India

Tela and Carol visiting a Hindu temple

Jim at a street-side market in Bangalore

The final blog post of  our 6 month journey that began in Tanzania, then Greece and now INDIA!

Tela and Jim surrounded by curious Indian tourists at a Hindu temple

Tela exploring a local market

HIking with friends Abhimanyu, Aashutosha
 Prajval and Sharad

Enjoying a delicious home made vegetarian meal with friends
in their Bangalore home

School children getting a ride home in a rick shaw

Hindu temple carving of a dancer

Hindu temple carvings of elephants

It was great fun to be together again as a family, experiencing
India together

The largest Jain sculpture in India,
carved from one piece of 90 foot granite.

Tela and Jim at a Hindu temple in Delhi

Jim doing some heavy-duty bargaining for a rick shaw fee

Semi-precious gems inlaid in marble in the Taj Mahal

Qatar is a small country, wealthy with oil, situated on the eastern coast of Saudi Arabia on the Persian Gulf with its capital, Doha, being a large airport hub for international travelers.  Tela, just having completed her fall semester at Grinnell College met us in  Doha’s airport after the six month separation.  It was an exciting reunion filled with tales from our different worlds.  In 1973 Carol traveled through the northern region of India on her way to Nepal.  Then in 2007 Jim, Tela and Carol spent some time in Chennai, a bustling coastal city on the SE of India while traveling around the world with Semester at Sea.  So returning to India this time felt like a visit to a familiar place in some ways.  Yet how to begin to feel familiar with so much that is beyond our experience in the west?  The cacophony of colors, sounds, and smells overwhelm the senses.

We stayed for several days with close friends from our previous time in India at their home in Bangalore (Bengaluru) in the south central region of India.  They pampered us with gourmet vegetarian meals and taught us some survival skills before we launched on our own to visit some cultural sights several hours away by car.  Temples, temples, temples.  So much history it’s mind boggling.  Hindu, Jain, Seikh, and Muslim faiths all intertwining with places of worship, past and present, on almost every street corner.  It was fascinating to experience the depth of faiths being lived every day, all around us.  We were given a behind the scenes tour of a Seikh temple, guided through 900 year old Hindu temples famous for their intricate stone carvings over the entire exteriors and we hiked barefoot up a rock “mountain” to a huge Jain sculpture carved from one massive piece of granite.

Tela is the Facebook superstar by now, I’m sure.  Being a tall, blond  westerner, she was in constant demand for photos.  She’d often have a swarm of photographers asking her to pose with them, their girlfriends, their parents, their children…………we are sure her face is now broadcast throughout India, hopefully in a good way.  Children loved to practice out their English on us, and collapsed into giggles as they, with very British accents, said "Hello" and "Welcome".

We sadly left our friends and flew north for a must-see visit to the Taj Mahal.  WOW!   We were very lucky to have a fog-free evening for a special night viewing under the full moon then followed up with a lengthier visit the next day under clear blue skies.  It lived up to our expectations even though we’d seen pictures and read descriptions about it for years.  The detailed marble carvings and inlay work made it seem so delicate and lace-like.  Just exquisite but Jim felt slightly pressured to figure out how he was going to proclaim his love for Carol in any way that could measure up to the Taj.  He’s still pondering this dilemma.

So six months of adventures have drawn to a close.  More than we could have expected in so many ways and yet it’s good to be home with friends, family, two new kittens and our beloved Garden of the Gods just out the door which we visit daily for walking and cross-country skiing when there’s enough snow.

Happy New Year to you all with many wishes for good health, peace inside and out and perhaps a chance to visit in this coming year of 2015.  We’d love to see you and catch up on your adventures, be they local or abroad.

Love,  Carol, Jim and Tela

The world is so large, so wonderful and so eager to teach us life lessons!
It's been a fantastic journey.  Thanks for sharing it with us.

Tela overlooking Agra from the Taj Mahal

Winter in Greece

Here are a few photos with text down below.......................

Caryatids - gorgeous sculptures of Greek women supporting a temple at the Acropolis in Athens

Jim enjoyed being a student after months
of directing and teaching in Tanzania

Rain kept the tourists away and soothed our
overheated bodies.

The sun finally came out so we
could enjoy
our rooftop terrace overlooking Athens

Zeus's temple - huge pillars that dwarf the trees

The new Aropolis Museum was a fabulous place for seeing original
sculptures taken from the Parthenon to preserve them.

