deleted some old cruftHEAD master

author: luxagraf <sng@luxagraf.net> 2024-10-10 15:18:00 -0500
committer: luxagraf <sng@luxagraf.net> 2024-10-10 15:18:00 -0500
commit: 84abb974c8fc4cf74e929d8497b29771e7d9c84a (patch)
tree: dc5552902468569877d280790ffd5d63ac5ce39c /bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2005/12
parent: 16a38bf5d206b23b79b0cd2b6edd3673d9d9d70b (diff)
25 files changed, 0 insertions, 4821 deletions
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-                <h1 class="p-name entry-title post--title" itemprop="headline">On a Camel With No&nbsp;Name</h1>
-                <time class="dt-published published dt-updated post--date" datetime="2005-12-05T22:46:54" itemprop="datePublished">December <span>5, 2005</span></time>
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-            <p><span class="drop">I</span> arrived in Jaisalmer at about 5 AM to what has to be one of the most surreal sights in India, the line of touts yelling and screaming, holding up placards for the various hotels in the area, kept at bay by the military police. The military police here always walk around with bamboo canes, but the train station in Jaisalmer is the first place I've seen them brandish, though not actually use them, to keep the touts under control. </p>
-<p>Once again I had called ahead and avoided the mayhem, but it was still a bizarre sight to see when you stumble out of the station half asleep. And once I was at the hotel, I promptly went back to sleep. Later in the afternoon I went exploring in the fort, which is actually still an occupied city and seems very much the same as it must have been in the middle ages except now it's full of tourist shops rather than, well, I'm not sure what the shops would have been five hundred years ago. The walls and indeed most everything in the fort is made of honey colored sandstone, some of which has been walked on so much it's almost glassy smooth and the sunlight glints off its shiny surfaces. After walking around for a while I started stopping in at various different camel safari operators to check out what was offered and how much it cost. Eventually I settled on one that offered a simple overnight trip since that's really all the time I had.</p>
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-<p>Bright and early at eight o'clock the next morning I found myself in the back of a jeep bouncing down a dirt road toward some waiting camels. There were only four of us on the trip, Thet, a girl from Burma who grew up in Namibia, but now lives in London, Ignacio a student from Lisbon who spoke flawless French English and Spanish, Casimir an aficionado of Cajun music who was from the south of France and didn't speak much English and myself. An interesting mix to say the least Ignacio would go from speaking French to Casimir and then English when talking to all us. Let me say right now before we go further, that camel is no way to travel if you can help it. <amp-img alt="Camels Jaisalmer India" height="175" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2005/camelsafari.jpg" width="250"></amp-img>Imagine being on a horse that's twice as fat so that your legs feel like their being ripped out of your hip sockets, now imagine that the horse walks about the same speed, possibly even slower, than a motivated hiker with a backpack—that's camel travel in a nutshell. Camels also tend to fart frequently and with odors like you've never wanted to smell. Luckily the camel I climbed on was sort of the stoic of the bunch and as such was always in the lead. Camels are much easier to control than horse because the reins are attached to what amount to nose piercings, little pegs inserted through the nostrils and attached to a rope, so with only the slightest tug they'll go wherever you want.</p>
-<p><amp-img alt="That Desert India" height="162" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2005/thar.jpg" width="245"></amp-img>The Thar Desert is a bewitching if stark place, and it reminded me of areas of the Great Basin between Las Vegas and St. George, Utah. Twigging mesquite-like trees, bluish gray bushes resembling creosote, a very large bush that resembled a Palo Verde tree and grew in impenetrable clumps, and strangely only one species of cactus and not a whole lot of them, make up the sparse vegetation and support the village goats and cows that wander freely about grazing. We rode past a few small villages where the children begged for chocolates and rupees. We paused in the heat of the day to make lunch and sit in a dry riverbed in the shade of small tree. We quickly learned that the thistle covered grass in no good for sitting and spent most of our lunch break removing spiked prickles from our clothing. As the heat began to subside a bit we mounted up again and after tanking up on water at the local well, we left civilization behind and headed into the dunes. Except that the dunes proved to be not more than a kilometer square at best and civilization remained visible as distant wind turbines slowly spinning on the horizon. I was told that longer safaris head deeper into the wilderness and to far larger sand dunes, but the majority of the Thar desert lies in a sort of demilitarized zone north of Jaisalmer and stretches into Pakistan, unfortunately you need a special and difficult to obtain permit to enter that area and once you have entered it you must beware of armies and land mines on both sides of the border. </p>
-<p>Our safari might have been short on true wilderness, but after the exhausting day on a camel, we sat facing to the north and it was easy to imagine that we were in the middle nowhere and it was hours before we were willing to move our aching bones again so the illusion reinforced itself. And it was nice to camp out, it had been a while since I sat around a campfire and ate dhal and chapattis. Okay I've never sat around a fire and eaten dhal and chapattis, so that was a unique experience. </p>
-<p><amp-img alt="Moonrise Thar Desert, India" height="227" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2005/tharmoon.jpg" width="170"></amp-img>And then the sun set over the dunes and the new moon rose as a glowing red sliver flanking a dusty grey disk. I've never been able to see the unlit portion of the moon so clearly before, but the spectacle was short lived and the moon set after only an hour. But it was just as well that its brilliant light faded away, because when it did the stars came out filling the sky like tiny little diamonds, billions of them, I have never seen so many stars, for the first time in my life I saw the bow, or shield or whatever it is of Orion (see previously I could only take peoples word that it existed so I never bothered to remember what it was). In fact there were so many stars it was difficult to locate the constellations I usually recognize.</p>
