Change In Plans

Jodhpur - the Blue City

Jodhpur - Rajasthan - India

This post is about our trip west into the Thar desert, and our first day in the ancient kingdom of Jodhpur.

We said goodbye to our new friends at the Pushkar tent camp early yesterday morning.  The livestock-trading part of the festival had ended, and the rest of the week (building to the full moon) was more focused on pilgrimage and spiritual cleansing.  We were told that already 3,000 camels had been led past our campsite that morning, on their way out of town.

The 200 km drive down to Jodhpur was quick.  We have gotten used to the controlled chaos of Indian roads.  On a good two-lane tar road, like the one connecting Pushkar to Jodhpur, in any given spot there are likely to be two vehicles heading in one direction (one passing, one being passed), and one vehicle coming the other way, half onto the shoulder to avoid a head-on collision.  There will be one or two scooters (with 2-3 passengers each), several pedestrians, and maybe the odd cow.  Everyone seems to pay close attention to what is happening, and it is all in relatively slow motion.  The cars are fastest at no more than about 45 mph.

Midway through the drive we stopped in at a village primary school during a break between classes.  The school was very humble: no desks or chairs, water pumped by hand from outside, and only a half dozen teachers for about 250 kids.  That said, the kids all had school books and uniforms, the facility was clean and functional, and everyone seemed very engaged.  Once class time started, the principal thanked us for our visit and escorted us out.  Not an instructional minute to lose. 

The landscape got progressively more arid as we headed west into the Thar desert.  We have amused ourselves by saying, “There’s gold in them Thar hills!” and “Are we really goin’ out Thar inta the desert, Maw?”  It’s a laugh a minute here with the Baird family.

Umaid Bhawan Palace hotel

We are staying in a truly magnificent hotel called the Umaid Bhawan Palace.  We could see its 60-meter red sandstone dome shimmering on a hillside from about 10 km away.  Many hotels are called “The XXX Palace,” but this one actually houses a royal family in the present tense.  The Maharajah of Jodhpur had it built, starting in 1928, to provide jobs during a famine.  It was designed by a British architect named HV Lanchester, and reflects “influences from Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim and Art Deco styles” with an exterior “inspired by Angkor Wat.”  Whew.  

In 1971, Indira Gandhi abolished something called the privy purse, which I found out was the right for India’s approximately 500 kings to tax their local subjects.  Having fallen on relatively hard times, the Maharajah leased part of the palace to the Taj Hotel group.  The royal apartments are right around the corner from our room: when Lu and I were walking across the courtyard, the king’s small dog barked at us furiously.

Jodhpur is the second-largest city in Rajasthan, with about 2 million residents.  My mind still reels at the size of India’s population.  It is nicknamed the Blue City, because traditionally its Brahmin residents painted their houses a soft pastel blue color.  Late in the day, we looked out over the old city from a high vantage point, and the medina-like jumble of blue buildings was breathtaking in the afternoon sun.  Jodhpur is known for having fierce warriors and excellent polo players.  The famous riding breeches were first tailored here as well.

The historical and physical focal point of Jodhpur is the spectacular Mehrangarh Fort.  It is a behemoth of red and yellow sandstone, perched about 200 meters above the old town.  It is surrounded by 24-meter thick walls hewn from the solid rock of the cliffs.  The founding monarch of Jodhpur, Rao Jodha, started construction on the Fort in 1459.  Each subsequent maharajah added to the fortifications or to the palace within.  

One tiny corner of the Mehrangarh Fort

The Amber Fort in Jaipur was quite spectacular (including the grand entrance on elephantback), but the Mehrangarh Fort is in another league entirely.  In the inner courtyards, the decorative stone carvings are so intricate and beautiful and vast that they brought on vertigo.  The frescoes in the “Hall of Private Audiences”and in the king’s bedrooms were magnificent.  The ceiling of the “Phool Mahal” (which I think was the ballroom) was painted by a single master craftsman, described as the Indian Michelangelo.  Shortly before he finishes, he fell from a ladder and died.  The maharajah declared that no one was sufficiently skilled to finish the master’s work, so it remains incomplete.

Just before we left, Zola and I went for a walk along the ramparts, looking out for 15-20 km in every direction.  There is a great collection of old cannons up there, which makes it easy to imagine defending the palace walls in battles gone by.  More immediately, Zola had to fend off a gaggle of ten young Indian girls who wanted to shake his hand and know his name, and take pictures with him.  He was OK when one of the girl kissed him on the cheek, but definitely not OK when her teenage brother followed suit a moment later.  I think he is learning a lot on this part of the trip.

Pushkar - Rajasthan - India

This post is about attending the Pushkar Camel Festival in Rajasthan over the last few days.  It was a wild experience.

The festival is a tremendous “only in India” spectacle.  It sprawls over about 250 dusty and crowded acres, located just outside of Pushkar village.  The largest area is devoted to camels, with smaller sections for horses and cows (think milk, not meat).  There are also carnival rides, tack shops, feed and water stations, a few makeshift movie theaters, food stalls, and a small stadium for games and feats of animal husbandry.

The general idea is that farmers walk with their herds to Pushkar from all over Rajasthan.  While they are all at the fair, they buy and sell animals, depending on need and market conditions. 

