We're home. I seem to recall that the weekly letter after Pop and Grandma's long trips always began with "It's good to be home" and recounting about going through the mail and unpacking and laundry. Some things pass on to the next generation. One interesting note - 30 days of mail and one hand-written note. The rest were appeals for money, flyers and bills.
Anyway, we are glad to be home and adjusting to our normal, sedate lives, happy to have bland food and trying to sleep through the night. We each wake up three times a night, wide awake, and read and force ourselves to go back to sleep. Hint: read a boring book. My choice: The Confidence Man, by Melville. Why, you ask? Because Philip Roth cited that book as the one best to understand our President. After 100 or so pages, not sure I've seen what Roth sees, but it does help me go back to sleep.
The second part of our trip was given over to sightseeing, trying to make sense of India on our own, albeit with guides and driver, with various gradations of English abilities. We went to the places on the normal tourism route, and were awed by the Taj Mahal and the Golden Temple in Amritsar, as well as a place not to far from the Taj, called Fatepuhr Sikri, where a King married a Moslem, a Christian and a Hindu wives and built a palace to accommodate all three religions, but abandoned it only a short while later due to water shortages.
After that, the palaces and forts seemed to kind of blend together, Spectacular, complex architecture all of them, stunning views, with grisly histories for the most part, dating back thousands of years in some cases. What a culture, and almost impenetrable to a first time visitor.
We looked for opportunities to do things off the beaten path and those proved to be eye-opening adventures - a bike ride through a bird sanctuary with a young, enthusiastic guide; a walk through an old, Moslem neighborhood at Friday prayers with a young volunteer for a project called the Hope Project; a visit to the changing of the guard at the India-Pakistan border, where we witnessed a full-throated nationalism on display; a peek behind the scenes at the organization behind feeding 25,000 people a day for free at the Golden Temple. Among others.
We had our low moments, and they mostly had to do with illness - of the stomach and cold variety. And we could regale you with our attempts to maneuver walking down and across streets, avoiding the rickshaws, and taxis and trucks and buses and carts and Lexuses and motorcycles and camels. But, we've had a chance to download with a few people so we can spare everyone the in-person "when-we" stories. Summed up: we're glad we went, really glad, but it's hard to see us jumping in line to go back, even though the school is a pretty big draw. Not even sure how to recommend to other people.
We came back to warm weather, but the bite of 7 degrees this morning when I went out to get the paper, shows we're not out of winter yet. David made it through a high-wind power outage, enough to host Matthew and Tina who came over to get some warmth. David also talked about a Shaker woodworking workshop he attended. Joe and Leonor have been busy with house renovations getting ready for the big arrival; Margaret is trying to navigate the rumors of budgets for the down-sized State Department, and Annie's work has finally picked up. We have travel ahead plans, on coming weekends, to Arizona for baseball, to Cleveland for basketball, and down to DC for a baby shower.
Next letter, more news from you all. Love from up here.
Here's a shot from the border ceremony. Louder than a soccer match. and certainly ore colorful.
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