-<p>We all lay our bedrolls on the edge of the fire and looked up at the stars. Whenever more wood was added to fire and it got brighter the stars faded out, cloaked in blackness and the radiance of the flames lighting up the nearby bushes. The sky looked then more like does over western Massachusetts, but as the flames turned to glowing coals again and the bitter cold of the desert night fell over us the rest of the stars would fade back in as if the night sky were slowly revealing and concealing itself by turns. Finally I managed to fall asleep for a while in spite of the cold, but it was a short-lived and restless sleep spent curled in a ball huddling with my head beneath the blankets thinking of how hot I was just two weeks ago. </p>
-<p>Our guides were up at dawn making chai, but none of us westerners stirred until the chai was ready and fire had been enlarged so a modicum of warm would entice us from under the blankets. We watched the sunrise and ate a small breakfast of boiled eggs and toast with jelly and then it was back up on the camels for a long ride through the desert. Because we had to cover about twice the ground we had covered the say before we had the camels at more of a trot, though I hesitate to say trot because a camel trotting is nothing like a horse trotting. Still we were moving significantly faster. My camel still led the pack and at some point I was about two hundred yards ahead of the others and did not see what happened, but heard shouts to turn around so I came back to where they were all no dismounted and discovered that Thet had been thrown from her camel. Camels are quite tall so being thrown is roughly the same as falling off a roof backwards, depending on how you land you could easily be paralyzed or worse. Luckily for her the camel had decided to pitch her off right beside the only road in the area. After making sure that she did not seem to have broken her back or any other bones we used cell phones to call a jeep, which came and picked her up. While we were waiting for the jeep I decided I had had enough safari and volunteered to ride back with Thet to the hotel. Neither Ignacio nor Casimir had ever really been in a desert whereas I've been in more than I care to remember so I let them continue on with the guides and after getting Thet back to her room I went to my own room and fell asleep for the better part of the afternoon, happy to be warm and thistle free.</p>
-<p>Oh and truthfully my camel had a name, but I couldn't pronounce it or spell it. </p>
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-                <h1 class="p-name entry-title post-title" itemprop="headline">On a Camel With No Name</h1>
-                <h2 class="post-subtitle">Exploring India&#8217;s Thar desert</h2>
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-                <time class="dt-published published dt-updated post-date" datetime="2005-12-05T22:46:54" itemprop="datePublished">December <span>5, 2005</span></time>
-                <span class="hide" itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person">by <a class="p-author h-card" href="/about"><span itemprop="name">Scott Gilbertson</span></a></span>
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-            <p>I arrived in Jaisalmer at about 5 AM. It was one of the most surreal sights I&#8217;ve seen in India, a huge line of touts yelling and screaming, holding up placards for the various hotels in the area, kept at bay by the military police. The military police here always walk around with bamboo canes, but this was the first I&#8217;ve seen them brandish, though still not actually use, them to keep the touts under control. </p>
-<p>Once again I had called ahead and avoided the mayhem, but it was still a bizarre sight to see when you stumble out of the station half asleep. </p>
-<p>I found my driver amidst the mayhem and made it to my hotel without being accosted much. Once I was at the hotel, I promptly went back to sleep. Later in the afternoon I went exploring in the fort, which is actually still an occupied city and seems very much the same as it must have been in the middle ages except now it&#8217;s full of tourist shops rather than, well, I&#8217;m not sure what the shops would have been five hundred years ago. </p>
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-<p>The walls and indeed most everything in the fort is made of honey colored sandstone, some of which has been walked on so much it&#8217;s almost glassy smooth and the sunlight glints off its shiny surfaces. </p>
-<p>After walking around for a while I started stopping in at various different camel safari operators to check out what was offered and how much it cost. Eventually I settled on one that offered a simple overnight trip since that&#8217;s really all the time I had.</p>
-<p>Bright and early at eight o&#8217;clock the next morning I found myself in the back of a jeep bouncing down a dirt road toward some waiting camels. </p>
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-</div>
-
-<p>There were only four of us on the trip, Thet, a girl from Burma who grew up in Namibia, but now lives in London, Ignacio a student from Lisbon who spoke flawless French English and Spanish, Casimir an aficionado of Cajun music who was from the south of France and didn&#8217;t speak much English, and myself. An interesting mix to say the least. Ignacio did his best to translate for Casimir. </p>
-<p>Let me say right now before we go further, that camel is no way to travel if you can help it. Imagine being on a horse that&#8217;s twice as fat, stretching your legs until they feel like they&#8217;re being ripped out of your hip sockets. Now imagine that this horse walks about the same speed, possibly even slower, than a motivated hiker with a backpack &#8212; that&#8217;s camel travel in a nutshell. </p>
-<p>Camels also tend to fart frequently and with odors like you&#8217;ve never wanted to smell. Luckily the camel I climbed on was sort of the stoic of the bunch and as such was always in the lead. </p>
-<div class="pic960">
-        <a itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" href="https://images.luxagraf.net/original/2005/India-Jaisalmer_12_01-05_05_15.jpg " title="view larger image">
-            <img class="u-photo" itemprop="contentUrl" sizes="(max-width: 959px) 100vw, (min-width: 960px) 960px" srcset="https://images.luxagraf.net/2005/India-Jaisalmer_12_01-05_05_15_picwide960-sm.jpg 960w, https://images.luxagraf.net/2005/India-Jaisalmer_12_01-05_05_15_picwide960.jpg 1920w" alt="View from a top camel, camel trek, Jaisalmer, India photographed by luxagraf" data-jslghtbx="https://images.luxagraf.net/original/2005/India-Jaisalmer_12_01-05_05_15.jpg" data-jslghtbx-group="group" >