In practice, this means that about 10,000 people, and 30-40,000 animals, converge on the fairground, and camp for several days.  From the center of the fairground there are camels as far as the eye can see in every direction.  Many of them have been painted, or branded, or had their fur trimmed into patterns.  Some are hung heavily with bells and colorful afghan-type blankets.  Some camels are hobbled, with one front leg tied into a bent position, so that they hop around gracelessly.  Many camels are expressing their general displeasure with the low, loud, gargly roar and squeak that only an angry camel can make.  

Surprisingly (at least to me), there is no bad smell associated with all of this livestock and with all of this compressed humanity.  Camel dung comes in very dry little pellets, looking remarkably like roasted chestnuts (Merry Christmas!).  The cow dung is somehow rapidly gathered and dried for fuel.  We saw huge stacks near some of the larger herd areas.  I don’t know how they manage human sanitation, but it seems to work.  The main smells are dust, people, and cooking.  

Apparently, the average price for an adult camel is about $1,200, which seems like a good deal for an all-in-one tractor, passenger car, milk source, status symbol and store of wealth.  The camel can also reproduce, doubling the value of the investment.  Eventually, of course, there will also be meat and skin.

The horse section is definitely higher class than those for the camels and cows.  The herders looked more professional, and the sale prices went as high as $200,000.  Many of the horses looked just beautiful.  Tallulah insisted that we take dozens of pictures of them.

Most of the activity at the festival is associated with the animals: feeding, watering, grooming, test-driving, inspecting teeth and hooves, and negotiating prices. The horse test drives are hazardous to the hundreds of people walking continuously on the dusty corridors between animal herds. We leapt out of the way several times as a bareback rider thundered through the pedestrians at full gallop, seemingly with limited control.  We only saw one ambulance evacuation, but it wasn’t clear whether the man had been run over by an errant animal, or kicked by one of his own.  

In several places around the grounds, there were dozens of men packed closely together in long lines.  After a deal is struck for the sale of livestock, the papers have to be notarized by a government official.  The few officials were overwhelmed by the volume of deals brought to them, and the lines backed up endlessly.

We made three separate visits to the camel fair, each for about 2-3 hours.  We were all dazzled by the bright colors of the saris and the turbans, the relentless activity, the beauty and novelty of the animals, and by  the noise.  Our kids were mobbed again and again by people eager to take a picture with a small blonde person.  They both handled the attention well, although Tallulah’s photo smile looked progressively more forced as the day went on. 

On our final visit, last night, we watched the sun set from the hillside overlooking the camel area, and then took a cart ride into the carnival area.  We rode the pirate boat and the 150-foot-high ferris wheel, both of which seemed at least adequately safe (but not by much). 

From the top of the ferris wheel, we looked out over the early-evening spectacle of cooking fires, gas lamps, carnival lights, and tents.  We could see hundreds of camels being roped together to start walking home at dawn.  Mostly we could see thousands of people laughing and eating, taking care of their families and their livestock.  It has been an amazing experience.  India, coming at you.

Pushkar - Rajasthan - India

This post is about our two days and two nights of camping in the desert near Pushkar, Rajasthan.  I will write about attending the Pushkar Camel Festival itself in a later post.

On Friday morning we drove roughly 200 km southwest from Jaipur to Pushkar.  Pushkar is an important pilgrimage destination for Hindus, because it has 400 shrines, including the only shrine to Brahma in all of India.  50 weeks out of the year, Pushkar is a quiet town with about 17,000 residents and a handful of religious visitors.  For 2 weeks in the Hindu month of Kartik (late October/early November) Pushkar hosts the biggest, loudest, most colorful, and dustiest cattle fair in the country.  The fair culminates with thousands of pilgrims converging on the town for a visit to the Brahma shrine and a ritual cleansing in Pushkar Lake.

We stayed in a quiet and orderly tent camp about 3 km from the fairgrounds.  Under the circumstances, the accommodations were very comfortable: twin-size army cots and blankets, mosquito nets, flush toilets, buckets to wash in, and a little outdoor area shaded from the sun.  The neat lines of khaki tents, with a large mess tent and dusty parade ground at one end gave a vaguely military feel to the camp.

The social dynamic in the camp was great: a little like being in a European youth hostel at age 19, but with much older people and less hooking up.  We befriended a couple in the tent across from ours.  He is the Chief Medical Officer for the U.S. Embassy in Delhi, and they had a 19-month-old girl who Tallulah adored. I spent an hour talking to two Canadian couples in their 70s, who had traveled to India together ten years earlier, and were making a return visit.  Two of the four had spent much of their childhoods here.  We found we had a scad of mutual friends with an Indian-American couple and their young daughter.  They had recently moved from New York to Singapore.  Overall, it was a remarkably open and friendly environment, so transient and so far off the beaten path that normal social strictures did not apply.  

On Friday afternoon we walked around the town, through the tourist-markets, down to the lake, and eventually to the famous Brahma shrine.   

The market streets were jammed with people, selling, hustling, shopping, and just hanging around.  An armless beggar followed us for several minutes, which I found unsettling.  Apparently the market is virtually empty for most of the year.  The shops open only for the festival weeks, and maybe for a few weeks after.  I was reminded of the short-term commercial intensity of the boardwalk towns in southern Maine, where the season is from mid-July to Labor Day.  Instead of fried dough, the air smelled of charcoal fires and people.

