[Sunday, Feb. 22 (Happy Birthday George), 2009, 11 am Thai time] When I saw Slumdog Millionaire, I posted that I liked the movie, but it was basically Hollywood formula and glitz in a new setting. I was also concerned that the movie didn't really convey the complexity and richness of the Mumbai slums. I wrote:

Gregory David Roberts, for example in his book Shantaram seems to capture some of the spirit of the Bombay slums. He makes us feel its oppression, but also to see that despite what looks totally unlivable from a Western perspective, the inhabitants, like everyone else, live rich lives with joys as well as suffering.

A NY Times article today on protests in Mumbai against using the word slum in the movie, does a much more thorough job describing that these 'slums' are really very vibrant communities. Here's an excerpt - go to the link for the rest:

Its depiction as a slum does little justice to the reality of Dharavi. Well over a million “eyes on the street,” to use Jane Jacobs’s phrase, keep Dharavi perhaps safer than most American cities. Yet Dharavi’s extreme population density doesn’t translate into oppressiveness. The crowd is efficiently absorbed by the thousands of tiny streets branching off bustling commercial arteries. Also, you won’t be chased by beggars or see hopeless people loitering — Dharavi is probably the most active and lively part of an incredibly industrious city. People have learned to respond in creative ways to the indifference of the state — including having set up a highly functional recycling industry that serves the whole city.

Dharavi is all about such resourcefulness. Over 60 years ago, it started off as a small village in the marshlands and grew, with no government support, to become a million-dollar economic miracle providing food to Mumbai and exporting crafts and manufactured goods to places as far away as Sweden.

Certainly the movie brings much more attention to the situation and perhaps more people will actually be moved to find out more about this huge city within a city.

I see that I used both Bombay and Mumbai. The later is the new name for the city, but many, still use the older name.

Kuala Lumpur 4 - Roti

[This post and the previous two posted Saturday, Feb. 7, 2009 around 10:30pm Malaysia Time - which is one hour ahead of Thai time, so it gets dark about an hour later]

Joan wanted to see what snacks they had at Temptations, one of the hotel restaurants last night.

The Indian chef Yodesh (I think that was his name) was
teaching one of the Chinese chefs how to make a roti.

So they insisted that we taste it.

This morning we passed up the 44 Ringget buffet for another roti in a little Indian shop cooked with egg and served with a delicious sauce. Joan got tea and I got water. 7.50 ringget for the two of us. It was delicious.

[Update Feb. 9] Wikipedia tells us more about this

Roti canai (pronounced "chanai," not "kanai") is a type of flatbread found in Malaysia, often sold in Mamak stalls. It is known as roti prata in Singapore, and is a close descendant of Kerala porotta. . .

Malaysianfood.net has a recipe. But the chef at the hotel said it took three months to master.

After looking at about six roti cannai videos, I think this one gives the best overall picture of how they are made. So, no, this is NOT my video. It was posted by rustyanalog.

Mangoes, Wheat, Pests

[Friday, January 30, noonish:  I posted this briefly yesterday before I saw that the blogger required permission for posting anything from his blog.  So I took it down right away and emailed for permission, which I just found in my email.]

Here's some interesting environmental history I found while working on my mango project. About how US wheat shipments to India in the 50's introduced a massive pest - Congress grass - into India. And how JFK got to eat fresh Indian mangoes at the Indian embassy, but the seeds were confiscated by the USDA. This was originally posted June 22, 2007:

Mangoes, Congress Grass and AmericaPL 480 – now how many know what that is all about? People from Bangalore will definitely know about Congress grass, because it has been the main cause for most allergy related misery & skin diseases out there. Ever figured out how it reached the city? It is an interesting story, because the seeds or the weeds traveled long and far to reach Bangalore…Parthenium or carrot weed (since it looks like a carrot plant), one of 10 worst weeds in the world, traveled with the PL 480 wheat that was imported from USA (some say Mexico – I am not 100% sure yet) many years back, under the Public loan 480 generously provided to India.
Now, Parthenium is called Congress weed or Congress Grass, do you know why? As far as I could gather, the white flower looks like a Gandhi cap …It is also called 'Safed topi 'or Gandhi Bhooti!!! But I could not see any resemblance, Was it because Congress was in power when the wheat import took place?? (Or maliciously meant to mean - as spread out & ingrained as the Congress party in India?)
SO what happened in 1956?? After partition, Western Punjab, India's wheat bowl had gone to Pakistan. A spell of successive bad monsoons added, there was a severe food crisis by 1955, reminiscent of the Bengal famine. India had no options. Chinese were already starving. Russia, India’s quasi-ally didn't have enough for its own people. Europe was just recovering from World War II and could not help. India didn't have any foreign currency to buy food even if it were available. Millions of people would have to be left to starve, if the US had not came to India’s rescue. That was how the famous PL 480 wheat import deal with US was signed by India in 1956.
US prohibited mango import from India for many long years. To tell you an interesting story, in 1960, during a state visit by Nehru, Alphonso mangoes imported from Bombay were served for Nehru’s state dinner with JFK by BK Nehru, the Indian ambassador. There was a caveat, after dinner, all seeds were to be collected & handed over to the USDA for incineration. Can you believe that these things happen??

