Heidi and Lee have been back in Shaker Heights now for three very full days and are adjusting gradually to being home again. Jet lag has affected Lee less than Heidi, but Heidi has gotten a lot more done as a result - laundry, making arrangements to have the bathroom wallpaper stripped and the walls painted, sending in our snowplow contract (There was snow on the ground when we returned Monday morning!), grocery shopping, banking, catching up on email, talking with friends on the phone, visiting neighbors, contacting our house cleaning crew. Lee did convene the Off Campus Studies group reading The Tale of Genji Wednesday afternoon but otherwise has been just lazing about, "adjusting" very, very gradually to his new/old surroundings.
Looking back on that marathon return travel day, there were three highlights worth adding to the litany of worthwhile tour stops:
Mid-morning in the midst of our three hour bus ride from Mysore to the airport in Bangalore, we stopped at a prison site used by a local Indian ruler to incarcerate English prisoners of war. The men were chained chest deep in leech-filled water in a vast underground grotto (only discovered when a cannon fell through the cavern roof) - doesn't seem man's inhumanity to man has changed all that much over the centuries.
The prison was part of a large fort built (with the help of French engineers) and defended by Tipu Sultan against the British until his defeat (and death) in 1799. Only the ruined walls of the fort still stand, but nearby we visited Gumbaz, the site of his tomb and the location of an annual memorial service marking the day of his death - which coincidentally had taken place just the previous Friday. Consequently the compound was more than usually crowded with visitors, mostly Muslims decked out (especially the women) in sparkly duds that attracted lots of attention from the group's cameras.
Just before lunch we made a brief stop at a silk cocoon wholesale auction center where we wandered, awestruck, among hundreds and hundreds of tables stacked with white and off-white silk cocoons brought in by locals and sold to other small scale cottage industry representatives to be spun into silk thread. None of us had ever seen anything like it before, and we left even more aware of the place of small scale enterprises in the Indian economy - no wonder there are so few chain stores around and nary a Wall-Mart in sight!
Eventually we did reach Bangalore where members of our group began to peel off, heading in different directions for the return home. Heidi and Lee waited five hours at the airport for our flight to Delhi, then spent two hours transferring from the domestic terminal to the (brand spanking new) international terminal and making our way through security (likely enhanced as a result of Obama's recent early afternoon arrival). A fourteen hour thirty minute plane ride followed, bringing us to a two hour layover in Chicago prior to our fifty minute flight to Cleveland. Somehow we survived it all to take a taxi the last several miles home to Shaker Heights.
Both of us are now working on making sense of the whole trip. A Highlight Reel in digital photo form will follow in the near future, along with a re-cut version of the Kevin - Jeannine wedding video and an assembled collection of "people pictures". So, stay tuned for some final (illustrated) thoughts.
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