From the market, we walked down to Lake Pushkar, which was somehow very calming, despite also being thronged with people.  There are 52 sets of steps, all around the lake, leading down to the water.  Apparently each set of steps is used by different jatis, or sub-castes, of Hindus, as they make their way for the spiritual cleansing.  Strange set-up.  We were told that it gets very crowded in the last days of the camel festival, culminating on the night of the full moon, with many thousands of people in the water.  After bathing, the pilgrims float atonement candles on paper boats out into the center of the lake from all sides.  It must be an amazing sight.

Finally, we walked up to the bright-orange Brahma shrine.  We had to take our shoes off on the street, and walk the last 50 grimy yards to the temple in our bare feet.  Loudspeakers were blaring instructions to the pilgrims in Hindi, and dozens of police officers herded the masses through metal detectors and up the stairs.  Monkeys clambered overhead, and everywhere we were pushed gently along by the crowd. 

One of my favorite all-time Zola moments came when India (the person) made a reference to her mother, who is very neat and particular about germs.  India said, “Wow! Gramae would be having a heart attack right about now!”

Zola responded, “Mom, you don’t understand.  I’m having a heart attack right about now!”

We glimpsed the shrine, rang its bell, and threw flowers, before being swept away by the crowd and deposited back on the street.

Jaipur - Rajasthan - India

This post is about our second action-packed day in Jaipur.  We rode more elephants, toured the famous Amber Fort, saw a lot of sights, went for a walk in the old city, and had dinner with a local family.  We are keeping busy for sure.

We were out the door by 8am today, in order to get to the Amber Fort in time to get another elephant ride. Starting at about 7:30 am, taking an elephant up the long hill to the fort is the only way to arrive in style.  We waited in line for about 45 minutes, and were among the last tourists to actually get on elephants.  They stop the parade at 10 am, because the road is too hot for the elephants’ feet.  Several hundred people were sent away without being able to ride.

The Amber Fort is yellow in color, but the name comes from the Sanskrit word for “high.”  It is the traditional home and center of power of the kings (maharajahs) of Jaipur.  Construction on the fort began in 966 AD, and continued in fits and starts until about 1700.  It is a massive and sprawling, almost organic, set of structures, perched about 400 feet above the valley on a hillside, and surrounded by two huge perimeter walls.

Our elephants set us down in the midst of the daily carnival in the huge courtyard below the living areas.  There were dozens of musicians, snake charmers, food and drink sellers (we chose to pass on that) and people selling t-shirts and souvenirs.  As we are finding in many places in India, several people asked to take pictures of themselves with Tallulah.

We walked up two sets of broad stairs and into the palace area.  The main gate is a large rectangular hole in the inner walls, which becomes a short passageway.  The passageway turns 90 degrees to the left before reaching the stout wooden doors.  This design prevented invaders from charging the doors with their elephants, because apparently the elephants have difficulty making the hard left turn at speed.

The interior spaces of the palace are spectacular beyond words.  One room has thousands (tens of thousands?) of small convex mirrors embedded into the patterns decorating the walls.  At night, a single candle is reflected and fragmented into shimmering starlight.  Thick stone screens, looking out onto the valley below, are carved into beautiful repetitious patterns of stars and triangles.  The enormous gardens are laid out in a pattern which matches the stone screens.  Once we left the courtyards, we found a warren of small rooms and connecting passageways and stairs.  It would be easy to get lost.  

IN 1727, after three generations of having no successful attacks on the Amber Fort, the maharajah decided that the inconvenience of living (mostly the difficulty of getting water) on the mountainside was too great for his court, and they built the planned city of Jaipur down on the valley floor.  Old Jaipur, the Pink City, is laid out as a perfect rectangular grid, about two kilometers by one kilometer.  All in, the city walls contain about 400 acres.  The main road is exactly 110 feet wide, and as straight as a ruler’s edge.  The grid is full of precise right angles.  

The city’s buildings are uniformly three stories, and were painted pink, by royal decree, in advance of Prince Albert’s visit from England in 1876.  Since then, by law, every other years every property owner must apply a coat of pink paint.  Unfortunately, many of the buildings don’t look as though they get much maintenance aside from the paint.  The battered and crumbling facades, combined with the crowded chaos spilling into the wide streets, creates a strong image of faded glory.  The few restored buildings (like the Palace of Winds) are magnificent, and further highlight the sad shabbiness of the others.

After visiting the maharajah’s celestial observatory (world’s largest sun dial, keeping accurate time within 20 seconds) and touring the City Palace museum, we went for a walk on the main road.  Again, like our trip through the market streets of Old Delhi, it was an overwhelming but exhilarating experience.  There were so many people walking, pedaling, scooter driving, and driving past us.  Small shops and food stalls extended their wares and their staff out over the rough sidewalks and into the roadway.  It was loud, and smoky, and frenetic in the pace of its activity.  If there were any doubt that we had arrived in India, the walk made it clear for all four of us: India coming at you.

We are staying one more night in Jaipur, leaving to drive to Pushkar, and the famous camel festival, in the morning.  I can’t understand why I did not make a trip to India until I was 42 years old.  This is perhaps the most exciting and spectacular place I have ever been.

Jaipur - Rajasthan - India

This short post is about the trip from Delhi down to Jaipur, and about our first day here.  The events and images are coming at us so quickly that it is difficult to capture and convey them.  Nothing prepared us for the overwhelming sensory assault of our first trip to India.