The story goes on and ties back into Congress grass and the new laws to allow importation of Indian mangoes to the US. You can read the rest of the story at Maddy's" Ramblings.  Check out the rest of his blog too, some quirkily interesting, funny posts - like the one about the bee's painted onto urinals so men would aim better.  Another post that caught my fancy was about an Indian journalist who worked in Germany in the 30's and 40's.  The dialogue between three Indians trying to get into Switzerland and the SS Guard is a wonderfully funny look at cross-cultural meanings.  I also think I found it interesting because I'm about 2/3 through The Orientalist    whose main character is Baku born Jew who ends up in Berlin as a writer, converts to Islam.  Their time in Berlin would have overlapped and I wonder if the two knew each other, or at least about each other.

Thoughts on Slumdog Millionaire

[Update: for a much more astute review see Great Bong's review at Random Thoughts of a Demented Mind.]

After the (Anchorage International Film) festival, there were just two movies we wanted to see: Milk and Slumdog Millionaire. I've already posted on Milk, which I think is a very well made and powerful movie. We saw Slumdog the other day.

India is probably one of the more fascinating places on this globe. Even calling it a 'place' is misleading. It's a different world, a different time, a different reality. It's got a huge population. It is a mix of so many landscapes and cultures. It has incredibly rich and unimaginably poor people. It's part of the 21st Century, yet the last ten centuries, at least, continue to exist simultaneously. Perhaps most significant, India probably is the biggest countervailing force to the West's materialism. (The whole idea of the movie - winning on the tv show "Who Wants to be a Millionaire - would seem to belie that characterization, but India is still big enough to swallow up and trivialize the tens, maybe hundreds, of millions of Indians who are caught up in Western materialism.) India, for centuries, has had the most advanced knowledge of internal human capabilities. Indian yogis and the many other spiritual traditions have mastered the discipline, certainly equivalent to the discipline required in Western science, of gaining control of one's own human body. Rather than being a technical fix you can plug in, it requires decades, lifetimes even, of focus and discipline and simultaneously letting go.

The world of English literature has been enriched hugely by Indian writers writing novels in English. Salman Rushdie. Vikram Seth. Arundhati Roy. The Indian movie industry has its own traditions ranging from the austere films of Satyajit Ray  [Jan 2015 - noticed the old link was bad, changed to another] or the psychedelic exhuberance of Bollywood.

So, I was looking forward to this British movie told from an Indian perspective, a boy from the slums of Bombay who wins big in the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. [update: Yes, the filmmaker is Western, but unlike many other Western made films, the focus isn't on a Westerner in the other culture, such as in The Last King of Scotland, or Blood Diamonds.]

I was only moderately pleased when I left the movie. Probably without the hype it would have been much more enjoyable. Yes, go see the movie. It's fun. It's a good movie. It teaches more about India than most Americans will ever know. It's just not the great movie that is being hyped. It gives glimpses of India. The way the story is woven together - which I won't disclose - is clever and moves both narratives along nicely. The bollywood ending is contagious.

After a couple of days of thought - no, I didn't sit and think about this for three days, but rather, my brain distilled it in the background while I did other things - I can articulate one key issue I have with the movie, which may be the cause of my disappointment.

Despite the fact that the three main characters are children of the slums of Bombay, and that much of the movie takes place in those slums, the movie manages to use the slums as a backdrop only. I'm not sure how it happened, but we don't at all get to know the slum, to feel it, to smell it, to ache with it and for it. Perhaps the rise out of the slum of the three main characters makes it less menacing. Reagan was called the teflon President, none of the problems of his administration stuck to him. The three characters - while enormously impacted by the slums - seem to have that same teflon coating. The problems of the slums - perhaps the outhouse scene illustrates this most graphically - are there, but they slide off and we go to the next scene. It's not that the film doesn't depict horrible situations - rioters rampaging through the slums to kill Muslims, a child's eyes gouged out so he can beg more successfully. But somehow, through the main characters, we seem to be immune from all this.

