Changemakers.net

At the request of someone I know, I just voted at this site:

http://www.changemakers.net/ratings/voteInfo.cfm?type=health

This is a competition between innovative 'social entrepreneurs' in the healthcare area. The ones that get the most votes will get a $5000/- grant. There are 12 finalists. While its pretty confusing to read 12 business plans one after the other and gauge which are good and which are not, its also quite educative and encouraging. It seems lots of people have basically sensible ideas that don't take a lot of outside money, and are implementing them seriously. In some cases they have reached significant scale. Quite inspiring. Take a look if you have the interest and perhaps vote too.

PS: Went to the Max Mueller event and found it quite interesting. Hope to blog about it later. For now, off to Timbaktu again for 5-6 days. Also, things are on track for my trip to Himachal etc. in early July.

Architecture - 3

Continuing on the architecture thread. As the photo above shows (not very clearly), the essence of Italian architecture seemed to be a fantastic degree of consistency with cream colored walls and tiled roofs that slope to a point or a line. So when we went out of Italy, in the first place we saw (Innsbruck, Austria) something stood out glaringly -- the use of colours in buildings :-).





Below are some photographs in Switzerland:







The buildings are very pretty. The facade is more elaborate than in Italy and they have a different kind of roof with an attic-kind-of-thing and a flat roof. The large new building in the last photo above is pretty terrible -- an example of what I was saying about trying (and in this case failing) to make modernity fit with the old architecture.

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Some trivia:

--Switzerland is often represented by the letters 'ch'. For example, Swiss websites will end with .ch (like .com or .in). 'ch' stands for 'confederation helvetica' or something similar to that in French or German and is the old name for the country.
--The Schengen visa lets you enter any of the 7 odd countries with just one visa. So what are the actual formalities at the border ? Answer: none! As far as I could see there was not even a formal border between these countries, we just whizzed through on the bus without as much as a stop. I found this really amazing. These countries have actually surrendered their territorial borders to a significant degree. It is a first of the (hopefully) next phase of the world, where the modern nation-state loses its primacy. Hats off to you guys.
--The local name of Austria is 'Osterreich'.

Celebrity Spotting - 2

Shrub in Timbaktu with enormous thorns. Ain't no cow or goat going to try to get a bite off this one ..
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As I said in a previous post, I have a yen to meet interesting famous people. I find it quite amusing that my definition of 'interesting famous people' is genuinely intellectual. At the wax museum in Paris, the kind of statues I took photographs with were Jean Paul Sartre (philosopher) and Picasso (painter). And it was not snobbery either, it was spontaneous. Of course a question is, how intellectual it is to want to take photos with wax statues, but lets leave that aside :-).

Anyway. The Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan in Bangalore is organizing a discussion between Professors Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Upendra Baxi. Gayatri C.S. is quite well-known in literary and intellectual circles and I have come across her name several times, so I am planning to go to this event to get a dekho of her. The event promises to be ultimately abstruse (the topic is: Law, Social Movements and the Subaltern - Articulating Postcolonial Predicaments). Most of the times when I've tried to check out this kind of stuff, I've found it toally incomprehensible. But happy to give it one more try. Here's the formal writeup about the event:

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The Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan and the Hauser Center for Non-Profit Organizations, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University are happy to invite you to an exclusive event, featuring an intellectual exchange between two titans in their field: Professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities, Columbia University and Professor Upendra Baxi, Professor in Law and Development, Warwick School of Law.

Date : Sunday June 25, 2006
Time : 5.00 to 7.00 p.m.
Venue : Max Mueller Bhavan
Doors open at 4.30; event starts on time

All are welcome!