-        </a>
-</div>
-
-<div class="pic960">
-        <a itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" href="https://images.luxagraf.net/original/2005/India-Jaisalmer_12_01-05_05_16.jpg " title="view larger image">
-            <img class="u-photo" itemprop="contentUrl" sizes="(max-width: 959px) 100vw, (min-width: 960px) 960px" srcset="https://images.luxagraf.net/2005/India-Jaisalmer_12_01-05_05_16_picwide960-sm.jpg 960w, https://images.luxagraf.net/2005/India-Jaisalmer_12_01-05_05_16_picwide960.jpg 1920w" alt="Camels resting, camel trek, Jaisalmer, India photographed by luxagraf" data-jslghtbx="https://images.luxagraf.net/original/2005/India-Jaisalmer_12_01-05_05_16.jpg" data-jslghtbx-group="group" >
-        </a>
-</div>
-
-<p>The only upside to camels is that they&#8217;re much easier to control than a horse. The reins are attached to what amounts to a nose piercing, little pegs inserted through the nostrils and attached to a rope, so with only the slightest tug they&#8217;ll go wherever you want. And then there&#8217;s the whole walking on sand thing, they are good at that. They also don&#8217;t need much water, which makes them good desert travelers.</p>
-<div class="pic960">
-        <a itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" href="https://images.luxagraf.net/original/2005/India-Jaisalmer_12_01-05_05_21.jpg " title="view larger image">
-            <img class="u-photo" itemprop="contentUrl" sizes="(max-width: 959px) 100vw, (min-width: 960px) 960px" srcset="https://images.luxagraf.net/2005/India-Jaisalmer_12_01-05_05_21_picwide960-sm.jpg 960w, https://images.luxagraf.net/2005/India-Jaisalmer_12_01-05_05_21_picwide960.jpg 1920w" alt="View from the top of the dunes, camel trek, Jaisalmer, India photographed by luxagraf" data-jslghtbx="https://images.luxagraf.net/original/2005/India-Jaisalmer_12_01-05_05_21.jpg" data-jslghtbx-group="group" >
-        </a>
-</div>
-
-<p>The Thar Desert is a stark, bewitching place. It reminded me of the Great Basin desert between Las Vegas and St. George, Utah. </p>
-<p>Twiggy, mesquite-like trees, bluish gray bushes resembling creosote, a very large bush that resembled a Palo Verde tree and grew in impenetrable clumps, and strangely only one species of cactus and not a whole lot of them, make up the sparse vegetation and support the village goats and cows that wander freely about grazing. </p>
-<div class="pic960">
-        <a itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" href="https://images.luxagraf.net/original/2005/India-Jaisalmer_12_01-05_05_18.jpg " title="view larger image">
-            <img class="u-photo" itemprop="contentUrl" sizes="(max-width: 959px) 100vw, (min-width: 960px) 960px" srcset="https://images.luxagraf.net/2005/India-Jaisalmer_12_01-05_05_18_picwide960-sm.jpg 960w, https://images.luxagraf.net/2005/India-Jaisalmer_12_01-05_05_18_picwide960.jpg 1920w" alt="Sand dune ripples, camel trek, Jaisalmer, India photographed by luxagraf" data-jslghtbx="https://images.luxagraf.net/original/2005/India-Jaisalmer_12_01-05_05_18.jpg" data-jslghtbx-group="group" >
-        </a>
-</div>
-
-<p>We rode past a few small villages where the children begged for chocolates and rupees. </p>
-<div class="pic960">
-        <a itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" href="https://images.luxagraf.net/original/2005/India-Jaisalmer_12_01-05_05_09.jpg " title="view larger image">
-            <img class="u-photo" itemprop="contentUrl" sizes="(max-width: 959px) 100vw, (min-width: 960px) 960px" srcset="https://images.luxagraf.net/2005/India-Jaisalmer_12_01-05_05_09_picwide960-sm.jpg 960w, https://images.luxagraf.net/2005/India-Jaisalmer_12_01-05_05_09_picwide960.jpg 1920w" alt="Houses on camel trek, Jaisalmer, India photographed by luxagraf" data-jslghtbx="https://images.luxagraf.net/original/2005/India-Jaisalmer_12_01-05_05_09.jpg" data-jslghtbx-group="group" >
-        </a>
-</div>
-
-<div class="pic960">
-        <a itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" href="https://images.luxagraf.net/original/2005/India-Jaisalmer_12_01-05_05_12.jpg " title="view larger image">
-            <img class="u-photo" itemprop="contentUrl" sizes="(max-width: 959px) 100vw, (min-width: 960px) 960px" srcset="https://images.luxagraf.net/2005/India-Jaisalmer_12_01-05_05_12_picwide960-sm.jpg 960w, https://images.luxagraf.net/2005/India-Jaisalmer_12_01-05_05_12_picwide960.jpg 1920w" alt="Mud huts on camel trek, Jaisalmer, India photographed by luxagraf" data-jslghtbx="https://images.luxagraf.net/original/2005/India-Jaisalmer_12_01-05_05_12.jpg" data-jslghtbx-group="group" >
-        </a>
-</div>
-
-<p>We paused in the heat of the day to make lunch and sit in a dry riverbed in the shade of small tree. We quickly learned that the thistle covered grass in no good for sitting and spent most of our lunch break removing spiked prickles from our clothing. </p>
-<div class="pic960">
-        <a itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" href="https://images.luxagraf.net/original/2005/India-Jaisalmer_12_01-05_05_17.jpg " title="view larger image">
-            <img class="u-photo" itemprop="contentUrl" sizes="(max-width: 959px) 100vw, (min-width: 960px) 960px" srcset="https://images.luxagraf.net/2005/India-Jaisalmer_12_01-05_05_17_picwide960-sm.jpg 960w, https://images.luxagraf.net/2005/India-Jaisalmer_12_01-05_05_17_picwide960.jpg 1920w" alt="Making tea in the sand dunes, camel trek, Jaisalmer, India photographed by luxagraf" data-jslghtbx="https://images.luxagraf.net/original/2005/India-Jaisalmer_12_01-05_05_17.jpg" data-jslghtbx-group="group" >
-        </a>
-</div>
-
-<p>As the heat began to subside a bit we mounted up again and after tanking up on water at the local well, we left civilization behind and headed into the dunes. Except that the dunes proved to be not more than a kilometer square at best and civilization remained visible as distant wind turbines slowly spinning on the horizon. </p>
-<p>I was told that longer safaris head deeper into the wilderness and to far larger sand dunes, but the majority of the Thar desert lies in a sort of demilitarized zone north of Jaisalmer and stretches into Pakistan, unfortunately you need a special and difficult to obtain permit to enter that area and once you have entered it you must beware of armies and land mines on both sides of the border. </p>