Maybe conveying the slums is just too overwhelmingly depressing. But I think it can be done. Gregory David Roberts, for example in his book Shantaram seems to capture some of the spirit of the Bombay slums. He makes us feel its oppression, but also to see that despite what looks totally unlivable from a Western perspective, the inhabitants, like everyone else, live rich lives with joys as well as suffering. But he had over 900 pages to make it work. I'm hoping director Mira Nair, with Johnny Depp, can keep that sense of the slums in the film version scheduled for a 2011 release.

I heard in an interview that it was Danny Boyle's (the director) first time in India. Maybe that explains it. We've seen a number of movies that featured India in the last couple of years, most of which seemed more authentic, connected more on the emotional level.

The trailer is so promotional that it trivializes the whole movie. So I'm putting up this clip I found online. This is just one scene, not particularly noteworthy.

Slumdog Millionaire Scene
by ThePlaylist

[Update, 22 Feb 2009 - Thai time: This NY Times article discusses what I tried to get at with my comments about Shantaram - that the slums of Mumbai are really far richer, safer, and more productive than our stereotypes.]

Namaste Shangri-la - Anchorage Nepali, Indian, Burmese, Tibetan Restaurant

After class today, I biked over to Scott's office to return his camera. The glorious morning sunshine was gone, the trail around University Lake was muddy, but it was still good to be on the bike after yesterday's gloomy rain. Taped on Scott's wall was a flyer for Namaste Shangri-la Restaurant - serving Burmese, Nepali, Indian, and Tibetan food. Where I asked? 2442 E. Tudor. Calculating from my own address, I figured it was just east of Lake Otis.



So, with my wife in class, JL came over (his wife's in New York) and we went searching for Namaste Shangri-la. Turns out it's in the strip mall with Ichiban, UPS, and a number of other diverse shops. In fact, it's taken over the spot where Mumbo Jumbo was not that long ago.


While we waited for our meal, we watched this truck come toward us, go up on the curb a bit, then back up into this parking space. The fact that the right tires were up on the curb didn't seem to bother him. We're not sure where he went, but there was a one in three chance it was the liquor store on that side.
Our hosts were great. She is a Tibetan born in India. He's Nepali. And the food was delicious. I won't use my time in Thailand as credentials for saying this, because there was no Thai food. But J and I did spend a month in India in 2006 so I do have an idea of good Indian food. We also had Burmese food in Chiangmai. We were regulars at the Tibetan Kitchen in Portland during our six months there. And I've eaten in Nepal.

The food was really, really good. A significant portion of the menu is Veg. That was something we liked in India. I'm not a restaurant reviewer and won't get into the game of trying to come up with original ways to describe the food. It was good. Interesting flavors and textures. Light. They prepared each dish carefully - and dishes in that region of the world aren't simple to prepare.

You can see the three dishes we ate. I took the descriptions from the menu. The Thali plate is a combination of three vegetarian dishes that are special for that day. (I felt a little stupid because that was something I'd learned in India - that Thali is a combination plate and I'd forgotten. They have a non-Veg Thali plate too.)

The Thali plate is good for them because they can prepare the dishes fresh, but in large batches each day. Since a lot of the dishes take time, they're going to have to figure out how to get things out to the tables fairly quickly when people discover them and it gets crowded. The Thali will help with that. Even if they have customers who like to sit and eat slowly, they'll need a certain amount of table turnover to be profitable.

All three dishes tasted even better than they looked.

Does this sound like a commercial? Well, I have a vested interest in their staying open. It's a place with a good veg selection (she said mostly vegan). It's easy walking distance from our house. The food is delicious. The hosts charming. And the prices more than reasonable for what you get. The restaurant business is hard. Just cooking great meals isn't enough. There's the whole business of running a restaurant that trips up many great cooks.

So, Scott, thanks for alerting me to this place. And the rest of you, keep them open by eating there.



Driving on Tudor from the Seward Highway, go past Lake Otis to the second block on your right. It's the little strip mall. They are next to the UPS store and this tattoo parlor.



