India 2007

December 2007 took us to India again. We hadn't expected to return quite so soon, but one of our closest friends was getting married in Bangalore. The wedding ended up postponed, but we grabbed the opportunity for some new adventures anyway. We spent much of the time in the south-western state of Kerala, prompted in part by an invitation to visit a grad school friend of mine (Venkatesh) who uses Shriram's textbooks. Venkatesh organized a 2-day symposium on computer science education at his university, the Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management Kerala, in Trivandrum. We joined 3 other CS professors in talking about initiatives for developing post-graduate technology education. We also traveled a bit through Kerala just as tourists.

Here we come a Kerala-ing

Kerala has a nontrivial Syrian Christian population, so Christmas has a genuine presence there. My image of Indian Christmas from last year's trip was of skinny gas station attendants in skinnier red santa suits. Kerala broadens the costuming, with a rich array of santa masks available from roadside shops. The first one I saw featured a rough, round ruddy-face with stubble beard, more of an irish fisherman look (the fisherman analogy makes sense for Kerala, but the irish escaped me). Another featured a long triangular beard more than twice the length of the red hat. A third was a simple paper affair that reminded me of old Burger King crowns. I only ever saw the third being worn (by small kids at a park), but suspect these get saved for parties. Our first night, we walked past a private home outside which a small group was singing loudly to energetic drumming; looked to me like caroling of a form, given the santa-costumed ringleader, three others wearing lamps on their heads, and the vague resemblance to the rhythms and tonal patterns of christmas tunes. Whenever sound stands out as noise in India, something unusual must be going on; they were having a jolly time at the least.

Lacking evergreens, Christmas decorations consist mostly of large paper stars strung up everywhere. Churches will hang dozens of them cascading down from rooftops to entry arches, each enclosing a lightbulb. The color schemes are flamboyantly indian: kaleidoscopes of pinks, oranges, purples and greens. One fancy hotel made a bouquet of small stars of silver and gold foil to suggest plant life; otherwise, trees just aren't part of the holiday iconography (despite Kerala being overrun by tropical trees). The endless arrays of stars and masks at stall after stall along the roads gave the holidays a cozy, personal feel in contrast to the mall-scale commercial assault that has become Christmas in the US. That commercial-scale feel re-emerged in Bangalore and Mumbai, where large stores and malls promoted the holiday spirit. The day we left, the local Bangalore paper reported that Christmas-period retail sales had surpassed those of Diwali for the first time. What better evidence of the rise of India's middle class than the firm rooting of a shopping season.

Switz-a-roo?

Our first stop in Kerala was Munnar, a tea-plantation town in the high mountains of Kerala. The plantations are spectacular: driving a couple hours from Cochin along the usual Indian dusty and cracked roads, the plantations suddenly cover the landscape in vivid green bushes. With the spaces between the bushes, the hills look like rough green stone walls cemented with black grouting. The visual textures, both within and between the dense bushes, are fantastic. The air is also fairly clean, making the Munnar plantations a lovely place to walk for an afternoon. Wandering the plantation paths, I was reminded of another December in which we visited the Swiss mountain town of Murren. There, we also walked mountain paths, stared at mountains and breathed deeply (albeit in snow). Initially, I made the connection through the similarity of letters and vowel patterns between "Murren" and "Munnar", but the place still kept saying "Switzerland" to me for some reason. Then Shriram figured it out: our hotel in Munnar had the same interior design as a small hotel we really like in Zurich (the Adler): winding staircase with murals on the landings, a small bench suggesting a garden on the ground floor landing, detail railings, similar carved ceilings, even the same yellow paint around the elevator. No fondue restaurant, but enough to cause mild disorientation everytime we used the main staircase. Anyone have another 6-letter mountain town starting with "M" to recommend?

Monsoon Showers

Much of Kerala is inhabited tropical rainforest. My first real rainforest experience had been last year in Australia, where people and the rainforest more or less keep their respective places. In true indian style, rainforest life looks confrontational: people installed housing and spice farms in hacked-out clearings and the rainforest looks ready to swallow the result: palms tower over small concrete structures, bending over the clearings with anticipation of a sci-fi movie monster who has just spotted lunch. Rain is a key economic player here, typified by the annual monsoon which make the region so fertile (I heartily recommend Frater's "Chasing the Monsoon" for an overview). Everyone and everything is just used to getting very, very wet at times.