-<p>Our safari might have been short on wildness, but after the exhausting day on a camel, we sat facing to the north, looking away from any signs of civilization, and it was easy to imagine that we were in the middle nowhere. We sat a long time, just chatting. It was hours before we were willing to move our aching bones again so the illusion of isolation reinforced itself. And it was nice to camp out, it had been a while since I sat around a campfire.</p>
-<p>The sun set over the dunes and the new moon rose as a glowing red sliver flanking a dusty grey disk. I&#8217;ve never been able to see the unlit portion of the moon so clearly before, but the spectacle was short lived and the moon set after only an hour. </p>
-<div class="pic960">
-        <a itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" href="https://images.luxagraf.net/original/2005/India-Jaisalmer_12_01-05_05_26.jpg " title="view larger image">
-            <img class="u-photo" itemprop="contentUrl" sizes="(max-width: 959px) 100vw, (min-width: 960px) 960px" srcset="https://images.luxagraf.net/2005/India-Jaisalmer_12_01-05_05_26_picwide960-sm.jpg 960w, https://images.luxagraf.net/2005/India-Jaisalmer_12_01-05_05_26_picwide960.jpg 1920w" alt="Moon over the dunes, camel trek, Jaisalmer, India photographed by luxagraf" data-jslghtbx="https://images.luxagraf.net/original/2005/India-Jaisalmer_12_01-05_05_26.jpg" data-jslghtbx-group="group" >
-        </a>
-</div>
-
-<p>But it was just as well that its brilliant light faded away, because when it did the stars came out filling the sky like tiny little diamonds, billions of them, I have never seen so many stars, for the first time in my life I saw the whole of Orion, not just the belt. There were so many stars it was difficult to locate the constellations I usually recognize.</p>
-<p>I lay awake on the edge of the fire looking up at the stars. Whenever more wood was added to fire and it got brighter the stars faded out, cloaked in blackness and the radiance of the flames lighting up the nearby bushes. The sky looked then more like does over western Massachusetts. But as the flames turned to glowing coals again, and the bitter cold of the desert night fell over us, the rest of the stars would fade back in, as if the night sky were slowly revealing and concealing itself by turns. </p>
-<p>It was cold. Cold enough that sleep was long in coming. Finally I managed to fall asleep for a while in spite of the temperature, but it was a short-lived and restless sleep spent curled in a ball huddling with my head beneath the blankets thinking of how hot I was just two weeks ago. </p>
-<div class="pic960">
-        <a itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" href="https://images.luxagraf.net/original/2005/India-Jaisalmer_12_01-05_05_27.jpg " title="view larger image">
-            <img class="u-photo" itemprop="contentUrl" sizes="(max-width: 959px) 100vw, (min-width: 960px) 960px" srcset="https://images.luxagraf.net/2005/India-Jaisalmer_12_01-05_05_27_picwide960-sm.jpg 960w, https://images.luxagraf.net/2005/India-Jaisalmer_12_01-05_05_27_picwide960.jpg 1920w" alt="Breaking camp day two, camel trek, Jaisalmer, India photographed by luxagraf" data-jslghtbx="https://images.luxagraf.net/original/2005/India-Jaisalmer_12_01-05_05_27.jpg" data-jslghtbx-group="group" >
-        </a>
-</div>
-
-<p>Our guides were up at dawn making chai, but none of us westerners stirred until the chai was ready and fire had been enlarged so a modicum of warm would entice us from under the blankets. </p>
-<p>We watched the sunrise and ate a small breakfast of boiled eggs and toast with jelly and then it was back up on the camels for a long ride through the desert. </p>
-<p>Because we had to cover about twice the ground we had covered the day before we had the camels at more of a trot, though I hesitate to say trot because a camel trotting is nothing like a horse trotting. Still we were moving significantly faster. My camel still led the pack. </p>
-<p>I was about two hundred yards ahead of the others and did not see what happened, but I heard shouts to turn around so I came back to where they were all no dismounted and discovered that Thet had been thrown from her camel. Camels are quite tall so being thrown is roughly the same as falling off a roof backwards. Depending on how you land you could easily be paralyzed or killed. Fortunately Thet was mostly fine, a little bruised and shaken, but not broken. She was not, however, keen to keep going.</p>
-<p>Luckily for Thet her camel decided to pitch her off right beside the only road in the area. After making sure that she did not break any bones, the guides called a jeep, which came and picked her up. </p>
-<p>While we were waiting for the jeep I decided I had had enough safari and volunteered to ride back with Thet to the hotel. Neither Ignacio nor Casimir had ever really been in a desert whereas I&#8217;ve been in more than I care to remember so I let them continue on with the guides and after getting Thet back to her room I went to my own room and fell asleep for the better part of the afternoon, happy to be warm and thistle free.</p>
-<div class="pic960">
-        <a itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" href="https://images.luxagraf.net/original/2005/India-Jaisalmer_12_01-05_05_28.jpg " title="view larger image">
-            <img class="u-photo" itemprop="contentUrl" sizes="(max-width: 959px) 100vw, (min-width: 960px) 960px" srcset="https://images.luxagraf.net/2005/India-Jaisalmer_12_01-05_05_28_picwide960-sm.jpg 960w, https://images.luxagraf.net/2005/India-Jaisalmer_12_01-05_05_28_picwide960.jpg 1920w" alt="shadow self portrait on the sand dunes, camel trek, Jaisalmer, India photographed by luxagraf" data-jslghtbx="https://images.luxagraf.net/original/2005/India-Jaisalmer_12_01-05_05_28.jpg" data-jslghtbx-group="group" >
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diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2005/12/camel-no-name.txt b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2005/12/camel-no-name.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index 0ec794c..0000000
--- a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2005/12/camel-no-name.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,83 +0,0 @@
-On a Camel With No Name
-=======================
-
-    by Scott Gilbertson
-    </jrnl/2005/12/camel-no-name>
-    Monday, 05 December 2005
-
-I arrived in Jaisalmer at about 5 AM. It was one of the most surreal sights I've seen in India, a huge line of touts yelling and screaming, holding up placards for the various hotels in the area, kept at bay by the military police. The military police here always walk around with bamboo canes, but this was the first I've seen them brandish, though still not actually use, them to keep the touts under control. 