We had a gorgeous day for seeing the Parthenon

Having left Tanzania on December 10^th with mid-90 degree F weather and 90% humidity we were thrilled to arrive in Athens, shivering in its cooler, wet clime, devoid of tourists (they may have been the warmer, smarter folks but we were happier).  We delighted in exploring ruins, museums and eateries ready to woo us with traditional Zorba music, wine and delicious green salads.  We walked miles through the windy, cobblestone streets of old Athens, exploring structures that majestically told of the culture that had flourished well before the arrival of the Romans and Christians into the area.  It was fascinating to realize that the stone masonry so eloquently preserved a heritage that the Tanzanians had lost over time due to the use of different building materials. The island of Crete seduced us away from the city for a more relaxing time in sleepy villages on the sea.  Wild coastal hikes shared with goats, traditional food (think olive oil, goat cheeses, rustic breads and olives) mixed with backgammon games in front of a fire and hiking in a deep gorge all managed to soothe our spirits.  It was the perfect respite for us with no ability to do work without computers and only the day to day routine of easy paced exploring of a world we’d always wanted to visit.  The Greek people were friendly, eager to share their local lore, teach us some basic language skills and they were accepting of our eccentricity of traveling when all other tourists avoided their lovely harbors and villages.  On the northern coast of Crete we stayed in a Venetian mansion on a quaint harbor (Hania) as we sipped wine on our balcony.  We drove through the mountainous interior of the island to a small coastal village (Hora Sfakion) with two restaurants competing for our nightly meal.  It was a time to reconnect with each other and begin the slow integration back into the western world.  Delightful!  Our next blog post will take you to our final leg of the journey where we meet up with our daughter, Tela, for 3 weeks in India.

Love from Jim and Carol   (catch us in our next blog post in India)

Stunning mosaics and paintings
at Knossos

Reconstructed palace of Knossos on Crete

Dead-ended in the middle of a peaceful olive grove.

Ladders were used to get to the oil in these
huge amphoras

Sea breezes blowing away the strain of past 4 months

Hiking the cliffs of southern Crete

Wrapping up in Tanzania!

FINAL 3 WEEK COUNT-DOWN IN TANZANIA

Students working hard on their final research papers under the fan at our home on  campu

Jim beginning to see the light at the end of the
 tunnel as program draws to a close

Two of our Tanzanian colleagues essential to success
 of the program: Paulina and Dr. Kessey

Students Heather and Joanne at the final poster session

Since our last blog post the Tanzanian ACM program has ended.  We now have the challenge of integrating our experiences into our lives back home.  Following the 6 weeks camping in the field we returned to Dar es Salaam for 3 weeks of relative calm.  The students lived with host families spread around campus and busily tried to pull all their data together into some semblance of coherence.  Jim was kept on his toes helping them with their statistics, sentence construction, and asking the bigger questions such as “how will this research of mine contribute to furthering our knowledge on this subject?”.  The effort all culminated in a final poster presentation where the proud students explained to their host family members and University staff and faculty what they’d been doing all this time in Tanzania.  It was a grand moment in celebration of a journey well-traveled.

Students heading off to the airport with too much luggage in auto-rickshaw!

Then came the packing up and departing scramble, leaving Jim and I sighing with relief, knowing we’d done our best to provide guidance and encouragement and structure to these 22 students in a world apart from anything any of us had known before.  They left eager for chocolate brownies, smoothies, and fresh vegetables that didn’t have to be cooked.  They knew it would be hard to explain to loved ones what they’d just experienced for the past several months but were very ready to launch back into the world of flush toilets, hot water out of a tap and friends and families gathering for Christmas holidays.

Hand-made tool used to steal Jim's computer and Carol's phone out of our home on last night of the program.

Our moment of delight and sense of well-being after waving goodbye to our students was short-lived.  At 3:30 AM Jim was roused out of bed by our night guard as a robber had just cut through a window screen and stolen Jim’s computer and my phone.  Luckily the robber couldn't get into the house because of sturdy bars on the windows and no one was hurt but our guard was quickly accused by the police of being the primary suspect in the robbery.  Apparently this is the norm: to blame the most available person, but fortunately Jim was able to stop that silliness and ensure our trustworthy guard’s freedom.  Being without a computer put a wrench in Jim’s plans to wrap up the final grading of student papers and course budget (my computer had met an untimely demise a few weeks earlier due to humidity and the well-intentioned but unfortunate efforts of a repair man).   The heat really began to wilt our enthusiasm for more travel in tropical Tanzania so we rather spontaneously agreed that a cooler, northern clime sounded perfect for some emotional decompression before meeting up with Tela in India.  Off to Greece we flew.  (See our next blog post for photos of this next leg of our journey).

Tanzania has been an amazing experience.  It’s hard to wrap it up into a few short sentences but we hope the photos give a sense of what we've been doing these past several months.  We think the students had a great adventure, intense at times as they adjusted to a culture so very different than their own in the states, yet full of the vibrancy and open welcome of a people with so little materially who gave so much.  The Tanzanian people embraced us, taught us and laughed with us as we explored their world.  The 25% of the country set aside as Natural Parks was breathtakingly beautiful. We reveled in the herds of free roaming elephants, the night time yipping of hyenas on the prowl and the pastoral grazing of giraffes. We felt privileged to spend intimate time with the Maasai people as they explained their ways of being in a rapidly changing environment.  We learned of past slavery and experienced a present-day Muslim community on Zanzibar Island which was powerful for all of us, breaking down stereotypes and offering new understandings of our shared humanity.  Seeing fossils that trace our early ancestry gave a new perspective on our lives in the present, so fleeting.   Tanzanians are proud of their country and have done an amazing job of uniting many tribes into a vision of a nation with compassion for one another, education for all and hope for the future.  We are so very grateful for the opportunity to share in their daily efforts to keep their country moving forward.