Jaipur is a city of over 3 million people, and is the capital of the state of Rajasthan.  We flew down from Delhi early yesterday  morning.  On the airplane, I was surprised to see that the total distance is only 250 kilometers (flying time of 16 minutes).  Apparently the road is so narrow and crowded that it could easily take 7-9 hours (!) to drive. This is between the nation’s capital its nearest big-city neighbor, across a relatively new road on flat and dry terrain. The government’s recent emphasis on developing road infrastructure seems like a good idea.

We are staying at a truly spectacular, off-the-charts hotel called the Rambagh Palace.  One of the Rajasthani queens built it originally for her wet nurse in the 19th century.  It is just down the hill, within easy viewing distance, from the main palace.  It was converted into a grand hotel in 1957.  

Rambagh Palace in Jaipur - spectacular hotel

Grand is an insufficient word to describe the graceful scalloped arches and the shiny pink and white marble floors.  The ceilings are 20 feet high, and every room is finished in dark hardwoods and brass.  The grounds are vast, and closely manicured.  Even the breakfast room is decorated with intricate white marble carvings in concentric arches over the doors and windows.  Zola, who loves grand hotels, and is generally pretty articulate, summed it up for all of us with: “Wow!” 

The staff greeted us with flower necklaces made from chrysanthemums, and by daubing each of our heads with a red dot. The whole effect was transporting.  We felt as though we were visiting an era of colonial privilege and 19th-century style.

Yesterday afternoon we went to an elephant camp in the foothills about 40 minutes from the center of Jaipur, to watch an elephant polo exhibition.  At the gate, we were greeted by six elephants with brightly colored saddles and paint on their faces and trunks.  The kids got to feed them bananas, and we were showered with flower petals from the mahouts who rode the elephants.  A 15-man military bagpipe and drum band, fully kitted in tartan kilts and long capes, played an accompaniment as we walked in.  We discovered that we were the only guests. 

The camp and polo grounds were very elegant, again looking like a British officers’ club from the late 19th century.  Two teams of two elephants each (plus a mounted referee) took the field, and played for about 15 minutes.  None of us had ever seen polo on horses, much less on elephants, so this was great novelty.  Basically the mahouts drive the elephants around the hockey-rink sized pitch at a trot, and the players whack away at a kids’ soccer ball with very long polo mallets.

Suddenly, the game stopped, and it was our turn to take the field.  Team Yellow was Tallulah and me on one elephant, and India on another.  Team Blue was Zola alone with a mahout on one elephant, and Indrajit, our guide, on another.  I don’t think we were very good, but we played a full-bore 2-on-2 elephant polo match for about 45 minutes.  Tallulah got tired, and went to sit in grand style with the referee on his elephant, where she could throw the ball in after each goal.  Team Yellow emerged victorious, by the score of 9 to 5, in large part because my elephant had been trained to trot a little faster than the others.  When we got down, we all laughed for a long time at the splendor and absurdity of it all.

The elephants and the bagpipers did a twice-round-the-field procession, after which I was instructed to present the commander of the bagpipe unit with a bottle of dark rum.  Apparently this is long-standing tradition with Indian bagpipers.

Finally, we had dinner out by a roaring campfire (by then, other guests had joined), and we watched traditional bhangra dancing.  The dancers whirled and swirled, their long skirts flowing and their mirrored fabrics glittering in the firelight.  The music and the dancing (and the fire eater performance) were again transporting.

Eventually both kids were asleep, and we had to drive back to the hotel.  

At this point, all four of us are absolutely blown away with the beauty, the culture, the history, the coolness of India.

This short post is about our first full day in Delhi, India.

After watching election returns all morning, we went out to explore a very little bit of Delhi.  Even in a few short hours, some of my negative preconceptions were challenged by direct observation.  My overarching belief that India is a vibrant, emerging economic powerhouse was strongly reinforced.

Based on a lifetime of hearing travel horror stories, my uninformed expectation was that the street corners of Delhi would be filled with beggars.  I expected that we would be traumatized by the sight of leprous stumps and sadly deformed children pressed into view on the glass of our car windows.  

In reality, we did see a small number of people begging, and they rapped insistently on the windows at long stoplights.  But it was a very small number, and they didn’t look unhealthy or malnourished.  Our guide strongly discouraged us from giving money out the window, suggesting several non-profits that we could donate to which help poor Delhites.  Thankfully, our kids seemed to understand, and were OK ignoring the rapped appeals.  Zola did see someone defecating on the sidewalk as we drove past, and this seemed to really shake him up for a while. 

Our first stop was the giant Red Mosque.  Unlike most of the mosques we saw in Morocco and Turkey, this was wide open to anyone willing to take off their shoes, Muslims and non-Muslims alike.  We walked past a big pile of slippers and sandals (most of the sandals were Ecco brand, indicating American tourists between ages 50-70).

The mosque was built in six years, starting in 1650, and is austere and huge and beautiful.  The red sandstone walls are inlaid with white marble in simple repeating patterns.  The minarets and the onion-shaped domes are uncomplicated, and they harmonize Arabic and Hindu architectural styles.  The big outdoor square of the mosque, and the flights of stairs leading up to it, are all marked off with white lines.  On busy days, this mosque attracts up to 20,000 worshipers, and the grid markings help to organize people into orderly lines.  