-
-Once again I had called ahead and avoided the mayhem, but it was still a bizarre sight to see when you stumble out of the station half asleep. 
-
-I found my driver amidst the mayhem and made it to my hotel without being accosted much. Once I was at the hotel, I promptly went back to sleep. Later in the afternoon I went exploring in the fort, which is actually still an occupied city and seems very much the same as it must have been in the middle ages except now it's full of tourist shops rather than, well, I'm not sure what the shops would have been five hundred years ago. 
-
-<img src="images/2005/India-Jaisalmer_12_01-05_05_05.jpg" id="image-2017" class="pic960" />
-
-The walls and indeed most everything in the fort is made of honey colored sandstone, some of which has been walked on so much it's almost glassy smooth and the sunlight glints off its shiny surfaces. 
-
-After walking around for a while I started stopping in at various different camel safari operators to check out what was offered and how much it cost. Eventually I settled on one that offered a simple overnight trip since that's really all the time I had.
-
-Bright and early at eight o'clock the next morning I found myself in the back of a jeep bouncing down a dirt road toward some waiting camels. 
-
-<img src="images/2005/India-Jaisalmer_12_01-05_05_10.jpg" id="image-2008" class="pic960" />
-
-There were only four of us on the trip, Thet, a girl from Burma who grew up in Namibia, but now lives in London, Ignacio a student from Lisbon who spoke flawless French English and Spanish, Casimir an aficionado of Cajun music who was from the south of France and didn't speak much English, and myself. An interesting mix to say the least. Ignacio did his best to translate for Casimir. 
-
-Let me say right now before we go further, that camel is no way to travel if you can help it. Imagine being on a horse that's twice as fat, stretching your legs until they feel like they're being ripped out of your hip sockets. Now imagine that this horse walks about the same speed, possibly even slower, than a motivated hiker with a backpack -- that's camel travel in a nutshell. 
-
-Camels also tend to fart frequently and with odors like you've never wanted to smell. Luckily the camel I climbed on was sort of the stoic of the bunch and as such was always in the lead. 
-
-<img src="images/2005/India-Jaisalmer_12_01-05_05_15.jpg" id="image-2010" class="pic960" />
-<img src="images/2005/India-Jaisalmer_12_01-05_05_16.jpg" id="image-2011" class="pic960" />
-
-The only upside to camels is that they're much easier to control than a horse. The reins are attached to what amounts to a nose piercing, little pegs inserted through the nostrils and attached to a rope, so with only the slightest tug they'll go wherever you want. And then there's the whole walking on sand thing, they are good at that. They also don't need much water, which makes them good desert travelers.
-
-<img src="images/2005/India-Jaisalmer_12_01-05_05_21.jpg" id="image-2014" class="pic960" />
-
-The Thar Desert is a stark, bewitching place. It reminded me of the Great Basin desert between Las Vegas and St. George, Utah. 
-
-Twiggy, mesquite-like trees, bluish gray bushes resembling creosote, a very large bush that resembled a Palo Verde tree and grew in impenetrable clumps, and strangely only one species of cactus and not a whole lot of them, make up the sparse vegetation and support the village goats and cows that wander freely about grazing. 
-
-<img src="images/2005/India-Jaisalmer_12_01-05_05_18.jpg" id="image-2013" class="pic960" />
-
-
-We rode past a few small villages where the children begged for chocolates and rupees. 
-
-<img src="images/2005/India-Jaisalmer_12_01-05_05_09.jpg" id="image-2018" class="pic960" />
-<img src="images/2005/India-Jaisalmer_12_01-05_05_12.jpg" id="image-2009" class="pic960" />
-
-
-We paused in the heat of the day to make lunch and sit in a dry riverbed in the shade of small tree. We quickly learned that the thistle covered grass in no good for sitting and spent most of our lunch break removing spiked prickles from our clothing. 
-
-<img src="images/2005/India-Jaisalmer_12_01-05_05_17.jpg" id="image-2012" class="pic960" />
-
-As the heat began to subside a bit we mounted up again and after tanking up on water at the local well, we left civilization behind and headed into the dunes. Except that the dunes proved to be not more than a kilometer square at best and civilization remained visible as distant wind turbines slowly spinning on the horizon. 