Which I presume explains some of the showering facilities we encountered at our hotels. An upper-average arrangement features an overhead showerhead in a corner of the bathroom near a floor drain: no curtain or separator between the bathing floor area and the rest of the bathroom floor. One quickly learns how shower curtains free us from thinking about water dispersal. One homestay (aka bed-and-breakfast) had a more challenging arrangement: a showerhead mounted on the wall directly between the toilet and the bathroom door and no floor drain (just a small drain hole at the side wall base behind the toilet). Using the showerhead coated the entire bathroom with water, with no obvious way (such as a squeegie) to clear it up for subsequent toilet use. One day, I tried just bathing over the small sink to contain the mess, only to find Shriram happy to reproduce the rain effect when I was done. I have to wonder whether living with the monsoon changes one's attitude towards standing water everywhere; perhaps such bathrooms are a form of daily monsoon-prayer ritual. Being used to fully enclosed shower spaces in the west, I used to think that the 3/4 stalls common in European hotels posed water-containment challenges. When we finally got to a hotel with such a shower arrangement, I rejoiced in the reduced-stress bathing experience.

Plane dosa

This trip featured four flights on domestic airlines. On the advice of friends, we tried both Jet Airways and Kingfisher; I now understand the disdain that travelers on good Asian airlines have for US airline services. Bottled drinks served to all before takeoff, menu cards and towelettes distributed before takeoff, the daily newspaper tucked into each seatpocket, and a personal entertainment system (on demand music and movies), even on short flights. And then there's the food: good south indian sambar, idly, uppma, and fresh fruit as a standard meal option (rather than a hard-to-get special meal). No bread-and-slice-of-cheese/meat-snack-if-lucky experience here. One early evening flight was delayed almost two hours, and when we asked where we might find dinner (having planned to eat on the plane), we were directed to the airport restaurant where buffet would be served free of charge to passengers on our delayed flight (and we still got the planned dinner on the delayed flight). And this was regular economy class. To be fair, Continental fed us very well on both of our Mumbai-Newark flights (we were in business class after all--thank you frequent-flier miles!), with a mix of Indian and American options (entrees all Indian for the vegetarians, of course). Even in business class though, bits of the american food came tired and prepackaged: the huge ken's salad dressing, the dead and skinny bagel (which we ate assuming that to be our full breakfast, rather than the pre-omelette round). The multicuisine statements from air travel couldn't have been clearer: americans take less pride in food. I still haven't figured out how Contintental's indian food flying out of India was poorer quality than what we got flying out of the states (which was pretty good) though. And both ways, it was the heavier north indian cuisine, rather than the light south indian fare we got on the domestic flights. Pride in food is something to take away from India. Taking the food would have been even better, but one can't get much sambar through security in 3oz bottles.

Life Cochin'

Traveling for me is less about seeing other places and more about seeing myself: places become vivid when they resonate with or challenge my self-definition. I can take or leave travel in places that let me remain detached. I reacted strongly to India last year because the onslaught of sounds, smells, pollution and general sea of humanity demanded a response. I felt more alive in India last year than I had in a long time, and I was eager to feel that again. A burnt-out shell of a post-sabbatical, post-semester professor boarded the flight to Mumbai, and I realized somewhere over Europe that I needed to figure out who I was again. Recalling the food, the clothes, and the rhythms of Bangalore helped remind me who I felt I had been a year earlier. I began to relax. The proverb on the Times of India masthead that greeted me in Mumbai read "Tension is what you think you should be. Relaxation is what you are". A cold-water centering from the newspaper gods boded well.

A couple of days later, I had started to reassemble myself and was thinking of buying some Indian clothes to externalize my rediscovered self-image. We were in Cochin, staying in the Fort area where the historical buildings were. We headed for a Kathakali dance performance at which it hit me: the room was full of western tourists, most wearing Indian clothes. In that instant, I lost myself again. The very idea of indian clothes suddenly felt like a branding: a tourist who comes to vacation cheaply, experiment with local culture, stay in a gentrified area and sip small doses of local arts before ordering bottled water. In a place that asked me to assert my western-tourist role, I couldn't be comfortable trying to be myself; instead, I started a two-day internal apology for being a foreigner. I saw myself as nothing more than an impact on the local economy: positive in bringing in trade and money, negative in the resource impact tourism is having on Fort Cochin's infrastructure. The idea of buying anything there became replusive: I'd be taken for a price ride because that's what westerner tourists were for, after all. In a place where many westerners would feel more comfortable (since the hotels and restaurants anticipated western needs), I was suffocating.

