Goa photo essay
Se Cathedral in Old Goa. All that's left of the formerly grand city of Old Goa are a splattering of giant churches like this. With so many huge churches, this must have been a pretty full town back in its day.
This is the waterfront of Old Goa. Check out how red that water is. I'm guessing it's because there's iron down there, or maybe some other mineral that makes it red. Not much left of the waterfront today, just this modern junky metal dock. All that's left now is a ship salvaging operation. These huge rusting ships could contribute to the red of the water, but water was red everywhere, not just here. This wide river would have been great for those Portuguese sailing ships to slide up.
My hotel, the Panjim Inn in the restored Portuguese mansion in Panjim, Goa's capital city.
My tour guide at the Spice Farm in front of the scraggly looking cinnamon tree.
Women bent over in rice paddies. This picture was taken from the back of a motorcycle taxi while heading through the countryside to the sparse village of Chandor to visit the huge restored Portuguese mansions.
This was the famous picture I took of my fat sloppy tour guide smoking in the ballroom of the bigger and more opulent of the two mansions I visited outside of Chandor. He wanted a U.S. dollar, but all I had to give was a penny.
and the outside of the mansion
I've hung out a few times with the son of my landlords. His name is Clint and he's about my age. An American couple also about my age were visiting last week, and Clint took us all to this lounge at the Grand Maratha Hotel. I had two beers, and they were expensive. Does this make me a bad person when so many people could use that money to fill their hungry bellies? There are no right answers.
Lawyer friend Mritunjay purchasing bootlegged DVDs at at typical ramshackle sidewalk kiosk. With so many cheap pirated copies of DVDs available on the streets, it's hard to bring yourself to pay 15x as much to buy the legit copies in the store.
A friend of Armand's younger sister whose name I forget, Armand's brother Vicky, Armand's younger sister Jenny (this is the Anglicized version of her real Indian name), me, and Armand, in their new one-room rental house. Vicky met a New Zealand traveler who made the down payment for them. Vicky went to the hills outside of Mumbai with this guy and was his guide. No one at this house was very happy or exciting, and I think it's because they haven't been eating because the Linking Rd. shoe shining business is bad during the monsoon. Armand was still trying to get permission from the railway authority to set up shop in a train station, and he should have shop set up by now.
Gathering of Dalit village leaders at the community center outside of Latur. Everyone raises their fist and shouts "Jingjabad!" as a show of strength and solidarity. I really liked doing it myself because it reminded me of black power from the 70s. I got everyone to raise their fists for the picture.
Some Dalit farmers in front of their collectively farmed 40 acres. They were very proud of this and excited to show us.
Yes, that is me biting into sugar cane. It's not very sweet. It's like soft wood, but you can peel the thin bark and munch on the soft wood inside, and it's kind of sweet.
The Maratha boy who offered the Dalits water. All of us, even the Dalits, were laughing so much watching this boy take all kinds of different poses on top of this bull.
in a village
at the school
This is the waterfront of Old Goa. Check out how red that water is. I'm guessing it's because there's iron down there, or maybe some other mineral that makes it red. Not much left of the waterfront today, just this modern junky metal dock. All that's left now is a ship salvaging operation. These huge rusting ships could contribute to the red of the water, but water was red everywhere, not just here. This wide river would have been great for those Portuguese sailing ships to slide up.
My hotel, the Panjim Inn in the restored Portuguese mansion in Panjim, Goa's capital city.
My tour guide at the Spice Farm in front of the scraggly looking cinnamon tree.
Women bent over in rice paddies. This picture was taken from the back of a motorcycle taxi while heading through the countryside to the sparse village of Chandor to visit the huge restored Portuguese mansions.
This was the famous picture I took of my fat sloppy tour guide smoking in the ballroom of the bigger and more opulent of the two mansions I visited outside of Chandor. He wanted a U.S. dollar, but all I had to give was a penny.
and the outside of the mansion
I've hung out a few times with the son of my landlords. His name is Clint and he's about my age. An American couple also about my age were visiting last week, and Clint took us all to this lounge at the Grand Maratha Hotel. I had two beers, and they were expensive. Does this make me a bad person when so many people could use that money to fill their hungry bellies? There are no right answers.
Lawyer friend Mritunjay purchasing bootlegged DVDs at at typical ramshackle sidewalk kiosk. With so many cheap pirated copies of DVDs available on the streets, it's hard to bring yourself to pay 15x as much to buy the legit copies in the store.
A friend of Armand's younger sister whose name I forget, Armand's brother Vicky, Armand's younger sister Jenny (this is the Anglicized version of her real Indian name), me, and Armand, in their new one-room rental house. Vicky met a New Zealand traveler who made the down payment for them. Vicky went to the hills outside of Mumbai with this guy and was his guide. No one at this house was very happy or exciting, and I think it's because they haven't been eating because the Linking Rd. shoe shining business is bad during the monsoon. Armand was still trying to get permission from the railway authority to set up shop in a train station, and he should have shop set up by now.
Gathering of Dalit village leaders at the community center outside of Latur. Everyone raises their fist and shouts "Jingjabad!" as a show of strength and solidarity. I really liked doing it myself because it reminded me of black power from the 70s. I got everyone to raise their fists for the picture.
Some Dalit farmers in front of their collectively farmed 40 acres. They were very proud of this and excited to show us.
Yes, that is me biting into sugar cane. It's not very sweet. It's like soft wood, but you can peel the thin bark and munch on the soft wood inside, and it's kind of sweet.
The Maratha boy who offered the Dalits water. All of us, even the Dalits, were laughing so much watching this boy take all kinds of different poses on top of this bull.
in a village
at the school
Comments
Happy birthday to you. You can get sugarcane juice in Bombay. The way to eat it is you have to cut off the outerskin as you do in a pineapple and then chew on the inside. It isnot totally edible , so you have to spit out the pulp.
Kanak
Nice pictures and verynice account of everything