-
-I was told that longer safaris head deeper into the wilderness and to far larger sand dunes, but the majority of the Thar desert lies in a sort of demilitarized zone north of Jaisalmer and stretches into Pakistan, unfortunately you need a special and difficult to obtain permit to enter that area and once you have entered it you must beware of armies and land mines on both sides of the border. 
-
-Our safari might have been short on wildness, but after the exhausting day on a camel, we sat facing to the north, looking away from any signs of civilization, and it was easy to imagine that we were in the middle nowhere. We sat a long time, just chatting. It was hours before we were willing to move our aching bones again so the illusion of isolation reinforced itself. And it was nice to camp out, it had been a while since I sat around a campfire.
-
-The sun set over the dunes and the new moon rose as a glowing red sliver flanking a dusty grey disk. I've never been able to see the unlit portion of the moon so clearly before, but the spectacle was short lived and the moon set after only an hour. 
-<img src="images/2005/India-Jaisalmer_12_01-05_05_26.jpg" id="image-2019" class="pic960" />
-
-But it was just as well that its brilliant light faded away, because when it did the stars came out filling the sky like tiny little diamonds, billions of them, I have never seen so many stars, for the first time in my life I saw the whole of Orion, not just the belt. There were so many stars it was difficult to locate the constellations I usually recognize.
-
-I lay awake on the edge of the fire looking up at the stars. Whenever more wood was added to fire and it got brighter the stars faded out, cloaked in blackness and the radiance of the flames lighting up the nearby bushes. The sky looked then more like does over western Massachusetts. But as the flames turned to glowing coals again, and the bitter cold of the desert night fell over us, the rest of the stars would fade back in, as if the night sky were slowly revealing and concealing itself by turns. 
-
-It was cold. Cold enough that sleep was long in coming. Finally I managed to fall asleep for a while in spite of the temperature, but it was a short-lived and restless sleep spent curled in a ball huddling with my head beneath the blankets thinking of how hot I was just two weeks ago. 
-
-<img src="images/2005/India-Jaisalmer_12_01-05_05_27.jpg" id="image-2015" class="pic960" />
-
-Our guides were up at dawn making chai, but none of us westerners stirred until the chai was ready and fire had been enlarged so a modicum of warm would entice us from under the blankets. 
-
-We watched the sunrise and ate a small breakfast of boiled eggs and toast with jelly and then it was back up on the camels for a long ride through the desert. 
-
-Because we had to cover about twice the ground we had covered the day before we had the camels at more of a trot, though I hesitate to say trot because a camel trotting is nothing like a horse trotting. Still we were moving significantly faster. My camel still led the pack. 
-
-I was about two hundred yards ahead of the others and did not see what happened, but I heard shouts to turn around so I came back to where they were all no dismounted and discovered that Thet had been thrown from her camel. Camels are quite tall so being thrown is roughly the same as falling off a roof backwards. Depending on how you land you could easily be paralyzed or killed. Fortunately Thet was mostly fine, a little bruised and shaken, but not broken. She was not, however, keen to keep going.
-
-Luckily for Thet her camel decided to pitch her off right beside the only road in the area. After making sure that she did not break any bones, the guides called a jeep, which came and picked her up. 
-
-While we were waiting for the jeep I decided I had had enough safari and volunteered to ride back with Thet to the hotel. Neither Ignacio nor Casimir had ever really been in a desert whereas I've been in more than I care to remember so I let them continue on with the guides and after getting Thet back to her room I went to my own room and fell asleep for the better part of the afternoon, happy to be warm and thistle free.
-
-<img src="images/2005/India-Jaisalmer_12_01-05_05_28.jpg" id="image-2016" class="pic960" />
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-                <h1 class="p-name entry-title post--title" itemprop="headline">Durbar Square&nbsp;Kathmandu</h1>
-                <time class="dt-published published dt-updated post--date" datetime="2005-12-15T17:57:48" itemprop="datePublished">December <span>15, 2005</span></time>
-            <p class="p-author author hide" itemprop="author"><span class="byline-author" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person"><span itemprop="name">Scott Gilbertson</span></span></p>
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-                    <span class="p-region">Kathmandu</span>, <a class="p-country-name country-name" href="/jrnl/nepal/" title="travel writing from Nepal">Nepal</a>
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-            <p><span class="drop">I</span> flew into Katmandu around ten o'clock at night, which meant I unfortunately missed any view of the Himalayas. I spent most of the next day walking the streets of Thamel (the backpackers' area of Katmandu) looking at the endless tables of vegetables, fruits, spices, and most omnipresently, curios of all kinds, statuettes of Buddha and Ganesh, tiny Buddhist prayer wheels, Gurkha knives and swords, wooden carvings of various gods, wooden flutes, endless stalls of wool hats, wool socks, and the nearly ubiquitous stores full of Pashmina shawls, scarves, bedcovers, sweaters and even dresses, most of which are probably 60% pashmina at best, but of course carry the full pashmina price tag. </p>
-<p><amp-img alt="Katamandu Curios" height="200" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2005/katmanducurios.jpg" width="158"></amp-img>The Thamel area has been the center of tourist activity in Katmandu for so long now that it very much resembles a European city, complete with salami and butter sandwiches available in little garden cafes, which I had quite a few of during my stay in Paris. I suppose you could say that Thamel is the touristiest area I've been in yet, but that hasn't really bothered me. There are all sort of western foods available, everything from tacos to great big pepper steaks. It's a nice change to have a variety of culinary options, I will confess to being sick of Indian food. With the exception of a few nights here and there, I ate exclusively Indian food for 30 days. I don't think I've ever eaten so much of one nationality's cuisine in my entire life, so the change is nice. And from what I've read and heard from other travelers, Nepali food is nothing to get excited about (their chai is certainly lacking by Indian standards). </p>