As a prelude to the Workshop on Law and Social Movements supported by the Hauser Center for Non-Profit Organizations, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, this event features a conversation between two leading intellectuals of our times, Prof. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Prof. Upendra Baxi, who have profoundly shaped the fields of contemporary social theory and legal theory. Profs. Spivak and Baxi will engage with each other on the politics of representation, the possibilities for resistance and subaltern agency, the predicaments of contemporary social movements and finally, how the law figures in these conversations and what prospects it may hold for redistribution in the Indian context. This conversation between Prof. Spivak and Prof. Baxi presents a rare opportunity for inter-disciplinary engagement between postcolonial theorists and legal scholars. The audience will have an opportunity to pose questions to our distinguished speakers.
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Here are a couple of links about GCS: this and this

Back (again)

I came back on Saturday night.
This time around the newness factor wasn't there so not that much to blog about, but the visit was more eventful. I got involved in a specific task: translating a report on a recent program they did, from Telugu to English. The report is now available on their website: www.timbaktu.org, see the "What's New" section at the top. This is quite a nice thing: they have not gotten out a good report on the festival in the past due to their constraints, and they have not updated their website in a while. So I'm quite encouraged and I feel like I'm contributing something useful. I also started working on their next big project for me, which is to help get their annual report out. This should be quite a nice project again -- if I can do a good chunk of the work, it will free up the head of the organization a lot which is a real tangible benefit. Further I am working with one of the people there who is good at writing in Telugu and he will try to get a Telugu version of the annual report out, which would be a first for them.
All good stuff. On the minus, I'm getting a little bit sucked into things, and can't take it casually or treat it lightly. The annual report needs to come out soon so that means I also need to spend a bunch of time on it now, which is clashing with other commitments with Priya and going on the trip with my parents etc.

The guy I mentioned above is quite a remarkable chap and 'discovering' him was something of a high point of the trip. He stands out quite quickly in a crowd due to his abilities and drive. Earlier he was involved with several things including the People's War Group and politics (he was close to Paritala Ravi for those familiar with Andhra politics), but finally found a niche for himself at Timbaktu.
I also shifted to the new guesthouse which was a big improvement. There's a maintanance guy so the insect quota is quite less, and the windows are bigger and have meshes. Its situated slightly away from the rest of the dwellings, and next to the hills and is really a gorgeous place. I really felt good staying there.

Since coming back I've not done a great deal. On the agenda is : getting taxes done, buying a scooter for the madam, getting her enrolled in the new course and preparing for the trip up north. I'm heading back to Timbaktu next week to get some work done on the annual report before taking off on the trip.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

Winding up soon -- More Italy

Basilica of St. Peter at the Vatican

Back to Italy where we started the tour.


We spent an afternoon at the Vatican City. As is quite well-known, this is some kind of an independent tiny country, inside Rome, whose "raison d'etre" is to preserve the independance of the Roman Catholic church and its highest head the Pope (or something like that, I'm making some obvious deductions here). As expected, its tiny, a huge open area surrounded by some buildings. The main buildings )that I'm aware of) are the basilica of St. Peter and the Sistine Chapel. The chapel is where the new pope gets selected and all the tradition about the color of smoke and so on. More interesting about the chapel are the supposedly magnificient paintings on the ceiling, by Michelangelo. We didn't get to see them but they do look spectacular in some online photos (sites here and here and several more if you do a search). There is a neat story that Feynman (the physicist) wrote in his autobiography. The chapel is always filled with tourists and he wanted an opportunity to see the chapel in peace and quiet so he found out the opening time and came and waited and rushed inside the chapel the moment it opened.

The pillars surrounding the main open circular area of the Vatican
We did visit the basilica (or large church) of St. Peter which is the main public building. An important sculpture inside is the "Pieta" of Michelangelo, which shows Mary holding Jesus after his death. The "Pieta" is very famous but we wern't actually able to see it properly as we couldn't get close to it due to security. The guide had something interesting to say about it : "Pieta cannot be translated from the Italian easily. To understand it you must observe the expression on Mary as she holds the body of her son. There is no sadness, only acceptance". Here are some photos.

From inside, the skylights in the dome of the church

The church has an atmosphere of true religiosity and is quite moving. I found this feeling in the other churches we saw in Italy too, like at Florence. The grandeur is there, but beneath it is true religious feeling. The church at the Vatican is quiet, despite the large number of tourists, and there is a small area for prayer. Its a remarkable space. There are great artworks all around inside. The church was primarily designed and executed by Bernini (pronounced "Berneeeni"), a fact our Italian guide insisted that we remember.



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Pisa:










In the small town of Pisa, we only went to the Piazza of Miracles. This is indeed a most pleasant space. It is a large compound with three excellent buildings, the most famous of which is the Leaning tower. The other two buildings are also beautiful.