The choking was self-imposed (the pollution wasn't bad there, for a change) and I knew it. It shouldn't matter how others saw what felt like my own self-expression. The other westerners there could have also been expressing feelings of being at home in India. We could have been a swath of soul-mates who happened to land up there at the same time. The onslaught of auto-rickshaw drivers always offering rides and shop owners calling out invitations to look was too much for me though; I simply didn't know how to behave as a foreigner-trying-to-ignore-that-I'm-a-tourist. In hindsight, it was a bit like Julie Andrews in "Victor/Victoria" (a woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman). It left me with deep unresolved questions about what makes one a foreigner: is it about how comfortable we are in a place, whether we speak the language, follow the customs, appreciate the nuances, or share ancestry? And what's wrong with being a foreigner anyway? Why this need for a "non-foreigner" merit badge? Won't any traveler be a foreigner in many places? I've never been troubled being (or feeling like) a foreigner when traveling in Europe; it didn't bother me in Japan. I still don't know why it bothered me so deeply in India. I know it has nothing to do with being married to an Indian. This one is all about me, and I suspect it's fairly fundamental.

Sense Preserve Us

The weather wins in areas as wet at Kerala. Structures look worn; paint jobs need frequent refreshing. Keeping up surface appearances is a losing battle that the locals have learned not to fight. The focus on surface appearance extends beyond weather-soaked buildings though. In Cochin, we visited Mattancherry Palace, which features a room painted in murals of the epic Ramayana. The murals are faded and broken in many parts, but enough detail remains to warrant a close look. Signs throughout the museum warn against taking photographs, and this seemed somewhat enforced: a staffer demanded the camera of a woman who took a picture of her son on a staircase. We'd have liked an image of the murals though and asked about postcards or prints. Not available; commerce doesn't explain the ban. So why can't we take pictures? Because the flash would damage the artifacts. Okay, that was the other expected answer, except ... all of the windows in the room were open and flooding the murals in light. When Shriram asked about that he was told that the murals were the property of the government, not public property, so special permission (which was hard to get, of course) was required to take pictures. Such a contrast from the home, where the murals would be behind glass in very low light conditions and professional photographs available to take home.

I don't yet understand the Indian mindset regarding preservation: obviously, it isn't a priority, but what other instinct inhibits it? A degree of preservation occurs naturally at temples and shrines that require barefoot visits, which suggests stronger preservation of architecture as opposed to artifacts. Even the idea of collecting items for display seems more an ideal imported from the British, however, an observation I noted (and Shriram confirmed) as we walked through a zoo in Trivandrum. Care for old things would seem inconsistent with the endless rubble piles around the streets of India. The crumble of buildings reminds me a bit of Rome, where piles of column fragments near sidewalks isn't uncommon. Yet there is something neat about the Roman piles (not my original thought when visiting Rome, mind you), perhaps because they aren't interlaced with random trash. Perhaps our western obsession with preservation stems from attachment to things, both materially and as a vehicle for understanding culture, whereas cultures richer in stories and gods use other preservation media. Certainly, the Ramayana is not going to be lost as those murals fade. But India of all places has made me appreciate the descriptive limitations of words alone, even those augmented with sound. I wonder if living amongst such sensory richness all the time makes one immune to its diversity; I'd expect one at least takes it for granted. Or perhaps such sensory richness surrounds me here in the US in ways I've learned not to perceive on a daily basis.

Service Return

Books (fiction and non) prepared me not to expect too much by way of "service" in India: queues exist to be stood in, forms to be completed, and counters to divide the person with a particular job from those without it. I went understanding that I should be satisfied when something got done, unsurprised if it did not. No problem. India's increasing interaction with the western economy, however, would seem to require a new breed of service-oriented personnel, and we saw signs of that awareness last year. Young hotel and restaurant staff are clearly being trained for better responsiveness: every request met with a bright, forceful and immediate "yes, sir!". Our electronic key cards have stopped working; "yes, sir!". I can't find the switch to turn off the lights; "yes, sir!". Waiter, there's a metal shard in my dinner; "yes, sir!". Not a single one of these (real, I might add) exchanges went past our initial remark. Not even a "what should I do about it" (which seemed obvious in at least the first two cases). Best we could do was to initiate another volley with a followup request, which too gracefully bounced off the smiling surface of the staffer in question. We did gradually learn to be very direct, rather than expect staff to infer the actual question from our statement of the problem. We had not actually asked for anything, so we got more than perhaps we should have expected; we got an acknowledgment.

In the context of broken key cards, it was all rather funny. In the context of corporate competitiveness, it's cause for concern from India's perspective. For a society that loves to question authority, people seem reluctant to question for information (I've read about Indians' general tendency to make up an answer rather than admit to not knowing something). We saw similar signs among some of the students we met on the trip: reluctance to engage and ask probing questions. I suspect these traits will limit innovativeness and competitiveness in the Indian high tech sector, perhaps sooner rather than later as demand for workers exceeds supply. As a computing professor in the US, we hear a lot about outsourcing and dropping enrollments. It was interesting to see the problem in more detail from the other side, to see what challenges the Indian system is facing with regards to human infrastructure (including serious faculty shortages). I talked to several people about WPI's project curriculum and how it helps students develop some of these skills. Thanks to Venkatesh and his colleagues for the open discussions that deepened my perspective on this issue.