-<p><break></break></p>
-<p>Nearly everything in Thamel is somehow geared to Nepal's biggest tourist draw—trekking. Every other store on the streets is either a trekking guide company or sells knockoff trekking gear with fake US brand labels. The gear was particularly fascinating to me because I used to work at a North Face store in Costa Mesa and one of the things we were trained to do was spot fake gear that climbers brought back from expeditions. Whether the climbers were conscious of what they were doing or not depended on the individual, but invariably the cheap stuff they bought in Nepal fell apart and, by passing it off as genuine, would be covered by the North Face's lifetime warranty. Most of the time it was pretty easy to spot fakes, telltale signs like terrible stitching or zippers that opened to nothing and existed only because the original had a pocket there, but some of the jackets and backpacks I saw on the streets of Katmandu were pretty good forgeries and it made me wonder if perhaps we missed a few things here and there when I worked at the North Face. There is one legitimate North face store somewhere in Thamel and though I have not been there, I was told that the prices are only marginally less than those in the US.</p>
-<p><amp-img alt="Durbar Square" height="200" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2005/katmandudurbar.jpg" width="165"></amp-img>After saturating myself with the streets of Thamel I went on a longer excursion down to Durbar Square (durbar means palace) to see the various pagodas, temples and the old palace. The palace itself no longer houses the King, but is still used for coronations and ceremonies and Durbar Square is still very much the hub of Katmandu. I haven't talked to any Nepalis about it, but the King seems less than popular shall we say. The current King of Nepal came to power under <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/1365739.stm" title="Royal Massacre">rather bizarre circumstances</a> and seems to be unpopular if the local English newspapers are to be believed. I arrived on International Human Rights day, which is an area where Nepal is, um, lacking. Along these lines I have added Amnesty International to the list of charities on <a href="http://luxagraf.com/donate/" title="Donate to Charity">the donations page</a>.</p>
-<p>Unfortunately most of the structures in the Durbar Square area were destroyed in a large earthquake in 1934 so, while much of the amazing teak woodwork was salvaged, the actual buildings are all relatively new. On my walk down to Durbar Square I passed hundreds of little shrines lurking in every corner of every streets; so many in fact that it was overwhelming and nearly impossible to keep track of even with my guidebook<a href="#footnote1" title="footnote">¹</a>. <a name="back1"></a>I decided to hire a guide for a walking tour of Durbar Square itself with the hope that maybe that way I wouldn't overlook anything. After skipping over the expensive and pushy guides near the entrance to the square, I managed to find one that was willing to work for cheap in exchange for an English lesson after my tour. </p>
-<p>Each temple in the area is generally for a particular god and only a couple were actually open. I went in the Kumari Bahal which is The House of the Living Goddess and is, as the name implies, home to Kumari the living goddess reincarnated in the figure of a little girl. Every decade or so the Nepalis have to find the new Kumari through a process not unlike the way Tibetans find the next reincarnated Dalai Lama. Once found the young girl lives in Kumari Bahal until she reaches puberty at which point the goddess leaves her body and the search begins again. Presumably the girl then returns to her normal life though I didn't actually get that part of the story.</p>
-<p>Most of the other buildings and temples are only open on certain festival days, but you can go inside Kasthamandap (from which Katmandu takes its name) which began life as a community center for festivals and ceremonies and was only later turned into a temple for Gorakahnath. Originally built in the 11th century and supposedly constructed from a single tree, Kasthamadap, which means house of wood, was greatly rebuilt following the earthquake. Katmandu and Nepal in general has an interesting mixture of Hindu and Buddhist beliefs which also draw somewhat off of older tribal religions to create a wholly different sort of hybrid. Thus I also saw temples in a Muslim style with statues of Krishna inside and traditional Hindu gods with the head of Buddha. </p>
-<p>The touristy aspect of Durbar Square is unfortunate and part of me spent much of my time wondering what Katmandu was like when the first mountaineers arrived overland from India, or even when the Beatles came and sat up on top of the temple. My guide claimed that many Nepalis thought for a while that these curious bleached skinned longhaired strangers must have come from space, which I didn't really believe, but it must have been a strange site to see the Beatles sitting up on the temple steps smoking hash with the sadhus while throngs of Nepalis gathered to watch the incongruous strangers</p>
-<p>After the tour we went to a little cafe and had some chai and I tried to help him understand the English verb "get, which is harder than it sounds, especially if one takes into account the number of idiomatic expressions that involve get. For instance "I'll get you for that" or "how do I get to ______" none of which seems to translate very well to Nepali. I don't know that I helped him all that much, but he seemed to pick up a few things and was satisfied enough to pay for the chai. The walk back to Thamel took me through what amounts to the garment district where I picked up a new hat and a pair of shoes which may well fall apart before I have a chance to wear them, but $3 US is hard to argue with.</p>
-<p>I have slowly adjusting to the sight of my breath in the early morning chill of Katmandu's unheated budget hotels. The nighttime temperatures drop near freezing, but, wrapped in a couple blankets and wearing my fleece jacket to bed, I have managed to stay comfortably warm through the night, though I have picked up a bit of a head cold probably due to the continuous and inescapable chill.</p>
-<p><amp-img alt="Swayambhunath Katmandu, Nepal" height="200" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2005/kathmandubuddha.jpg" width="168"></amp-img>In spite of an annoying nasal drip, the next day I set out for Swayambhunath, better known as the monkey temple. I was planning to walk, but about half way there a taxi driver convinced me to take a ride and after seeing the steps up to the main stupa I was glad I gave up the idea of walking. I entered the area from the back where a golden Buddha dominates the entrance to the monastery area and then walked over several smaller hills and then up to the main stupa.  The stupa (the stupa being a sort of hemispherical Buddhist temple structure) is surrounded by numerous smaller shrines some in Buddhist styles and some in Hindu styles, which again illustrates the curious mix of religions in Nepal. The most interesting thing I saw was an inscription in Sanskrit which dates from the 12th century.</p>