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Venice:







On a gondola



Given all the high expectations, Venice was a little bit of a disappointment. I think this was because Venice is not about any particular monument, but the feel of the place itself. For that you need walk or boat around the city and spend some time there and we didn't do that, we just visited San Marco square and the shore of the city and stayed for only a few hours.

Briefly, for those who don't know. Venice is an island, and one where there are no major roads. What makes Venice unique, is that here are minor streets but in place of the larger streets are canals and you have to go by boat from one place to another. I believe there are no automobiles at all in Venice. A bit of modern history: Venice is sinking inexorably and people are trying all sorts of things to understand why and stop it, but not making much progress it seems.

We went to Venice on a launch from the mainland. From the pier we visited the Murano glass showroom and San Marco Square and the church adjoining it and took a gondola ride. Some nice photos so I'll refer you to the Yahoo album : here. And this is a short movie taken during the launch ride to Venice. We took a nice movie during the Gondola ride too, but unfortunately its too heavy to upload.


The 'Piazza' of San Marco (St. Marks Square), the most prominent part of Venice, with an old church adjoining.


Detail of painting on the front of the church.


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Some notes on how I did the blogging: I finally did take a laptop with me on the trip in order to download the photos. Kind of overkill, but I didn't have any other way, at that moment, as I didn't have an extra storage card for the camera. I did download thrice, so it was really useful and we took lots more photos than we otherwise might have. The laptop was on the verge of battery exhaustion and I was crossing my fingers that it wouldn't crash while downloading. The wall sockets in Europe work with Indian style 2 pin appliances, but 3 pin appliances don't work, and we never found a charger at any of the hotels that did the trick.
I put the first few images on Flickr, but they have limited free upload, so after that started using the blogspot image upload which is not so cool, but they allow 300 MB which is very cool. We also put a lot of the photos in Yahoo albums which has unlimited storage. And I put the movie files on geocities. A big mish-mash :-)


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I'm off tomorrow to Timbaktu, so will be offline for the rest of the week. However the interesting news is that another trip has come up :-). My parents are going to a Chinmaya ashram in Himachal for a camp, and then to Vaishodevi and Amristar and back to Vizag. This is in early July. I will be joining them as the camp is getting over and travel with them to Vaishodevi and Amristar. This is my first real trip to North India and I'm (you got it!) excited ! I'm also stopping for a day or two in New Delhi to meet an old school friend.

Bye-bye.

'Taking the waters'

(Pic 1: The Tiber river in Rome, Pic2: The Seine river in Paris from the Eiffel tower)

I have some affinity for and rivers and waterbodies and we ran into much of interest in this area in Europe. The three big cities Rome, Seine and London are all on large rivers which is a nice thing. (BTW -- In Paris we drove through the Pont de l'Alma which is the tunnel under the Seine where Princess Di was driving when the crash happened). The banks are always nicely maintained so that its great to have a run or a walk along them. I talked about the Docklands area of London in a previous post, this area is an imaginative reuse of the old shipping wharf area of the Thames river in London. It seems the banks of the Seine are listed as a World Heritage site. I spent a happy afternoon walking along the banks, but didn't think it quite qualified. I'm sure there is more cool stuff there that I missed.


One of the most fascinating thing was the rivers in Switzerland. For one thing they were so many of them. The country is fortunate, they'll never have a water problem like us. And the rivers were so .. well behaved. They were all neat and well-mannered, the river paths were dead-straight, and the banks were nice and clean and well-maintained with hardly any moss or yucky substance. Much more interesting though was the color of the water, which was a remarkable strange shade of green. Everywhere it was quite the same. It was fascinating. In an interesting contrast, when we crossed the border from Switzerland to France, we almost immediately ran into a river and the color was completely different and as astonishing, this time it was dark grey almost black. I have a theory, that this is a glaciated region, so the land must have lots of loose rock and rubble and that is what gives the river the grey colour.


In one place we stayed in Switzerland (Thun), a river ran through the town, and the hotel was on the riverbank and it made for a gorgeous site (see pic). Switzerland also has a lot of lakes. One of the towns we visited is called Interlaken which means 'between lakes' in German. The town is between the lakes Thunersee and Brienzersee ('see' in German means lake). The picture below is of one of the lakes.