Market streets of Old Delhi

After the mosque, we took an hour-long tour through the market streets of Old Delhi by bicycle rickshaw.  Somehow all four of us squeezed into the seat, with Zola facing backward.  The streets of the market district are very narrow (10-12 feet wide) and crowded.  The river of pedestrians and rickshaw traffic (with the occasional scooter or small vehicle thrown in) flowed quickly and with great purpose.  Occasionally, at an intersection or bend, the flow would stop momentarily, then sort itself out and press onward. The spectacle was intense, but exciting.  Unlike the medina of Fes , which was crowded, but had little economic activity and only limited ambling movement, the shops and streets of the Delhi market area were bursting with high-speed commerce and motion.  Most shops were filled with customers, and every person on the street seemed to be rushing to make a delivery or accomplish some errand.  

Overhead, the three-story buildings, made of all conceivable materials, created a canyon criss-crossed with dozens of electrical and telephone wires.  We saw a small monkey dance across the wires above our heads.

As he rode along, facing backward, Zola kept up a running commentary about what he was seeing, and how crazy and exciting it all seemed.  Tallulah mostly stood on my lap, delighting in the glory of it all.  As in many of the countries we have visited thus far, Tallulah’s blonde hair attracted a lot of comment and attention.  A group of young boys ran alongside us for a while, snapping her picture and pointing to their own heads.

We all felt exhilarated and pleasantly overwhelmed by what we saw on the rickshaw tour.  I was surprised that only about 15% of Delhi’s population lives or works in Old Delhi.  85% of the city lives in more modern conditions whether tenement, apartment, mansion or suburb. 

We finished our afternoon by walking around the ministry buildings and the Presidential Palace.  These buildings were designed in 1911 to house the British colonial offices. They looked as if a mustachioed Edwardian might emerge at any moment to ask for a gin and quinine water (or some Grey Poupon).  

The sunset was spectacular, and we looked down the long-straight Rajput walk at the Gate of India, shimmering in the haze.

This evening, we had dinner with a professor of modern Indian history. Both kids, still on Japanese time, slept soundly through dinner. Professor Sethi was wonderful, genteel company, and he provided thoughtful, learned answers to all of our rookie questions.    My head is now spinning with facts about independence and partition, and with his detailed observations about the caste system and about contemporary Indian society.  The power failed three times during dinner, creating an awkward silence in the restaurant for 10-15 seconds, until the generators switched on.

We are excited to go out and to continue exploring.  I can’t believe I have lived more than 40 years without spending time in this spectacular country.  On to Jaipur.

This post is about out trip from Kyoto to Delhi, our first impressions of Delhi, and some thoughts on the opportunity cost of this travel year.

After a 16-hour travel day, we landed in Delhi just before sunset last night.  Our kids are getting quite good at long flights, and the whole day passed essentially without drama.

Flying into Delhi, I was a little surprised to see a thick, almost viscous, layer of smog covering the city for miles in all directions.  Once we got out of the airport, I saw that the smog is so thick that it dims the outlines of buildings, creates halos around the streetlights, and visibly moves and swirls with the air currents. It is a travel cliche to comment on air quality in Indian cities, but it definitely makes a strong first impression.  Apparently the air is much better than it was a few years ago (before the city switched from diesel to CNG buses), and is much better in November than it is during the winter.  Also, the evening rush hour is the worst time of day.  Literally breathtaking.  I think we will probably get used to it in a day or so.

Our guide, Indrajit, picked us up at the airport, and we battled the rush hour traffic into the center of the city.  Stating the obvious, Delhi is colossally big and crowded, so the 20-kilometer drive took over an hour.  Indrajit is young, and seems very intelligent and well educated.  His command of the facts as we asked our basic “welcome to India” questions was impressive.  More impressive were his well informed and clearly articulated opinions on lots of global topics, particularly the U.S. elections.  The combination of our stimulating discussion with Indrajit, who embodies the positive Indian stereotype of the young urban knowledge worker, and the freewheeling chaos of Delhi’s rush hour, reinforced the impression that India is absolutely bursting with vibrancy and economic growth.  The energy is almost visible and tangible (like the air).

Zola and I went out for a walk just after dawn this morning.  After the cleanliness and order of Japan, he was a little freaked out by the grime and chaos of Delhi’s streets.  We saw dozens of people waking up from their streetside campsites, and many more having breakfast at small stands.  Full buses roared past us, and thousands of pedestrians rushed everywhere.  Definitely not in Kansas anymore.

We are looking forward to our month in India.  We will take it easy today, seeing some sights in the afternoon, having dinner with an Indian history professor.  We leave for Jaipur tomorrow morning.  So much to see and do.

On a separate tack, three pieces of news within the last 24 hours have focused my thinking on the opportunity cost of this time I am taking to travel with my family. 

First, CNN has just projected Barack Obama as the winner of the Presidential election (two minutes ago).  Tremendously exciting and relieving.  That said, a man my age (roughly) getting elected President makes me feel like I have been slacking off.  It makes me wonder what I would be doing today (and next year) if I had just joined the Obama campaign full time in May.  

Second, also very exciting, a long-time (younger) friend sent me an e-mail, letting me know that he has gotten an enormous promotion.  I am thrilled for him, and know he will do a tremendous job.  The news also makes me acutely aware that I am spinning my wheels professionally for this year, while the rest of the world moves on.  I have no regrets, and I’m not sure where the wheels would be taking me if I had traction, but it focuses the mind.

Third, and very sadly, I found out that a friend who was a classmate from business school and a colleague at McKinsey died suddenly over the weekend.  He was also couple of years younger than me, and was a charismatic, seemingly joyous, and hugely talented man.  Like me, he has (had) two small children who he loved.  Life is short.

