According to my friend Eric my blog posts are far too long for the net generation’s attention span. Fair enough, but I grew up without a TV and therefore know how to read… !!!! But, I’m feeling lazy right now and want to make some updates but don’t have the energy to put them into narrative, so I’ll go with bullet points.
- The Taj Mahal is really really nice.
Descriptive enough? Oh, yeah, I’m an architect. I’m also writing this after a huge Nepal Ice beer (everywhere else in the world one beer is the size of a ’40’ ) and a margarita. We saw it at sunset twice and sunrise once. Unfortunately there was heavy cloud cover so the sunsets were pretty lame. But all hype aside, it is a pretty incredible building and more than that an incredible complex . The Agra fort and Fatehpur Sikri are also very nice. What else am I supposed to say? Oh yeah, Amber fort, near Jaipur. Also nice. The Rajputs (crazy warrior types) built walls that look like the great wall of China and forts that were pretty much impossible to breach. I admire that.
- The trails into the Nepali hills / mountains are made of micacious slate and flagstone so they sparkle and shimmer. Very cool.
- We rode ponies a few days ago. I’d forgotten how much I love riding horses… and how much more comfortable horses are than camels. If you have a choice between a horse and a camel, please be smart about it. I kept thinking about the American culture of litigation as Eric and I would decide to gallop out of sight of our boy guide every now and then. In America we would have been severely told to slow down. Unfortunately Holly was not as excited about our disappearing every twenty minutes. Sorry Hol. This has induced in me a desire to do some multi-day horse trekking, possibly in Tibet. Watch this space.
- I had a virus in my left eye last week, causing it to redden and swell and weep. When we checked into our guesthouse in Pokhara the owner offered to take me to the Himalayan Eye Hospital, conveniently located down the road. It cost me 20 rupees to see the doctor, who was a pretty professional type (the only difference being that there were lots of other people waiting in the room when I was examined) and 140 to buy two types of eye drops that cleared up the infection within a few days. Amazing.
THE HOBOTECT 