Another nice river episode was the Rhine falls near Zurich. The Rhine (not to be confused with the Rhone :-), another major European river) is a major European river. Rhine Falls on the Rhine river, is the only respectable waterfall that they have in Europe, our guide said, and they are very proud of it, though it hardly compares to something like Niagara. Its quite a nice little waterfalls.

I'll blog later about the canals of Venice :-)

Verdict/Summary

Beautiful building in Paris where the front facade is completely covered by shrubs and grasses

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Ok, so what to make of it all ?
It was a great experience of course. To me, Europe is some kind of 'holy land', a strange fascination I have with it. So it was a religious experience just being there :-).
The trip is not all just fun. With all the stuff going on, sometimes your mind just gets tired and wants a break. For a couple of days in the middle I stopped enjoying it and was hoping it would get over! Two weeks is a long time, and the schedule is demanding so you have to be prepared for it.
Another thing to say is that a trip like this just scratches the surface. If you are a serious traveller with some sense of the history of the place and an ability to appreciate the things there, there is a huge amount more you can do. We hardly talked to a local person or got any sense of the daily life in the country, and we hardly touched the local cuisine. Except for travelling by the metro a couple of times we wern't on our own much.
A friend here in Bangalore asked me the total cost (say 1.2 or 1.3L) per person and then asked me if it was really worth it. Good question :-). For that kind of money I could have bought a car :-). Well, one thing is, after you have bought a car and bought a flat(well, atleast paid the down payment on the flat), then if you have the excess 'disposable income', then this is a great way to spend it. The other answer is -- it could broaden your thinking and experience in unexpected ways and in that case you can't really put a monetary value to it. For me something unexpected did happen, at one point (specifically at Rhine Falls in Switzerland), I was idly wondering ' it would be great to live in Europe for a while', and thinking how I might make that happen. At this point its kind of unlikely that I would be able to find a job myself in Europe easily, and then a thought occured, 'why don't you do an MBA in Europe'. Its still in my mind, and not out of question. Either ways, it probably would never have occured to me if I hadn't gone on the trip.
Regarding this particular trip -- we had a lot of headaches with Cox & Kings prior to the trip (having the date switched on you at the last minute, not fun at all). Several other people we met on the tour reported similiar snafus with Cox & Kings. The tour itself went well, and they were relatively few glitches. With a tour like this its difficult to go wrong, especially if you're going with a good attitude. When you get to see Rome and Paris, and Vatican City and Eiffel Tower and Switzerland, you can easily forget the smaller inconveniences. There was a nice moment at the Lido show when Priya pinched me to see if she was dreaming or if this was real (I pinched her back to show that it was real). If you're going to try to do a tour like this -- if you can afford it, Thomas Cook is likely to be more reliable, if not go with C & K and do your homework, keep bugging them to make sure things are going well, and hope for the best :-).
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PS: I amn't finished blogging about Europe yet :-)

One-off snaps

Getting acquainted with a Swiss cow.



Some of our stash of freebies and toiletries lifted from the hotels :-). The toiletries were so stylish and well-packaged we couldn't resist. The bunch at the left are perfume vials they gave free with purchase at a store in Paris.





We saw thousands of this graceful tree (cypress ?) all over Europe.

Entrance of the United Nations in Geneva. There are several international organization headquarters there -- UNICEF, Red Cross, ITU

Amsterdam and London

The last part of the trip was done a bit messily and in a hurry. We raced up north through Belgium and Netherlands, to Amsterdam, and then down south again to Calais (to cross the English channel), but skipped Brussels which was on the itenary, due to lack of time. Then across the 'Chunnel' and a day's bus tour in London, and some time in the evening in the city and then caught the flight the next day.