We are going to play the will.i.am “Yes We Can” video a couple of times, watch the concession and victory speeches, and then go out to explore Delhi.

This post is about the spectacular culinary/cultural adventure that we had last night at Ryokan Hiiragiya in Kyoto.  The word

 “dinner” doesn’t seem grand enough to characterize the 14-course, 54-dish, 81-ingredient (at least) extravaganza of food, service, décor, and Japanese culture.

A ryokan, as I found out, is a traditional Japanese inn.

  Kyoto is renowned for its ryokans, and staying overnight in one is a classic “must do” gaijin experience.  Because we happened to be in Kyoto on Japanese Culture Day, we couldn’t get overnight reservations.  India did manage to book us for an early dinner at Hiiragiya, which we were told is one of the best two ryokans in Kyoto (and, therefore, in the world).

Ryokan Hiiragiya is a wooden structure hidden in the small streets on the [west] side of the twelve-hundred-year-old Kyoto street grid. We were greeted enthusiastically at the ryokan door by a gang of five staff members, who switched our street shoes for special slippers, and shuffled us down the corridor into a private dining room.

I’m sure there is a beautiful Japanese word for a ryokan dining room: surrounded by glass and an ancient garden on two sides, with floor mats and a highly polished wooden table. The interior was probably last updated in the mid-1970s, though.  The bright fluorescent lighting combined with the unhealthy-looking greens, browns, and grays of the carpets and drapes to create an ambiance more “mid-level bureaucrat” than “romantic dining”.  Despite the décor and lighting, the room had a strangely peaceful feel.  Even our normally raucous children became somehow calm and dignified as we sat on the floor.

Our server was an incredibly well trained and gracious young woman, who pronounced her name “Chia.” Each time she entered the room she bowed deeply and sang out, “sorry to keep you waiting,” even if she had departed only 15 seconds before.  India and I laughed when she handed us the menu for the “Kaiseki” (i.e., traditional) set-course dinner for the evening.  We laughed both because the menu was so long and complicated and poetic and beautiful, and because we thought our kids would eat less than 10% of it.

It would not be very interesting to list out all fifty-four dishes, but each one was tiny and beautiful to look at, and filled with exotic tastes and textures. 

The overall theme was autumn, so many of the dishes were garnished with freshly picked tiny red Japanese maple leaves and yellow ginkgo leaves. 

Even with the English menu in front of us, we frequently had no clue what we were eating (or not eating, depending on the course). 

Some of the best courses included:

• Tuna sashimi served with green perilla, young perilla stems, Japanese spiny lobster, red turnip, pumpkin, wasabi, and laver.  Laver is a dark seaweed puree pressed into tiny squares, looking exactly like a square chocolate chip.  Both kids were fooled by this one.
• Japanese Spanish mackerel with soy sauce, scallops, chestnuts, Japanese ginger, gingko nut, sweet potato, and propagule.  Propagule was sort of like an olive, served with a stiff pine needle through it.
• Steamed crab meat, turnip, Komatsuna-cress (?), Yuzu citrus-Miso (?) and sticky kudzu sauce.  The sauce sounds like something you might serve at a Tennessee meat-and-three restaurant.
• Shark-fin soup with tofu, ginger, and more sticky kudzu sauce.  Zola rallied to try the shark-fin soup, in part to impress his surfing buddies when we get to South Africa in December.

Some of the other courses could best be described as “too sophisticated,” even for the most adventurous palates at the table:

• Fermented sea cucumber belly and shiitake mushrooms in hot egg pudding.  This course was appropriately named, in Japanese, “Mushi-mono”
• The “Pickle Course” of pickled red turnip, pickled Shizumurasaki radish, and Mibuna cress deep pickled in salted rice-bran paste.  Ugh.
• Cod milt, cucumber, Japanese ginger, long green onion, grated white radish  and chili pepper, Sudachi lime, and Pon-Zu sauce containing soy sauce and citrus juice.  It turns out that “cod milt” means “digestive organs of cod.”  This was actually the only dish in the dinner which I found I had to truly gag down.

The food was an adventure, and it definitely made us feel as though we were eating authentic Japanese cuisine.  While they were awake (see below), both kids were on their best behavior, and they tried a wide variety of truly unusual foods.  They even practiced with their chopsticks and drank green tea.  Tallulah cracked us up as she bowed back solemnly every time Chia came in and bowed to us.

What we will remember most from our evening at Ryokan Hiiragiya will be the unbelievably gracious and welcoming service.

As you might expect, neither child was truly excited about the cuisine, and both were physically tired from running up and down Monkey Mountain and around the Nijo Castle yesterday.  That, combined with residual jet lag, left them heavy-lidded by the middle of the long meal.  When Chia saw that Tallulah and Zola were struggling to stay awake, she came in with a full futon, and mattress cover, and duvet.  She made a bed for them on the floor in about 45 seconds.  Two minutes later, both kids were sleeping soundly.  India and I had the rest of the dinner as a peaceful tete-a-tete under the fluorescent lights. 

Strangely, Chia kept bringing out dishes for the kids, setting them at their places on the table, and clearing them untouched.  This gave me an opportunity to double dip on crab in sticky kudzu sauce.

Near the end of the dinner, the graceful proprietress of Ryokan Hiiragiya glided in to greet us formally, and to thank us for being there. 