They set up a blog - Namaste Shangri-la - yesterday that has their menu.

Little India, The Arab Quarter, and Peranakan

J went to take his exams. I eventually got myself ready, took Kona for a walk, then came back and walked to Little India. I'll give you a glimpse of my day. I can offer things only for your senses of sight and sound. You can't, unfortunately, smell the garlic or incence, or taste the cardamon tea, or the dosa. Or feel the near 100% humidity that turns the Singapore into a giant sauna.







A park bench. Two men talking. A great trea. Lillies in the pond.












Walking to Little India.












Through the wet market. They called them wet markets in Hong Kong too. It just means the local market, usually in a covered market area. More like things have always been done than a supermarket.

































Western Union, even in the age of internet, is still alive. Indian workers in Singapore use it to send money home to their families.










There were lots of jewelery stores in Little India.





A Hindu temple.





There were also lots of restaurants. This one was Veg Only, and looked air conditioned, so I went in. They had idli on the menu. This is a southern Indian dish we discovered in Kerala. I couldn't resist. It wasn't as good as I remembered.














And dosas too. The idly by themselves would have been enough, but flooded with happy memories, I ordered a dosa too. And some cardamamon tea. (Checking the spelling, I learned that the preferred spelling is with an 'm' at the end, but with an 'n' is an alternative. How come I never noticed before?) I couldn't finish the whole dosa, but it was good.
















I was going to go into the mall, just to see what was in there, and hoping it might be air conditioned, but you had to check your bags and I didn't feel like doing that.







I've been struggling to find some remnants of the Singapore I saw 40 years ago. The laundry is one. They don't do this in the fancy areas of private housing where J lives.













The Alsacoff Arab School. The building in the background shows up later.

























Sultan Mosque












This is the building that is in the background in the picture above of the Alsacoff Arab School.




























This just seemed an interesting culinary juxtaposition.













Peranakan is just going to have to wait for the next post. It's turned from April 29 to May 1 while I was doing this.

Darjeeling Limited

Light, but not as light as it appeared, and lots of fun. Three brothers on a pilgrimage in India. The India part appealed. They obviously had a good time making the movie. The official webite has lots of material about making the movie and the soundtrack that deftly blends Indian music and Western music.



I've made two versions at different quality to see the difference. I'll post the second one soon. [Here's version two. Is the difference significant enough to justify using 5 times the megabites?]

Shantaram

The book was calling to me from the cabinet in the big open breakfast room of the Chiengmai bed and breakfast. I opened the glass door and started reading the book with my breakfast. “It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured. I realized, somehow, through the screaming in my mind, that even in that shackled, bloody helplessness, I was still free: free to hate the men who were torturing me, or to forgive them.” After reading a few pages, I was done with breakfast and put it back into the glassed cabinet.

The next morning I read a few more pages. “The first thing I noticed about Bombay, on that first day, was the smell of the different air...It smells of gods, demons, empires, and civilizations in resurrection and decay. It’s the blue skin smell of the sea, no matter where you are in the Island City, and the blood metal smell of machines. It smells of the stir and sleep and waste of sixty million animals, more than half of them humans and rats. It smells of heartbreak, and the struggle to live, and of the crucial failures and loves that produce our courage. It smells of ten thousand restaurants, five thousand temples, shrines, churches, and mosques, and of a hundred bazaars devoted exclusively to perfumes, spices, incense, and freshly cut flowers.” Now this may sound bombastic to some, but if you’ve been in Bombay, or anywhere in India, you recognize it immediately as a reasonable attempt to describe the undescribable. A few months out of India and still trying to make sense of it all, I thought this book might fill in a few of the many huge blank spaces of my understanding. I wrote down the name - Shantaram - and auther - Gregory David Roberts. I was going to have to buy this book.

The next morning I’d brought a book to breakfast to trade for Shantaram. I couldn’t wait until I found it somewhere in a bookstore. This book was sucking me in, and at 931 pages it would easily carry me through the long plane rides back to the US and to Alaska.