Near Amsterdam we spent some time at Madurodam, which is like a miniature depiction of Netherlands. It has lots of buildings, Schiphol Airport, bridges, highways, train systems etc, all in miniature. It didn't get me excited, but a lot of other people enjoyed it. We visited a cheese and clog (wooden shoe) making farm which was moderately interesting. And then the Gassan diamond factory which was also moderately interesting :-). We did a cruise on the canals and saw lots of the architecture of the city. The main motif is very much exposed brick walls with flat facades. They cycle a lot in the Netherlands and there were lots of cycling paths int the city, besides the walking paths, and the canals, and roads which leaves relatively litle space for buildings :-).

London on bus was quite cool, we got to see a bunch of interesting stuff from the outside: Buckingham Palace, 10 Downing Street, Westminster, Bush House (BBC Headquarters), Tower of London, London Eye, Albert Hall, Kensington Gardens.. We stayed in the new part of London called the Docklands (Canary Wharf). This is a very American style gleaming steel-and-glass highrise place. Its quite cool by itself, but the setting is on the river Thames (the old Wharf area), and that makes the place a lot cooler. We went to the Canary Wharf underground station to go spend some time in the city in the evening. It was an amazing scene there at the tube station. There were these hundreds of men and women all working in the financial and tech offices in the area, all attired very similiarly, especially the men, streaming out of the offices and into the underground station to go home. It was a surreal sight, and I think something that you would see only in Manhattan other than London. I conjured up a vision in my mind of the kind of life these people would be living and felt a little envious (and nostalgic for what I'd left behind in the US)..
I also had an 'aha' moment there at Canary Wharf. There was a scrolling stock ticker, and along with a bunch of the familiar names (including Juniper, which is not doing so well), there was Cognizant Technology Solutions, the Indian outsourcing firm. It struck home that Indian multinationals are now firmly part of the global scene and here to stay.



Below are photos of two impressive London monuments: the Tower of London (a World Heritage site) and the graceful Westminster. Photo albums of our Netherlands and London pics are on Yahoo.

Swarovski

We visited the Swarovski showroom at Wattens, Austria which is the headquarters of the Swarovski company. The building is inside a funny-looking 'face' landscape. There are fountains in front of the face and the water comes in spurts instead of a continuous flow, which makes for a nice effect of cascading individual drops, to remind you of crystals I suppose. Inside they have a museum kind of place, which then leads to the showroom. The museum was very good, and I wish I had been able to spend more time there. It was themed around crystals of course, but often quite tenuously. The displays were very creative with stuff all over the place. You can see the full set of photos here in a Yahoo album. Its worth a look. The two photos here are of a stylized (Christmas?) tree made of crystal, and an entire wall made of crystal.

The showroom was also very good with very imaginative and beautiful stuff. Necklaces and earrings are just the start with all kinds of stuff like showcase pieces, pencils (!) and so on.



We saw Swarovski showrooms everywhere, including Doha airport. Looks like they are very big worldwide. I do have some scepticism whether people make too much of the crystal and glass stuff and whether more or less the same thing can be made cheaply with modern technology. They're certainly very creative in the designs they come up with, so lets just assume that the crystal end of the business is also non-trivial. I hope the Swarovski craze catches on in India, and displaces some of the gold madness.

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We also visited a Murano glass showroom in Venice. Murano glass is supposed to be world famous and so on. Its not very clear to me what exactly crystal is and how its different from just glass. The Swarovski showroom didn't do anything to clear it up either, someone said that they keep their formula for making the crystal a close secret. Anyway the Murano showroom was also excellent, with beautiful pieces. We got a demonstration of a master glass blower making a handmade vase in front our eyes. It was pretty cool.





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A note on blogging: If you've been reading through all the posts about the trip, you might be wondering why I'm spending so much time and effort and chronicling minute details. Well, I've been wondering too :-). Especially after I've started this blog, I feel like I have to spill my guts about everything bloggable or I feel something is not complete. Its a bit strange. Blogging gets it out of my mind and then I can go on and do other stuff. In the case of this trip, there was so much squeezed into a short time, that blogging properly about it all is quite difficult and taking a lot of time. Its not always pleasant and Priya is also getting irritated. However it is a creative act with lots of fulfillment.