Indo-Japanese signage

Signs with safety warnings are popular throughout India. Bangalore intersections feature the rhythmic "a little care makes accident rare", or the more direct "save head, wear helmet" (more people _carry_ helmets than wear them on their heads). I find these amusing not only for their cadence, but because they actually give justifications rather than just instructions. So much of my experience of Indian culture is someone proclaiming what someone else should do without giving rationale, so these signs are refreshing. Perhaps my favorite sign from this trip though was one I saw all over Trivandrum: "Future spells Linux. Let's Migrate!!!". I was suddenly reminded of Japanese tshirts that bear bizarre, often off-color, phrases in English. The sign stands out as odd precisely because south Indians generally have very good English skills, better than the average Japanese. Future _spells_ linux? I couldn't quite make it make sense, which made it a prime candidate for a tshirt. In general, Japan and India don't have much in common aside from a shared love of things that beep. In particular, the contrast between Japanese and Indian temples is striking. Both have temples around random turns, but Japanese temples inspire stillness while Indian ones just seem more frenetic. In fact, public parks are the only quiet places in Indian cities, set off from the streets by stone walls that magically block out noise and fumes. They are welcome places to migrate in the late afternoon.

Wave goodbye

We finished the trip with an 8-hour layover in Mumbai enroute for home. Plans to meet one of Shriram's friends feel through (the friend flew to and from Bangalore around the same times we flew to and from Mumbai), but his friend sent his driver to take us around for the afternoon, so I got a quick tour of Mumbai. Mumbai is unrelenting: flying over it presents patches of roofs that stretch entire blocks, with little to no space for light to reach the interior homes. Population takes on a whole new meaning when viewed from Mumbai. We drove and drove, and saw the same shop fronts over and over, the same surges of people conducting business, selling fume-kissed vegetables, or scraping together a living along the sidewalks. The numbers of people are staggering, then it hits that this is just one slice through the city; there are hundreds of other slices. There are thousands of boys playing cricket, everywhere boys playing cricket, with dozens of games commanding the same fields but at different angles. It's mayhem. It's Mumbai.

Towards the end of the drive, we came across a seawall where hundreds of folks had lined up to watch the sunset. A sudden rush of people shrieking and running across the street, camera phones in hand. One of the bigger Indian movie stars was waving to crowds from his balcony. He went inside, and they all rushed back in a human ripetide that returned as fast as it had come inland. Waves are the only metaphor I can conjure for Mumbai, massive flows of seas of people,many of whom get pulled under the current. Last year, I felt that India had finally given me a context to undertake a liberal arts education; a living laboratory where economics, urban studies, and sociology would have made more sense than they did coming from suburban New York. Mumbai brought that again to the fore. This country still has a lot to teach me, a lot to get inside my head and through my soul. It's fabulously alive, yet mentally exhausting. The books and thoughts we brought back will simply have to tide me over to our next visit.

Montravels in Montreal

We're in Montreal for a long weekend. Montreal is a lovely mix of
European and North American city life, full of cafes, ethnic
restaurants, mixed languages, and wanderlust-inspiring parks. Okay,
more European than North American (though we could get the American League Baseball Championships on tv to see how the Red Sox/Indians series wound up). We get up here every few years and
always have a great time. However, there is one aspect of Montreal
which gets me every time: French (the language).

I'm generally adept at languages. Tourist-level language comes
quickly and easily, and I tend to remember basic phrases for a long
time. French, however, has a bizarre opposite effect. I can't recall
basic French phrases. Even worse, when someone speaks French to me, I
lose the ability to speak at all, even in English! This happens all
the time: some addresses me in French and my mind goes totally blank.
Waitstaff will say something (to clarify my badly slaughtered attempt
to order) and I'll just stare at them trying to figure out how to talk
again. Shriram has seen this often enough to believe me, and we are
slowly learning that letting him order for us both spares much family
embarrassment.

From a scientific perspective, I find this fascinating though.
Experience has led me to believe that I have a default "stammering"
language: when in a foreign language situation, my brain defaults to
the current "stammering" language. For a long time, that language was
Chinsese (which I majored in as an undergrad). That's been replaced
by German due to my many conferences there over the years. How is it
then that one language (and only that one language so far) causes me
to lose language ability entirely? Surely there's an interesting
explanation for this -- pointers to any relevant theories?

Fortunately, the language of cycling is nonverbal, so I've been able
to get around quite handily on two wheels this weekend. Montreal is
often hailed as a great city for bicycling. Last time we were here,
we brought our bikes and rode the Lacine canal route, which runs along
the St. Lawrence River. Or so we hear. The day we did the ride was
so foggy that we never saw the water, even though we rode alongside
it, over it, and around it for several hours. Still, the biking
infrastructure seemed good enough that we brought the bikes again for
this trip. We spent yesterday on and around Mt Royal, the main
vantage point over the city.