She also said, bowing toward our sleeping children, that, “perhaps the Kaiseki food was not to the tastes” of her younger guests. Of course we lied that the kids loved it, but that they were jet lagged, and we thanked her for a wonderful meal and for Chia’s gracious service.  The proprietress thanked us for thanking her, and then we thanked the proprietress for thanking us for thanking her.  I think this type of exchange is not uncommon in Japan. 

The proprietress brought out small gifts for us: eight sets of lacquered chop sticks with an autumn theme, and small change purses for the kids.  We thanked her for the gifts, and she thanked us for thanking her, and then we restarted the little mutual appreciation cycle again.  Her warmth and hospitality were sincere, however, and we were genuinely flattered that she came in to speak with us.

When it was time to go, another group of five ryokan staff came and helped us change back into our walking slippers, carry the sleeping kids to the entrance, change us into our street shoes, and finally assist us out to the taxi they had called.  We found that while we were eating dinner, someone had polished my shoes and cleaned the kids’ filthy Crocs.  Yet another very gracious touch.

Overall, India and I were very glad that we had the ryokan dinner.  It was expensive, but only about half of what I had expected in my “worst-case scenario.”  It is definitely an evening that we could not have replicated elsewhere, and not one that we will forget. 

Incidentally, both kids were very hungry this morning, but we got them some bacon and eggs, and all was well.

Feeding monkeys on Monkey Mountain

This post is about our too-short visit to Kyoto.  We feel like we have seen and done a lot, but wish we had a couple more days.  Instead, we leave for Delhi in the morning.

We arrived from Tokyo on the bullet train (shin-kansen) yesterday afternoon.  I was amazed that the inter-city trains leave Tokyo station, pretty full, every 10-20 minutes all day long.  It was very easy, even with all of our luggage, to get tickets, board the train, and get settled.  As goes without saying in Japan, the train departed on schedule precisely at 11:20 am and arrived on schedule precisely at 1:41 pm.

After we checked into our hotel in Kyoto, and ate in a (bad) noodle shop for lunch, it was too late to take the 40-minute ride out to Monkey Mountain, which had been the original plan.  Instead, we searched for a U.S.-friendly cash machine for a long time, and then got dropped off in the Gion District.  For the last 1,000 years, Gion has been the entertainment and leisure center of Kyoto.  Traditionally, this entertainment has included geishas, so seeing them is part of the reason that tourists mill around with cameras, waiting for something to happen.

There are only 190 geishas left, with perhaps an equal number of geishas in training.  We didn’t realize that spotting geishas on the street is a little like seeing lions on a game drive while on safari.  It is expected, but still uncommon enough that a crowd gathers and hundreds of photos are taken.  We saw six geishas yesterday, not including a tall Western male transvestite who was also tottering around Gion with all of the kit on.  That was a little difficult to explain to our eight-year-old son. 

The cultural significance, and the appeal of the geisha is still a little lost on me, but it plugs directly into the strange repressive/suggestive role of sex in Japanese society. 

After our successful sunset geisha spotting, we walked back to the hotel along the Kamo River.  All four of us were exhausted from our time in Tokyo, and were asleep (without dinner) by 7:15 pm.

This morning we hired a professional guide, Ms. Kana Nakagima, who took us around on a rapid tour of this ancient and hugely historic city.  When we scheduled our time in Kyoto, we did not realize that today was National Culture Day.  Touring the shrines and temples of Kyoto on Culture Day is a little like dropping in at the Vatican on Easter Sunday.  Apparently Kyoto receives 49 million visitors  every year (!), and it seemed that about 20% of them were around today.

We started the day at the Golden Pavilion, which was constructed in 1220 as the country villa for one of the shoguns.  In 1394, the third shogun of Ashikaga abdicated the throne and devoted the rest of his life to making this villa a “breathtaking site of peace and serenity.”  After this ex-shogun died, the villa was converted into a Buddhist temple.  The grounds and the buildings are breathtaking, but the peace and serenity probably come on less crowded days.   Having Ms. Nakajima there to give us background and details was hugely helpful in appreciating the site.  For example, she pointed out a tree that looked pretty much like a tree.  Turn out that it was planted 600 years ago, and has been shaped over time by bonsai artists to look like a sailboat.  The boat is sailing west (always the direction of Buddhist paradise), across an ocean of carefully selected white pebbles, toward the Golden Pavilion.  We would have never picked up any of that stuff on our own.

From the Golden Pavilion we went out to Monkey Mountain, which may be the highlight of the trip to date for our kids.  We had to walk for about 2 kilometers along a foot path, climbing nearly 800 feet, and reading a lot of signs that made no sense in English (eg, “Do not feed monkeys on the outside!”).  As we neared the top, we started seeing and hearing lots of monkeys.  We came on small building with chain-link fence for walls, and 20 or so people on the inside, feeding monkeys on the outside.  It seemed strange that the people were caged while the animals ran around, but it is a good system.  The monkeys are very aggressive, but know that they can only get food through the fence.  Otherwise they would terrorize every person walking on the paths. We bought bags of apples and sweet potatoes, and fed the monkeys for a while.  The babies were unbelievably cute.  Even on the outside, we saw the monkeys up close -grooming, running around, fighting loudly, making up- which the kids thought was just great.

On the way back toward Kyoto proper, we stopped at Nijo Castle, which was the part-time residence of some of the 17th century Shoguns when they were in Kyoto.  The interior walls of the castle were made of paper, and many of the roofs were thatched, neither of which seemed ideal for a secure environment.  It turns out that the Shoguns used clever means of protection (in addition to high stone walls and a moat on the outside of the castle).  The castle floors, called “Nightingale Floors” all squeaked when walked upon, to alert guards of movement.  The bodyguards were not allowed to sit with the Shogun during meetings, but stared at bowls of water that would vibrate if anyone moved suddenly.  If the water vibrated, they ran in with swords drawn.  Cool castle.

