to Tanjore.  The bus stopped for gas opposite a big tent next to an old Catholic church.  A Christian revival meeting seemed to be going on—although the area was Hindu.  (In fact, I'd actually heard a Moslem call to prayer at 5 a.m.  In India, now, religions seemed to weave around each other, not competing as much as co-existing—although we knew, of course, about the religious violence after Partition.)  

​              An ancient outdoor shrine at which local people worshipped animals, trees, and the sun  revealed still another way in which people in India related to life and death and the world around them.  A long dirt path lined with clay horses and elephants led to a sacred tamarind tree.  The figures were simple, some unpainted clay, some broken, others intact and brightly painted, often with grotesquely grinning mouths, as if they were laughing at us as we walked past.  Near the tamarind tree was an open area where, we were told, goats and cocks sometimes were sacrificed.  In India, people could accept a religion such as Hinduism, Buddhism, or Christianity and incorporate it into ancient beliefs that had been passed down for millennia.  They saw nothing contradictory, for example, if they hung bags containing the placentas of cows from the branch of a banyan tree as an offering for those ancient gods.

​              "This is more like it," Sherrill said when we stopped at a village in which master bronze workers had been producing exquisite bronze figures for a thousand years, using the traditional lost wax method.  They worked squatting on the dirt floor, making molds, casting the bronze, and refining and polishing the statuettes.  In the little adjoining shop we found a beautiful statuette of Saraswati, the patron goddess of education, which we bought for our daughter, along with a gracefully stylized figure of a deer for ourselves—art and religion united.

​              We braved (barefoot, of course) the enormous crowds at the evening Hindu ceremony in the seventeenth century Meenakshi Temple in Madurai.  The immense size of the temple brought to mind Cologne cathedral or Notre Dame, but the granite columns inside had been carved into monstrous grotesque creatures.  Pilgrims from around India prostrated themselves in front of shrines and scattered colored powders on statues, but it was the shrine dedicated to Shiva where the crowd swelled until there was hardly room to move.  Suddenly, excitedly, people moved back just enough to allow bearers to carry Shiva on his silver palanquin across the temple to the shrine of Parvati, his wife.  Then, as priests blew horns, waved feathery fans, and chanted, they surged forward again in a frenzy as Shiva joined his consort.  All we could do was try to avoid being crushed.

       No other town we'd seen in India was like the former French city of Pondicherry: straight streets lined with trees and elegant colonial buildings, and a long boulevard stretching beside the Bay of Bengal.  However, when we stopped at a statue of Gandhi overlooking the bay, several gypsy women and their children and trained monkeys suddenly appeared.  One of the gypsies sent her monkey to climb on a woman with us.  The monkey nearly had its tiny hand in one of the woman's pockets when she screamed.  The gypsy reined in the monkey and pretended to scold it. 
      While we were in Pondicherry, we saw the first of several posters urging parents to value female children, part of a campaign to stop the killing of girl babies. 
              "Too little, too late," Sherrill commented.
              "Better than nothing," I said.
              "Better than nothing?  Yes."

​              In the town of Madurai, we went to the opening night screening of a Tamil movie, managing to get seats despite the crowds of fans.  We had never seen a movie in which the musical numbers were full of beatings, murders, and other violence.  The young males in the audience loved it all, of course. 
​          We also saw a bigger than life-size statue of one of India's biggest movie stars who retired to become a successful politician and then started free lunches in the schools throughout the state of Tamil Nadu—which prompted the farmers and other poor parents to send their children to school for the free food, which eventually increased the literacy level in the state to 80 percent.   

​              The movie screening was an exciting conclusion to our time in Tamil Nadu.  The next day, we continued south into the more rural state of Kerala, where we stayed for a while on the edge of a tiger and game preserve.  On the way, we saw farmers washing their cattle and then decorating them with colored powders and wreathes and horn decorations as part of the Pongal celebrations—and to show their gratitude to the sacred cattle.  

​              We didn't see a tiger in the preserve, but we did spend several hours with a naturalist, spotting Indian bison, large deer, a native otter, wild boars (big and hairy and ugly), and many birds, some posing like feather-adorned mannequins on dead trees in a lake.  Kerala also was famous for growing spices.  Sherrill and several others drove off on a "spice safari," riding jeeps into the higher hills to explore different spice plantations, including one that grew "the best pepper in the world." 
               "You would've hated the narrow cliff road, sweetie," Sherrill told me when she got back that evening, "but you missed some wonderful smells!" 

​              The road we took over the mountains to the Arabian Sea the next day wasn't much better, winding precariously among hillside tea plantations.  Flashes of color darted like wild birds through the green tea plants as children with backpacks ran to school through the tea hills and women in saris cut the leaves and stuffed them into bags.  When we hit the coast, we landed in a world of lagoons, inland canals, and lakes, the "backwater" area where the second largest lake in India fed into a web of manmade canals.  

​              Crossing the lake by boat, we reached the complex of cottages where we stayed for a while, a quiet paradise surrounded by water, the perfect starting point for further explorations. As we boated along the canals during the next days, we sometimes passed through half-hidden villages. Often, rice fields stretched into the distance from one or both sides of a canal—bordered by levees, since the fields were lower than the canal.  In one village, we saw a woman making rope out of coconut husk fibers, then we moved through hundreds of ducks being herded by a man in a boat, an absurd yet beautiful sight as they quacked their complaints.  One of the villages we passed was where Arundhati Roy, author of the 1997 Booker Prize novel The God of Small Things was raised.

​              When we left this backwater paradise, we continued on to the 600 year-old city of Kochi (Cochin)—a colorful mélange of Portuguese, Dutch, French, British, Chinese, and Jewish history, starting with when it was founded by Vasco da Gama.  As I write this in 2018, weeks of fierce rains have buried large parts of the historic city under mud (Kochi is built on several islands, as well as the mainland), but the city is digging out.  Some of its islands are artificial, so this kind of disaster may recur as climate change continues. 
To be continued....   
 
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