Today, I ventured along the lines marked as some sort of bicycle route
on the tourist map. Biking lanes here are fairly sophisticated. The
biking lanes run between the sidewalk and parking on the side of the
road, sometimes separated from the cars by short concrete walls.
Biking routes are well-marked, and clear marking indicate when biking
lanes will cross one another. I usually don't like city riding, but
the lanes here are quite enjoyable.

A short spin in the bike lanes highlights, however, that cars and
bikes follow two different road protocols. Cars behave as cars
usually do: traffic lights, signaled turns, and the usual degree of
city aggression. Cyclists, in contrast, follow Indian road culture
(as I described in my earlier Indian travelogue): traffic lights are
suggestions at best, and plowing through perpendicular-moving traffic
is par for the course. Even as a pedestrian, I've felt more at risk
from the cyclists than from the taxi drivers (which I'd heard warnings
about on local cycling pages). The craziest cyclists are invariably
riding helmetless (as are most cyclists here). Casual observation
suggests that helmet wearers are much more likely to be men than
women, and spandex seems reserved for touring cyclists rather than
weekday riders. Quite a change from home, where most cyclists are
exercising rather than commuting and seem aware that they are
violating car-based road protocols, rather than asserting a vehicular
counterculture.

Vegetarian visitors should check out Cafe Lola Rosa, on Milton street
near McGill. We had two delightful meals at this little veggie cafe
on this trip, as well as a fine Tibetian meal at Shambala on
St. Denis. Montreal is very veggie friendly, though with less
elegance than veggie restaurants in France. Dishes here are both
North-American- and French-inspired, but generally fairly light yet
filling. Attempts to locate fine croissant on this trip didn't work
out too well, but that gives a goal for the next time we make it up
this way.

Where Rhode signs used to be

Ask a Rhode Islander for directions, and the response will likely include the phrase "where X used to be". In my 7 years living here, I've been told to make turns at landmarks like "where Joe's barber shop used to be" and "where the little place with the really good fried clams used to be". One day, Shriram and I came across a sign on a major street reading "former bus stop" and figured it was there to help people who had been given directions by locals (especially as there was no indication of the current bus stop location).

This weekend, I was reading on the front porch when a trio of women on bicycles pulled up and asked

"Excuse me, can you tell me where the John Howland school used to be?"

Our condo sits on the former site of the school. They were trying to find an old house of personal interest and the school was one landmark they recalled from visiting the area years ago. It was the first time I'd heard anyone turn the phrase back around to be what one sought. But it struck me, if you can get directions to where the place used to be, what difference does it make whether you ever actually knew the original place? All you need is one Rhode Islander to give directions, and another to resolve the level of indirection. Computer science exploits indirection all the time, so surely I can make good use of this. Besides, who knows what interesting place now sits where the place with the really good fried clams used to be ...

Ride to Time Bad a Never

On a visit to Williamsburg, Virginia last weekend, I got in a bike ride on the Colonial Parkway, which extends from Jamestown to Yorktown via Williamsburg. The parkway is a scenic road with a surface of stone embedded in something like concrete. Speed limit is 45 mph and the car rattles quite a bit along the surface. On a bike, it's a whole body vibrating experience better than that of riding on cobblestones, but hardly conducive to a smooth, relaxing ride.

Jiggling along the 7 miles from Williamsburg to Jamestown, I noticed that my bike bottle kept rotating leftwards in its cage on the bike frame. As a result, its imprinted slogan read out in reverse, yielding the title of this post, over and over. Contemplating this phrase provided distraction from the tooth-chattering ride.

It actually made surprisingly good sense, if read in pseudo Irish-speak. Why ride? To never have a bad time. To keep from being slow. To maintain understanding of your own pace and ability. To stay healthy. They're all pretty good reasons, and decent explanations of why I enjoy a good ride. I also ride for scenery, which the road certainly offered. I tend to ride to release tension though, which this ride induced instead. However, at a time when I could have easily seen myself chucking the ride and turning back, I instead found wisdom from my rotating water bottle that reminded me of all the fun of just being out on a bike on a summer day. Spinning around can indeed help change your perspective, especially when it happens in the opposite-than-usual direction.

Vegetarian recommendation: Food for Thought in Williamsburg, Virginia has several interesting veggie options (some vegan). They're on Richmond Road. Probably the best veggie food we've had there outside of ethnic restaurants, and certainly the best selection. In the ethnic category, we enjoyed Emerald Thai as well.

Rocky Mountain, Eh?