I’ve been living in parallel worlds - my ostensibly 'real' life and Roberts' India - almost a month now. Flying back to the US from Thailand got me a long way into Roberts' world. By the time I reached LA, I needed to look it up on the internet. Was this fiction or autobiography? The morning after seeing Mira Nair’s The Namesake, I discovered Shantaram was loosely autobiographical fiction, soon to be a movie directed by Mira Nair starring Johnny Depp. While I assume that Depp will play the narrator - named Shantaram while living in a Maharashtra village for several months - it would be really delicious to see him play Prabakar, the Indian guide who picks up the narrator as he gets off the bus from the Bombay airport with his incredible smile. "There was something in the disk of his smile - a kind of mischievous exuberance, more honest and more excited than mere happiness - that pierced me to the heart. It was the work of a second, the eye contact between us. It was just long enough for me to decide to trust him - the little man with the big smile. .. "I am Bombay guide. Very excellent first number Bombay guide. I am. All Bombay I know it very well. You want to see everythying. I know exactly where is it you will find the most of everything. I can show you even more than everything."

I finished Shantaram last night with the help of a couple days of some sort of stomach ailment that’s kept me in bed. Having finally finished, I must say that the end was not nearly as beguiling as the beginning, though it is never boring and old characters reappear clarifying questions I'd long forgotten - though in a book about India, such tying of loose ends is totally unnecessary, since we know we will never get it all. The book is best when Roberts lushly evokes the life of the city (Bombay) and its inhabitants - mainly the slum dwellers and underworld. Having flown over and driven by the massive shanty towns, I was hungry to learn about the lives inside. I can’t vouch for the accuracy of Robert’s version of these lives, but its ability to see the richness of the human social and spiritual infrastructures that counters what outsiders can only see as squalor is consistent with my own experiences living in rural Thailand. It constantly reminds us that even the poorest of the poor, is a full human. [I took the shanty picture as we flew into the Bombay airport. It's from an earlier post on Farmer Suicides]

There are lots of reflections on life, death, and in-between. A few are profound, many sound more profound than they probably are. The language is generally rich, and if it often goes a little over the top, well, India is over the top. There are lots of excellent books about India in English by the Indian authors. Can an Australian writer capture something they cannot? His living in the slums and working for gangsters gives a view of parts of India I haven't seen elsewhere. And if this is all a hoax and he really didn't live these lives, then his imagination is truly incredible.

This book fits nicely into my “Airplane Reading” category. Requirements for this are simple: 1) it’s hard to put down, and can carry one through long bouts of travel and 2) it readjusts my brain, fills in blank spaces, or better yet, makes me rethink what I know. This one clearly did both.

Stamps II

I got a beautifully addressed envelope from Geeno thanking me for the big envelope of stamps I sent him. His letter was very appreciative. Geeno's the guy (click here for the previous post with picture)) we met in Kumarakom who collects stamps. So, again, take out an envelope, put his address on it, and when you throw away envelopes, tear off the stamps and put them in the envelope. When you have a good bunch of stamps in there, take it to the post office and send it. Remember to ask for nice stamps to send it, not the automated strip. You can click on the picture and enlarge his address, print it, then tape it onto an envelope.

The House of Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves

Our guide in Goa pointed to this building way up on the top of the hill. "That is the house of Ali Baba and the 40 thieves," he said. Then he smiled. "It is the building of the legislature of Goa - we have 40 legislators." People seem to have similar feelings about their legislators everywhere. But, I guess in a democracy, our legislators reflect the people who elect them. If people don't take the time and effort to support honest candidates, they get Ali Babas.

Bambolim Beach Resort - Part II

I had a brief post on our stay at Bambolim BeachResort back in November. I wrote at the time, "The place hovers between elegant and shabby" and always felt guilty about using the word shabby. It isn't shabby. But it is the difference between the antiseptically cleanliness of American style hotels and the more relaxed Indian style of doing things. Everything isn't perfect. On the other hand, the staff were incredibly friendly and we learned a lot about India and Indian life when we talked to them.

The view from our room. The Arabian Sea is that grey area in the background.




I also promised some pictures of the Resort. The first three and the last picture in the post Goa Pictures are from right around the hotel. But here are some more.



The pool.

This is the Banyan Restaurant, anchored by this enormous tree. The main part is under the thatched roof behind the tree.






In the distance you can see a point. The Resort is there behind the trees. This beach was basically sand and shells, no rocks. The water was calm. I would have preferred some surf, but the beaches we saw with surf were extremely crowded and having the beach here to ourselves was great.






Again, you can see a point in the distance. Here we are on the beach on the other side of the point in the previous picture. Again, a quiet picturesque beach. The shells in the Goa Pictures link (link above) were from here.

There was another restaurant, totally out in the open overlooking the rocky beach in the previous picture.