Finally, we paid to have a formal tea ceremony in a tea shop in the center of town.  Tallulah really liked the formality and the gear, although none of us cared much for the taste of the frothy green tea.  The ceremony took about 30 minutes, was very solemn, and gave us at least a little insight into some part of Japanese culture.

This evening we had a big and formal dinner at a famous ryokan, a traditional Japanese inn.  This was an amazing experience, but requires another entire blog posting to do it justice.

On to Delhi!

This short post summarizes how we have spent the last 48 hours in Tokyo. 

Tokyo is largely graceless, in terms of aesthetic beauty.  This comes from having been pretty much destroyed twice in the last century: in the earthquake of 1923 and again in the firebombings at the end of World War II.  The city makes up for its architectural blandness by being awesomely efficient (the best public transport system I have seen anywhere) and possessing tremendous vibrancy.  The lights are bright, and all hours of the day and night the streets are thronged with activity.

We have had only a few short days in Tokyo, so we have tried to do as much as we can.  Since we left the Tokyo Fish Market on Friday morning, we have been going full tilt.  Here is what we have been up to:

On Friday afternoon, Halloween day, we had to get Zola a constume, so we wandered around the Shibuya District, found a great store called Don Quijote (similar to a Ricky’s in New York).  Zola ended up combining a “Scream” mask and robe (inspired by Edvard Munch) with a “Friday the 13th” bloody sword.  Tallulah was a ladybug.  We ate a uniquely French-Japanese bistro lunch. 

Before meeting our friends for trick-or-treating we had a family karaoke session in Shibuya.  The karaoke place was 8 stories tall, with 10-12 small soundproofed rooms on each floor.  This supports a lot of karaoke.  Once I figured out the controls, we were able to sing along to Green Day and Guns ‘n Roses (Zola’s choices) and the Beatles and Michael Jackson (India’s choices).  Lu shook the maracas and the tambourines, and we all made a tremedous racket.  Fun for all, and a deal at $2.60 for half an hour.

Trick-or-treating is highly organized in Japan (a cultural specialty).  A couple of neighborhoods had been designated as October 31st trick-or-treat areas, with many other neighborhoods having been designated for last weekend.  Individual families signed up to receive visitors, and the map of houses was available on the Internet.  Our kids were tired, and a little shy about being with a mob of expat kids they didn’t know.  On the other hand, free candy is free candy.

On Saturday morning we checked out of the hotel and moved to our friends’, Keith and Kathleen’s apartment.  After dropping our bags, we ran out the door to see the sights.  We walked through the big Yoyogi Park, dodging multiple squads of runners training for some marathon.  Monday is Culture Day in Japan, and there was a big thousand-year-old ceremony at the Meiji shrine in the center of the park.  The highlight for me was watching Meredith and Isa (our friends’ daughters) teach our kids the hand-washing ritual outside of the shrine.

Leaving the park, we walked through a crowd of “Harajuku Girls”.  This is a difficult cultural phenomenon to describe, but the Harajuku Girls dress in fetishistic costumes (eg, Goth, dominatrix, sexy Little Bo Peep) to shock and tantalize the staid citizens.  Apparently many of the Girls do this in secret, leaving their homes in normal clothes, and changing into costume away from their parents.  It is a uniquely Japanese expression of group non-conformity, maybe now done more for reaction than anything else.

We walked to a tiny, smoke-filled dumpling restaurant in Omote-sando for lunch, followed by a second lunch at a sushi-go-round up the street.  Zola loves a miniclip video game called “Sushi Go Round,” so he was determined to see it for real.  We also went to Kiddyland, the noisy epicenter of Japanese electronic toys.  I actually stayed out on the sidewalk with the stroller (I spent two hours in Kiddyland a few years ago, and my eardrums am still scarred from the experience), and watched all four of the kids stagger out after about 30 minutes, happy but shell-shocked.

Keith and Isa walked back to their house with Zola and me, which took about 45 minutes.  Zola talked non-stop to Keith about every conceivable topic, while Isa looked on in silent wonder that someone could talk without breathing for that long.

Last night we left the kids with their nanny, and the adults went out.  We went first to a party hosted by mutual friends from New Jersey.  Fun, wonderful to see them, beautiful view of Tokyo from their roof deck.  We walked to dinner at Morimoto, which is the original Iron Chef restaurant.  Classic Japanese dining experience, ending in the second-floor lounge in big comfortable chairs.  India and I could have easily slept the night there at Morimoto.

Instead, we walked for about an hour (slightly lost) to a Halloween party hosted by expats in Tokyo.  This party was a lot more raucous than the first.  It was at a bar on the sixth floor of a building in Roppongi.  We navigated through hordes of large Nigerian men touting for strip clubs and massage parlors, and finally found the place.  The elevator doors opened into the middle of a dance floor, with disco hits of the early 80s blaring, and dozens of costumed Westerners rocking out.  Fun party, we stayed until about 1:30.

We are on our way to Tokyo station to take a bullet train to Kyoto.  Thanks to Keith and Kathleen for taking good care of us, and giving us two weeks of Tokyo fun in 48 hours.