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First, Bhubaneswar, with the AMAZING temples.

Across the lake there you can see the most famous one sticking up…I think it’s called Linga Raj. They don’t let non-Hindus in, so I didn’t try

I stumbled into this temple where they feed more than 300 people every day with pure-veg saatvick food.

some good cooking

here come some dancers.  Lana says that the entire art of Odissi dance was, at some point, recreated from the positions on these temple carvings.  What hips!

Near bhubaneswar are these Udyagiri caves, which were carved into the hillside by (or maybe for) Jain aescetics, who lived in them in the first century AD

The funny thing about these pictures: in all the dark spaces you can’t see into the caves, there’s a young couple making out.  It’s cute.

the view from my hotel in Bhubaneswar

Basanta Kumar Kar, the poet I interviewed in Bhubaneswar.  I didn’t photograph all of my interviews, to say the least.  But him, I did.

The beach at Puri.  I had a few hours to waste in Puri town, so I entertained the hell outta the bengali tourists by putting my bag down, going swimming, and beaching.

self portrait.

Now we change beaches, to the totally empty beach by Ranger’s, the tiny place I stayed in the forest between Puri and Konarak.

That’s Papaji, a canadian who was staying with us.  He was an interesting guy, a sailor, who never stopped telling stories.  Lives on a boat, and is thinking of moving to Orissa.  Characters.

And that’s carlos; he told me about Rangers and was a buddy. Spanish.  Good people.

papaji and his bike

Rangers’ B & B. Your Outdoor Camping Adventure Destination.

Now, the Sun Temple at Konarak, a UNESCO world heritage site and one of the most important places in India, ought to replace the Taj, perhaps.  It’s just hard to photograph because everything’s both so huge and so detailed

it’s a lion attacking an elephant eating a man

that’s Bondhu (means Friend), the patriarch of Rangers–not the owner, but the manager.  The owner was a great guy named Sanjay, a very idealistic and spiritual businessman who’d rather give his rooms for free to the likes of us than try to make money. Forgot to photograph him, I think.  Those wheels are the famous part of the temple–there are eighteen of them, corresponding to astrology–the whole temple conceived of as the sun chariot.

There’s a giraffe in the upper right hand panel there.  Giraffes, of course, are from Africa, not India; it’s a picture that depicts an african merchant who came to Orissa to trade.

This next one is my favorite picture

The sun god in the morning:

The sun god in the afternoon:

and the sun got at night with a lizard (another good picture, if I do say so myself)

Digging for artifacts

Leaving Orissa:

And on to Hyderabad.  Where my first picture was, apparantly, Hoshang drinking tea.  He was my friendly gay poet in Hyderabad.

This was the group that he took to the Sufi Dargha–the Americans were on the SIT program at Hyderabad University

In the Old City in Hyderabad, the Char Mahal.  Hoshang took me sightseeing.

All these next pictures are from the Palace of the Nizams in Hyderabad.  Hyderabad was under the rule of the Nizams, Muslim rulers, who allied themselves with the British, through the fall of the Raj.  Hyderabad has a really cool and unique Muslim heritage and history that makes it feel absolutely unique in all of India, maybe the world, for its blend of all different kinds of Islam and, of course, Hinduism.  There are a lot of Iranians there.  It makes for good food.

the last king’s english lessons, 23 mistakes on one page

That’s the dargha in which events occured, taken later in the trip.

Golkonda Fort at Hyderabad.  Wonderous!

that temple is where the dancers and singers lived; you’d look down on it from far away from the fort. They said that the king could hear her sing from down there, because of the aucoustics.  The acoustics were amazing–there was a place you would clap from the bottom of the fort and hear it at the top.

I didn’t take many pictures in Bangalore.  it wasn’t a bad city, though–doesn’t have much notable, except that it has a nice big central park, Cubbon park, that is used like an American park, which is kind of nice to see.

My hosts in Bangalore.  He’s a basketball player, she designs the science cirriculum for the Texas Public Schools.

And even though he was at home all day and she was at work, she cooked the delicious meal:

Then to Dharwad, a nice small college town in Karnataka

The University there

Some of the guys I interviewed in Dharwad.  On the left is Arya, who is an internationally acclaimed painter and has a book with Writers Workshop.  And then in the middle is Raghavendra Rao, who published his autobiographical novel with WW last year, and then their friend, Nitan

And now, what we’ve all been waiting for: HAMPI.  Is a paradise among the ruins of an empire.

Fun with Filters

Fun with Filters is now over.

This is the famous thing of hampi.  It’s famous.  So I took 2 pictures of it.

And this was the aristocratic ladies area.  They would climb those towers to look down and see what was happening in the rest of town.

The elephants stables

We (at this point, we, with an Italian named Michael–we were biking around the afternoon), stumbled upon this jain temple

The reason I liked it was this inscription on the inside:

It’s just what I have been learning and thinking about: the solar energy on the left and the moon on the right, and the balance of the two causes the energy in your spine to rise.  Sorry, I’m not terribly articulate right now–I’m hot.

this was a very very nice temple we stumbled upon.  It was supposed to be a place where Ram and Lakshmana camped on their way to go rescue Seeta; it’s built around the boulder on which they camped.

There it is, there’s the boulder.

he got a thorn in his foot and instead of helping i took a picture.

threewaymonkeysex (maybe it’s not a monkey but a little boy?)

whee!

Poona.  NOt the most photogenic city.

My host in Poona.  Sarathy.  This guy rocks (literally and non).  He’s a drummer, both kit and tabla, and is applying to THe NEw School for Music.

OK, then Mumbai.  I depended on my friend for pictures, cause she was trigger happy.  The only ones I took were of 26/11 related: first the dissapointingly lame memorial in the Taj

And then we went to Leopolds, where the bullet holes are just there, unapologetically, in the wall.  That felt like the real tribute.  I felt like I couldn’t be in mumbai and ignore it.

Now I’ll just upload some of the pictures my friends took of our wonderful fun weekend in Mumbai. Anneke was hosting me–she’s the girl with curly hair.  She’s from the Bay Area and is about to go to medical/nursing school in Mumbai.  And her friend Tiv from LA has been travelling, but wanted to find some more meaning than just travelling could give.  They’re going to come visit me in Kolkata, and may accompany me up to the northeast.  We got along absurdly well–we must have been family in a past life, or maybe it was just that I was very ready to have friends.

Eating Pani Puri is actually delicious, not painful

And we went dancing.  To techno music, of course, which I don’t know how to dance to, and so our response was to be as big, silly and ironic as possible, hugely amusing everyone else in the room who didn’t understand the ironic bit, but that’s an unnecessary bit, anyway.

http://i39.photobucket.com/albums/e197/jedbickman/SANY4609.jpg

And then, the next night, we hung out with these lovely people who were a lot of fun.  One of them ended up being a poet–he had a huge manuscript he was thinking of showing to P. Lal, so I interviewed him–we stayed over at their house and played scrabble and did yoga and ate of their delicious cooking.

That’s saurab, who had just graduated from something or other

That’s my poet Rahul

and this is Swati, who was great

yoga rapping

we got a bit lenient on the 2 letter words

She’s strong

And then we met up with this Chilean, who had no english, and we had an awesome time practicing our spanish.  And we saved him froma nearly tragic traveling encounter, after 2 hours of hardcore negotiations.  I’m too lazy to type the story, really.  Anyway, he makes these short films, which he later showed us, and they are FANTASTIC.  He is in India because he won a short film contest in Chile and the grand prize was a trip to India

And that was my MumbaiByeBye Picture(as tiv would say).

thanks for looking!  Sorry for the sparse words