Raiendra was one of the waiters we became friendly with. He's from the North. His family has a farm - goats, cows, water buffalo. He has been working on a plan for his life. He worked in Nepal for a number of years. His wife is going to nursing school, while he is here earning money. When she's done, he'll go back to school.

And while I said this resort was not as antiseptic as the typical American style hotels, there was someone spraying pesticide regularly. While this keeps the rooms pretty much free of ants and other insects for now, I can't help but think about a) the insects developing immunity to the spray over time and b) all this pesticide washing down into the beach just below where he's spraying.

Note: See also Goa Pictures

Christian Heppinstall

I met with Christian about a week ago to talk about India, particularly our visit with Winnie Singh. Christian had emailed her that we were coming and we had a very enjoyable lunch with her and her husband and daughter and another friend of theirs at their home in New Dehli. Christian met Winnie through an AIDS prevention chat room. Christian developed an AIDS education program that used high school students to write a play about AIDS. The students then performed the play at a number of high schools in Anchorage. The play would be followed up with questions and answers about AIDS. Christian is hoping to replicate the program in India. Winnie is the director of a non-profit organization that works to prevent AIDS in India -
Maitri. Maitri means something like 'loving kindness." There are some pictures of our visit to Winnie's in one of the early posts from India.

Christian is an actor, theater director, and general activist. He has a masters degree in Theater and directed Rocky Horror Picture show and Little Shop of Horrors here in Anchorage this fall. He also lived in Budapest for a number of years where he worked on AIDS prevention. I met him when he took a couple of public administration classes at the University of Alaska Anchorage (UAA). He's won a number of awards recently for his AIDS education program - from the Municipality of Anchorage, from Planned Parenthood, and from an association of volunteer organizations in town. You can get to his website by clicking the title of this post.

Words Indians don't translate when speaking English

These are words I noticed at the conference and later on tv and in newspapers. (There were several earlier posts - poverty conference,, , other conference shots. conference) These are Indian words (I guess Hindi, though the same or related words show up in other Indian languages.) I'll try to give a little explanation, but my knowledge is scanty and these are based on what I understood people to be explaining and some internet checking - mostly on wikipedia. So don't take any of this as absolutely certain, but rather as a starting point.


Lakh (sounds like 'lock')= 100,000

Crore (rhymes with 'roar') = 10,000,000 (100 Lakh)

Panchayat - Village council - elected by the villagers. They make decisions about village matters, including settling disputes. This came up in the conference because many Indians go through the Panchayat instead of the court system because, as we were told at the conference, the court system is millions of cases behind. One speaker said that understanding Eternity was easy once you've been through the Indian court system.

Jirgas - The Pakistani equivalent of the Panchayat, though I think these are made up of village elders who may not be elected. While some cases have brought international condemnation of jirga decisions, conference attendees argued that millions of decisions are made regularly that generally satisfy both parties. Some conference presenters talked about restorative justice as an alternative to retributive justice. Instead of punishment being the object, making the victims whole is the object. However, when the discussion got to Jirgas, making the victims whole included things such as: A male member of the family has murdered someone. To make the victim's family whole, a sister of the murderer is given to the victim's family. One presenter, a very articulate Pakistani attorney, argued that this does not come from Islamic law, but from tribal law. Such verdicts have caused Jirgas to be outlawed, but they still exist and fill an important need.

Dalit - A members of "backward castes" including untouchables and some low caste peoples. The caste system continues to survive in people's minds and while there are affirmative action type laws that set aside seats at universities,etc. for dalit, there is still a long way to go.

Goa Pictures

These are just some pictures from Goa I didn't have a chance to post.

It wasn't until I looked at the picture that I realized how closely the butterfly matched the flower.


I didn't compose this picture, There were large piles of shells on the beach.


The beach next to our hotel. Quiet, no one around. This cove had the rocks. The one right in front of the hotel was just sand.


Colva Beach, not so quiet.


src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjT_PeLB7KALD7UhIOJa3z5azUqXaqqY4qGu-VvwVs1Ni7JjDebh0viXKfrcCJvv9YapRfU7zxciZjyvrRjKgEX6R1yKyID8GzbFhoTpBtLtoKKAQgeLJbjhJlDRHTZWAFpvYE8/s400/talisman.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5010489497682217490" /> The peppers and lemon on a string are to ward of evil that might otherwise come to his new car.


Look carefully to see the sandcrab so well camouflaged.

See also Bambolin Resort.