The Indian tourist abroad

At lots of places we saw loads of Indian tourists. Most of them were like us, doing group tours by bus. There are atleast 5 companies in India now doing this: Cox & Kings, Thomas Cook, Raj Travels, Kesari and Cosmos. It got a bit much at some of the restaurants we ate -- there would be two Indian tour groups eating and one more waiting to get in. Often people from different groups would chat quite amicably (and immediately try to get the dope on the other tour and how much it cost and how good it was!), and at other times, people would try to ignore each other (why do you'll have to all turn up here and spoil my special feeling !!). At one place in Switzerland I talked to the caterer and he said that he was serving 400-500 Indians a day, and that some survey had found that some 4 or 5 million Indian tourists had already been to Europe this year, and the season was not more than half way through. (I think the 4 or 5 million number seems way unrealistic). Cox & Kings has 4 groups (atleast) of 45 people each leaving every week for the six warmer months of the year. Our own tour leader also said that 'the market is bursting with Indians' right now. To put it in perspective (she said), in the '70s and '80s there were loads of American tourists and then after that hordes of Japanese and now it was the turn of the Indians and Chinese (we saw some Chinese tour buses too). I have a vision in my mind of a pyramid symbolizing the wealth distribution and number of people at each level. With all the new well-paying jobs in IT and other areas, the number of people who can afford a trip is rapidly increasing and I think it will continue big time. This is a good business to get into ! I think the Europeans are also seeing this trend and responding to this, especially Switzerland. There are all sorts of nods to the Indian tourist in Switzerland, from the Bollywood restaurant in Jungfraujoch to Indian music playing on the cable car.

For the most part, we (ie Indians!) seemed well-behaved enough and didn't upset the locals too much. Our tour leader however struggled a lot with us, we didn't keep time, we rushed her at roomkey distribution time, and rushed the table at dinner time, stuff like that :-). Several people had much trouble with English (leave alone the local language) so communication with the local people often a problem. There was one sort-of instructive episode in Antwerp, Belgium: we had just arrived at the hotel we were staying for the night and it was this small lobby, with a small funny lift and another lift somewhere else in the building, so pretty confusing and messy. Before we had arrived, it was quite and peaceable (as most places are in Europe!) and after we had arrived it was a veritable madhouse. Luggage all over the place, people talking to the dozen loudly across the room, yelling at their kids, kids yelling back, infant crying. It must have been pretty overwhelming for the normal quiet European to see.






A group of Indian tourists (not from our group!) just.. being themselves. In Rome

The Grevin Wax Museum in Paris

With Sartre and Picasso :-)




This is like Madame Tussaud's in London. Actually, it seems, the Grevin Museum came first and Grevin's neice or somebody (Madame Tussaud) went to London and did the similiar thing there, and it became more famous. The museum was moderately interesting, there is only so much you can do with the idea of having wax statues of famous people. However the Grevin people were quite creative and the musuem had lots of small interesting bits. The museum staff (it seems) were instructed to look as
much like wax figures as possible so there was a nice blending between fantasy and reality. There was one place where a staff member stood still pretending to be a figure, and then gave you a shock by coming alive (there was another place where an enterprising visitor did the same thing!).


The full set of Grevin Wax museum images are here as a Yahoo Photos album if you are interested. We took a lot of photos and now we aren't able to identify several of them so perhaps you can see if you know them :-)

Random notes

Qatar Airways: We flew to Rome from Mumbai and back to Mumbai from London by Qatar Airways. They're apparently trying to distinguish themselves as one of the premier customer service airlines and it showed. The airhostesses did not look Arabic, some of them were from India and the Far East -- perhaps because mid-east women are conservative (well, forced to be), the airline is forced to look elsewhere for its hostesses ? On the flight from London to Doha (capital of Qatar) the in-flight video was very advanced. Each seat had a display (which I've seen on other international airlines), but the movies or other programs ran individually at each display. So if I tuned into a movie it started right then for me, I didn't just tune into a running movie. I don't know how many other people have this. The selection of movies was also very good -- I was delighted to see Memoirs of A Geisha there, as I had missed it in the theater in Bangalore. I saw it on the flight and loved it. Most of the reviews were somewhat critical, but I found it completely absorbing.
Talking about movies -- at several places in Europe we saw posters for Almodovar's new movie "Volver". I like his movies and watched most of them while I was in the US. And then again in 2004 when I visited, his latest film ("Mother" ?) was playing and I saw that too. Would have loved to have the chance to see Volver while in Europe, but didn't happen. We also saw posters for the Da Vinci Code.

