Day 13

Everyone else was a passenger on a motorcycle doing an early morning tour of the city. I woke up with a bad sore throat and decided a quiet morning in my room was best. Later I joined the group for a walk around the neighborhood. This is a rain tree

We were by the water so there were lots of fish stalls - with fish covered with flies.



Banyon tree. It’s kind the Buddha sat under when he was enlightened.

Colonial homes still standing. 
M


Then we went to St Francis church which is the first church built in India.



Before we went in, an Indian family grabbed a few of the s for a photo.

How to know you’re in India:
Raise your hand if in the US you’ve had to take off your shoes before entering a synagogue or church.  I didn’t think so. I’ve had to do both here — in addition to taking them off for Hindu shrines.

The arrow points to Vasco da Gama’s tomb. However, his son took his remains back to Portugal so the tomb is empty.





This piece of cloth is a fan. Someone needs to move it back and forth. 

The Chinese fishing nets being raised and lowered. The big boulders weights them down. I don’t think Chinese fishermen are around anymore but their nets are.


Stairs to my room. Glad I found an elevator. 




Motorcycles lining up for the ferry. 




Comments

  1. ChrisJanuary 27, 2026 at 7:03 PM

    Hi Sora--I've enjoyed your trip while mostly sitting at home in frigid temperatures and a foot of snow. You are very ambitious in your travels! I hope the sore throat has passed. Thanks for sharing your journey.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Image
 Welcome to Southern India Day 1 in Southern India.  After over 24 hours of travel this shrine greeted us at immigration in Chennai airport. From there it was another 90minute drive to our hotel. It’s a lovely resort. Most of the tourists here are Indian.  I arrived a day early. I connected with another woman and we went to Dakshina Chitra— a living history museum of South Indian culture. It’s kind o like Indian Epcot center, but instead of building structures, they salvaged old traditional  homes from the region.  Inside each building they assembled amazing artwork found in many of the homes.  You can tell when the Portuguese arrived! Just so you know when I was supposed to come originally in December, it was high of 75 the local still think this is very cool weather at 88° and 75% humidity. We do not! After a few hours, we reached brain death and our drivers took us to a vegetarian restaurant. We were the only non-Indians there, but we knew they had serve...
Read more
Image
 Day 5continued At the end of Day 5, we had a home hosted dinner with a middle class family. The boys showed us their athletic medals. Though they had an arranged marriage, the families knew each other. They had a very small Indian wedding— only one thousand guests. That is not a typo! This chart shows the alphabet/sounds in 3 scripts. The top is Tamil, second Hindi, and the next is English. The table is in the sitting room, the shrine took up a shelf in the kitchen. They light it twice a day. THE bedroom. The parents get the bed and the mats on the bed get put on the floor for the boys. You can see the one house air conditioner on the wall. I don’t think they had any windows. As we left we looked over the second floor and saw women sitting outside making garlands to sell  We passed high end stores on the way home.  Day 6  Most of us left the hotel at 6AM to go to meet Brahmin priests who do rituals for family who have passed. Andrew recently lost a sister-in-law and...
Read more
Image
 Day 3 Today was one of my favorite days on an O.A.T trip. It’s called a day in the life. We visited a small farming village with 400 people and learned about their lives   Our guide introduced us to the village headman (in the blue shirt)  The structure behind them was built by money from us travelers. They use it for community meetings, weddings, and other village functions.  Next he explained how villagers got a certain amount of government rations of rice and sugar, lentils.  As we walked through the village we saw many mandalas for the Pongal celebration. They are made with chalk mixed with sand.  We visited the cow house. Experienced making papadam   Met the village shaman who treated 3 of us  Hope-the video plays   This, I hope is a short video of Andrew being treated. My video is too long to upload but I can tell you I actually did feel calmer after her treatment of brushing away bad energy with a special plant and putting some salt, ...
Read more