Mountains inspire, overwhelm, and center me. A train ride through the Canadian Rockies has long been on my "do before die" list. So when Shriram had to go to Banff (in the Canadian Rockies) for a conference, no question I was going along. Everyone I know who's been to Banff raves about its beauty, so I went with high expectations.

And a dose of trepidation. Banff trip planning is respite with wildlife warnings: what to do if you encounter a bear, what to do if you're attacked by a bear, what to not do if you're attacked by a bear, etc. Given my healthy respect (read "fear") of wildlife, I paid attention. The pamphlet we got on entry to the park included the obligatory section on bear survival (from which I finally learned why one should spread their legs when playing dead for a bear) and suggested that encountering a cougar would be worse (albeit rare).

For all the buildup, the wildlife scene was a bit disappointing. We did spot some wapiti (elk) wandering in Banff town the first day. There were lots of squirrels and birds. But I never did need all those bear warnings, and I was frankly quite glad of it, but the needless stress was still anti-climactic. Until our last day, when a bunch of cars pulled over along the highway alerted us to a family of grizzly bears on the other side of a high fence. Given that there are only 16 female grizzlies in the entire park, turns out this was quite an unusual event! We later saw (at longer distance, also beyond a fence) a mother and three small black bear cubs. No cougar, but that's just as well for me (though a moose sighting would have been cool).

May turns out to be an interesting time to visit Banff. The bears are recently out of hibernation and out at lower elevations looking for food. The streams are full of snow-melt runoff. The highways are clear, but snow still covers the mountains and most hiking trails and many lakes are still frozen over. This made my selection of bootcut jeans and crew socks a bit inappropriate for hiking. Just how inappropriate became clear when we found ourselves periodically sinking knee-deep in iced-over snow enroute to a glacier at the Columbia icefields. We did make it close enough to see the edge of the glacier though before deciding that the remaining snow field between us and it had the potential to be deeper than either of us city-slickers knew how to read.

Another glacier-bound hike near Lake Louise yielded similar snow sinkings, complete with helping a Chinese tourist recover his right shoe, which had stayed behind (and gotten buried) when he extracted his own foot from the snow. That hike ended when we encountered a clearing where an avalanche had clearly passed through (computer scientists are used to trees growing down, but even I know that an evergreen's roots don't really grow up into the air like that) and once again decided to respect our lack of outdoors saavy. The debris of trees, limbs, and needles strewn covered the snow like pattern on fabric. The size of the print evoked the tremendous force that caused it, in eerie contrast to the stillness of the resulting scene.

Spring is avalanche season in Banff, and while we never saw one happen, we heard several on the other sides of the peaks. It really is a crushing sound: snow bearing down on itself with a crunch equal in melody but richer in tone to our boots on the trails. I don't know that I ever really associated a sound with weight before that. If nature speaks to you though, spend some time sitting lakeside around spring mountains and listen to the avalanches through the stillness. Mountains always make me feel small, but that sound made me feel truly irrelevant.

Avalances feel powerful for the things that they bring down, but that process feels somewhat obvious in light of gravity. The idea of mountains arising from plates crushing together and jabbing towards the sky should feel more powerful, but I don't think I really got that until we stared at the Burgess Shale site in neighboring Yoho national park. The Burgess Shale is a large deposit of middle-Cambrian fossils that formed in the mud of the _ocean_ floor. It sits high up on a peak in the park, accessible only by guided hike in late summer. Staring up, realizing that the fossils up there once sank to sufficient depth to become fossils before rising up, there's a tremendous sense of the passage of time and history. It reminds me of how I felt standing on the Cardo (old Byzantine Road) in Jerusalem some years ago, looking down through a clear plate to unearthed ruins below then up at the ruins from a recently destroyed temple above. In those moments, feeling existence within geological time (or human history) is overpowering and intently, beautifully real.

Overall, as a personal experience, it was a tremendous trip. My feelings for mountains and trepidations for wildlife were reaffirmed, and I got duly put in place by geological grandeur. As a trip to the mountains, I'd be more inclined to return to the Lauterbrunen valley in Switzerland, where the mountains are much closer together and thus more enveloping. The train ride in the Canadian Rockies is lower on the life list now, but someday I would like to do the hike to the Burgess Shale. Luckily, I could get up there much faster than the the fossils, but they may have had the more interesting journey.

For vegetarians: many restaurants in Banff and Lake Louise have something basic on offer (like a veggie patty option or pasta dish). For interesting veggie food in Banff, check out Coyote deli and grill on Caribou St (couple of dishes, southwestern theme), Typhoon on Caribou St (ecletic asian), Nourish on Banff Ave (all veg), or Balkan on Banff Ave (greek). Wild Flour bakery on Bear St had good granola and breakfast goods. We really enjoyed Sunfood Cafe in Canmore (about 20k from Banff town, just outside the park gates), an all veg place with a swiss-inspired menu and a killer homemade veggie burger and french onion soup.