The Bonheur show at the Lido in Paris

We saw so many gorgeous flowers and flowering plants all through the trip. It was like a wonderland. It was absurdly easy to take fantastic flower photographs. I'll try to show some of them through the remaining blog entries (Blogspot is not allowing me to upload photos right now).

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One of the more interesting experiences of the trip was a dining/theater show at the Lido theater in Paris. This is quite a well-known place in the heart of the city on the Champs Elysees. We went in there for dinner (not so great frenchified version of Indian food), followed by the show. At the dinner we had an encounter with the classic rude French waiter, among other things he complained that someone was eating their samosa with their hand and not with the fork and knife :-). The hall was very grand with chandelairs (sp) and things, and the crowd was pretty upmarket though I think mostly tourists, since the show has been running for a long time. They had some audience dancing after dinner and then the show started.
We had been informed earlier that the show had some topless women but was not an obscene or a lewd show. That didn't quite prepare us for the extent of toplessness :-). However that was definitely not the focus of the show. It had a bunch of stuff going on. Basically it was a lot of dancing, in various settings. They had a lot of spectacle going on -- from airplanes coming down from top, fountains starting on stage, rain, circus acrobatics, ice-skating.. all sorts of stuff. The show was called the 'Bonheur' (happiness) show, and there was some silly spiel in the beginning to try to motivate it, but basically there wasn't any storyline or point. It was a lot of fun with a huge amount of energy. The songs were in French, English and German, a nice multi-culti mix. And there was a segment in Indian costume and a vaguely Indian dance style. Most of our group were completely entranced and it was one of the high points. Photography was prohibited inside, for obvious reasons :-)

Here's the website

Ode to Florence (and Architecture - 2)

I spent most of the time in Florence (Firenze in Italian) somewhat dazed at the splendour of the city. To quote from the Cox & Kings brochure: "The city of Florence is a shrine to the wonders of the Renaissance ... a living breathing museum".

The site here has a picture of Florence from the air. The absolute uniformity of the architecture, red tiled roofs with plastered walls of shades of off-white is stunning. At our first stop in Austria, we ran into buildings with different colours, which is something we didn't see anywhere in Italy.

The wealth of architectural, sculptural and painting in Florence (as in several other places, notably the Vatican) is very humbling. I ran into that several times during the tour, one isn't able to respond to the scale of what's on view. If you've been awed (and perhaps confused and frustrated) by the wealth of sculpture and carving in the large Indian temples, there is a close parallel in old European cities. At the Louvre in France (we went there to basically do a dekko at the Mona Lisa), magnificient masterpieces offhandedly hung every which way.

There were two main things that we saw:
The Piazza (public square) della Signoria. Here's a short movie of it. A couple of interesting things happened here, a bonfire of the vanities instigated by Savaranola and his later execution. Michelangelo's David was also originally installed here.


Here's a view of some of the buildings around the square.
The other interesting part we saw was the huge and splendiferous domed cathedral of the city, the Duomo and the Campanile tower beside it : here's photos of the dome and here's a movie that doesn't capture the dome.







The splendid door of the cathedral.


This building was touted by the guide to be the 'birthplace of the renaissance'. I missed why this particular building is so important, but it apparently it captures some key features of Renaissance architecture -- simplicity, with the lack of adornment of earlier architectural styles, and the repetitive symmetrical elements. I like it !
Here's another building showing the same features:




The Ponte Vecchio across the Arno river is a nice-looking bridge with buildings hanging precariously off it.


Our local tour guide in Florence did not do a very good job of tuning his spiel to the group. We were most of us quite ignorant about Italian history and Renaissance and so on, and the guide would start by saying something like: "Michelangelo had a workshop here" and expect that such a statement would have significant ooh-aah effect, which didn't quite work.


Sajini's previous post and photo of Florence is a nice complement to this post. She got to visit the Uffizi museum there which is touted as one of the finest in the world.

Lots of stuff on Florence here. Its seems the city of Florence itself has been designated a UN World Heritage site.






Here's a magnificient piece of sculpture to round off