Con Liçensa (A travelogue of Portugal)

I do not travel comfortably without knowing how to stammer some basic phrases in the local language. Addressing this is usually easy: work the corresponding Pimsleur language course. For Portuguese, this process was surprisingly representative of the culture as a whole.

Getting the course was the first challenge. The most readily available is Brazilian Portuguese, which differs noticeably from European Portuguese (one of Shriram's colleagues described the relationship as analogous to having an Irishman and an Indian trying to communicate in English). Continental, or European, Portuguese only comes in a 10-lesson set (rather than the more comprehensive 30) and as comparatively harder to find than previous sets I've used. While waiting for it, I did 2 lessons of Brazilian Portuguese to get started (figuring the main change at that level would be pronunciation).

From the first word, Continental Portuguese (CP) bore little resemblance to the Brazilian (BP) . Pimsleur always starts with the phrase "excuse me", which in BP was given as "con liçensa". CP instead presented "descuple" (sounds like "deszcoop"). Pimsleur teaches by listening, not by reading. Had I seen the word, it would have made some sense. Hearing it, I was baffled. (Overall, this is the first language I've done through Pimsleur for which I believe seeing the words from the outset would have helped, rather than hindered, progress).

Lesson three started with a basic dialogue including the now-familiar "excuse me". Except they didn't use desculpe and expected an answer using a previously unintroduced form of "you" (when asking a question). Different voices were on the tapes. It was if the folks doing the first 2 lessons had wandered off without leaving course notes to the folks doing the rest. Several similar changes popped up throughout the lessons. We took it as a sign.

On the whole, being familiar with Spanish made picking up basic CP easier. The bit of language we learned suggested a competition between extremal factions as to how much to resemble Spanish: some words were the same sans pronunciation (CP reminds me of Russian in cadence and consonants), but those that differed did so dramatically. We used a mix of CP and Spanish words to communicate to others, and that worked fine. I had a very hard time understanding CP spoken to me though, even at the level of numbers.

Something's afoot in Portugal: shoe stores are ubiquitous. At least one store in every cluster, and often several on a block, featured shoes. Most of these were women's pumps in neutral colored patterns. (In contrast, finding water and chocolate bars was difficult.) When traveling, I often take stock of a place with the question "could I build a functional wardrobe here if my luggage disappeared in transit?". I first tried this on a long airport layover some years back: within the airport, a man going to a business meeting could replace his attire sans the underwear, while a woman could only attire herself for a golf tournament or funky artists convention (still sans underwear, but sporting a lovely designer handbag). The main market in Braga easily solved the underwear problem. Dozens of stands sported all varieties of undergarments (mostly for women, but socks were there for all). Other forms of casual clothing (tshirts, jeans) were also readily available, though shoes were harder to come by. The emphasis was clearly on undergarments though. Non-chain clothing stores in the cities favored bridal gowns (harder to find than shoes, but far easier than jackets and umbrellas). I have to assume that we never stumbled across where people do their normal shopping, even though the old city areas do still seem the centers of commercial activity. To be sure, I saw nobody going to work in a bridal gown and leopard-print pumps.

Does anybody know what time it is? Does anybody really care? Not a single hotel room our entire trip had a clock (even at the more upscale place we stayed during the conference portion of our trip). We asked for a bus schedule at a tourist office and were told it ran "every half hour" (repeated attempts at clarification yielded the same answer, and English was not the issue). We asked at our hotel for a local cinema schedule and got "movies run all day until midnight" (and the schedule was in the paper at the end of the counter). If people showed up at a full restaurant at lunchtime, they generally stood around and chatted contentedly while waiting. For a quick lunch, people seem to go to cafeteria-style places, at which they can down a 2-3 course meal in the time I took to eat a salad. Every establishment has a posted government-issue sign showing their opening hours, but these are often approximations, especially on the opening end. Sights, however, close very promptly a few minutes ahead of the posted time (particularly at churches). Buses and trains were remarkably on schedule given the casual view of time in the culture overall. There didn't seem to be enough connections with places outside Portugal to drive the time-orientation of transit, so perhaps the Portuguese just have a better developed sense of where time really matters.

Blessed are the spice traders, for they made sure that Portugal has at least encountered foreign foods, even if it rarely adopts them. Almost all Portuguese restaurants offer the "typical" menu with the same headings: soup, fish, and meat (fish is sometimes divided into fish and shellfish). Sign boards carry two sections: fish specials and meat specials. Salads, vegetables, pastas, and rice are generally not on offer. The lack of restaurants featuring food from other cultures was surprising. The dearth of pizzarias was astounding. As vegetarians, we assume that we can always pizza our way through a trip in the western world if necessary. Technically, this appears true in Portugal, though it can take some amount of searching to find the one pizzaria in a medium-sized town or city. Even Indian food, which influenced early Portuguese economic success, was far rarer than we'd hoped. Food gave the strongest evidence of Portugal's isolation from the rest of the world. The crowds at the vegetarian restaurants we did find illustrated that even the Portuguese are getting hungry for broader options. The veggie places (listed under "recommendations" below) were uniformly outstanding, many specializing in all-you-can-eat buffets of salads, entrees, and sides; the others generally offered a choice of one of two daily plates. (All were also quite vegan-friendly.) If you plan to visit Portugal with a mixed group of vegetarians and non-vegetarians, though, plan to swap off who gets to eat at each meal. The rare pizza or Indian restaurant offer the only reliable hope of dining together.

Dueling banjos: Coimbra was plastered with lovely concert posters showing a mandolin and suggesting two shows: one the day we arrived at a place we couldn't identify, and another the next night at a theater in town. Our hotel staff found no info on the former. Enjoying the challenge, we eventually found a plausible spot and a student who confirmed correlation with the poster. Instead of mandolins, though, we found a stage setting up for a loud rock-style concert. Blaming our language skills, we settled on going the next night. Curtain opens to a large group of students playing lively traditional music on an assortment of string instruments. Then out come two people with microphones and cue cards. We got none of the text of the 5-10 minute speech that followed, but the enumeration of place names and cheering from around the auditorium suggested that we had in fact landed at a inter-collegiate "tunna" band competition. The groups were generally quite good and the atmosphere lively. Furthermore, we got insight into student life that we couldn't have found elsewhere. Particularly noticeable was the "jumping chant": someone in the audience would shout a particular phrase, then all the students would begin jumping up and down and singing along (rather like making a bride and groom kiss by clinking glasses in the USA). We never figured it out. We did, however, finally get that the previous night's "performance" was actually the undergrad party for all of the bands participating in the event. No wonder the student we asked looked so confused when we tried to inquire whether we'd in fact found the event on the poster.

Let the music pray: Musical culture generally seemed more subdued than I'd expected. I tend to associate Iberian and Hispanic cultures with music in the streets, but we rarely encountered as much as a sidewalk performer. Personal digital music players were nonexistent. The preference for American music took the cake though. Restaurants loved Elton John. They couldn't hold a candle in the wind to the music at the university chapel in Coimbra though: in low tones as befits a chapel came the unmistakable strains of Hotel California (from the cleaner's quarters). I still haven't decided whether that or the vigorous vacuuming at two other Coimbra churches were the bigger auditory surprise.

Recommendations: we visited Braga (4 days), Amarante (1 night), Porto (2 partial days), Coimbra (3 days), and Lisbon (2 days). Amarante had a picturesque bridge, but Vila Real had more tempting squares and other areas to wander around for a couple of hours, so we would have stayed in Vila Real instead as a starting point for exploring the Duoro valley. In Lisbon, we stayed at the Insulara Residential, featuring amazingly helpful staff (and very reasonably priced for the location in the heart of the old city). The Bracara Augusta in Braga was lovely and seems exceptionally good value in the off-season.

For vegetarians: In Braga, both Anjo Verde (Large Praça Velha 21) and Gusto Superior (Praça Mouzinho de Albuquerque, 29) offer multiple entrees of the day; O Alfacinha (Rua D. Gonçalo Pereira, 75) has a single-plate of the day for lunch; Rangoli offers veg and non-veg Indian. In Lisbon, check out Terra (Rua da Palmeira, 15 near Príncipe Real), Jardim dos Sentidos (R. Mãe de Água, 3 near Praça da Alegria) or Green Pepper (Av. José Malhoa 14 B), both of which offer all you-can-eat, all-veg buffets; Everest Montanha (Calçada do Garcia 15 near Rossio) offers Tibetian/Indian food for veg and non-veg. In Coimbra, Menu Verde (R. de Olivença 9 2nd floor in the Galerias Topázio, close to the Coimbra parque train station) offers cafeteria-style veg food (closed for dinner). The Hotel Astoria (which we didn't eat at) has two veg options on the menu. In Porto, O Vegetariano (R. de Camões, 339) is another cafeteria-style all-veg spot.

The Ulurring Down-Under (a travelogue of Australia)

Before I started this blog, I posted a travelogue of my first trip to Australia on my webspace. Just archiving it here for easier access.

Dosa, Re, Me (A travelogue of India)

Before I started this blog, I posted a travelogue of my first trip to India on my webspace. Just archiving it here for easier access.