-<p><amp-img alt="Monkey" height="199" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2005/monkeybuddha.jpg" width="200"></amp-img>And yes there were indeed a number of monkeys in the temple grounds. The monkeys are considered holy because the monkey god once came to the aid of Shiva (at least I believe it was Shiva) when some bad monkey's kidnapped one of his wives. I suppose it's the curious nature of religious belief that the monkey who rescued her comes to symbolize all monkeys rather than those that kidnapped her. Had it gone the other way I suppose I would be able to dine on monkey some evening.</p>
-<p>I have also been to Pashupatinath by the Bagmati River where the Hindus cremate the dead, but my experiences there were enough to warrant a full article so you'll have to wait a day for that one at which point I will also upload some more pictures.</p>
-<ol class="footnote">
-<li><p><a class="footnote" name="footnote1">1</a> Incidentally if you come to Nepal bring something other than the Lonely Planet Guide to Nepal, it's terrible. I swapped mine for a Rough Guide, which is much better. <a href="#back1" title="return to paragraph">↩</a></p></li>
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-                <h1 class="p-name entry-title post-title" itemprop="headline">Durbar Square Kathmandu</h1>
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-                    <h3 class="h-adr" itemprop="address" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/PostalAddress"><span class="p-region" itemprop="addressRegion">Kathmandu</span>, <a class="p-country-name country-name" href="/jrnl/nepal/" title="travel writing from Nepal"><span itemprop="addressCountry">Nepal</span></a></h3>
-                     &ndash;&nbsp;<a href="" onclick="showMap(27.703363690641837, 85.31737803225191, { type:'point', lat:'27.703363690641837', lon:'85.31737803225191'}); return false;" title="see a map">Map</a>
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-                <time class="dt-published published dt-updated post-date" datetime="2005-12-15T17:57:48" itemprop="datePublished">December <span>15, 2005</span></time>
-                <span class="hide" itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person">by <a class="p-author h-card" href="/about"><span itemprop="name">Scott Gilbertson</span></a></span>
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-            <p><span class="drop">I</span> flew into Katmandu around ten o&#8217;clock at night, which meant I unfortunately missed any view of the Himalayas. I spent most of the next day walking the streets of Thamel (the backpackers&#8217; area of Katmandu) looking at the endless tables of vegetables, fruits, spices, and most omnipresently, curios of all kinds, statuettes of Buddha and Ganesh, tiny Buddhist prayer wheels, Gurkha knives and swords, wooden carvings of various gods, wooden flutes, endless stalls of wool hats, wool socks, and the nearly ubiquitous stores full of Pashmina shawls, scarves, bedcovers, sweaters and even dresses, most of which are probably 60% pashmina at best, but of course carry the full pashmina price tag. </p>
-<p><img alt="Katamandu Curios" class="postpicright" height="200" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2005/katmanducurios.jpg" width="158"/>The Thamel area has been the center of tourist activity in Katmandu for so long now that it very much resembles a European city, complete with salami and butter sandwiches available in little garden cafes, which I had quite a few of during my stay in Paris. I suppose you could say that Thamel is the touristiest area I&#8217;ve been in yet, but that hasn&#8217;t really bothered me. There are all sort of western foods available, everything from tacos to great big pepper steaks. It&#8217;s a nice change to have a variety of culinary options, I will confess to being sick of Indian food. With the exception of a few nights here and there, I ate exclusively Indian food for 30 days. I don&#8217;t think I&#8217;ve ever eaten so much of one nationality&#8217;s cuisine in my entire life, so the change is nice. And from what I&#8217;ve read and heard from other travelers, Nepali food is nothing to get excited about (their chai is certainly lacking by Indian standards). </p>
-<p><break></p>
-<p>Nearly everything in Thamel is somehow geared to Nepal&#8217;s biggest tourist draw&mdash;trekking. Every other store on the streets is either a trekking guide company or sells knockoff trekking gear with fake US brand labels. The gear was particularly fascinating to me because I used to work at a North Face store in Costa Mesa and one of the things we were trained to do was spot fake gear that climbers brought back from expeditions. Whether the climbers were conscious of what they were doing or not depended on the individual, but invariably the cheap stuff they bought in Nepal fell apart and, by passing it off as genuine, would be covered by the North Face&#8217;s lifetime warranty. Most of the time it was pretty easy to spot fakes, telltale signs like terrible stitching or zippers that opened to nothing and existed only because the original had a pocket there, but some of the jackets and backpacks I saw on the streets of Katmandu were pretty good forgeries and it made me wonder if perhaps we missed a few things here and there when I worked at the North Face. There is one legitimate North face store somewhere in Thamel and though I have not been there, I was told that the prices are only marginally less than those in the US.</p>
-<p><img alt="Durbar Square" class="postpic" height="200" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2005/katmandudurbar.jpg" width="165"/>After saturating myself with the streets of Thamel I went on a longer excursion down to Durbar Square (durbar means palace) to see the various pagodas, temples and the old palace. The palace itself no longer houses the King, but is still used for coronations and ceremonies and Durbar Square is still very much the hub of Katmandu. I haven&#8217;t talked to any Nepalis about it, but the King seems less than popular shall we say. The current King of Nepal came to power under <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/1365739.stm" title="Royal Massacre">rather bizarre circumstances</a> and seems to be unpopular if the local English newspapers are to be believed. I arrived on International Human Rights day, which is an area where Nepal is, um, lacking. Along these lines I have added Amnesty International to the list of charities on <a href="http://luxagraf.com/donate/" title="Donate to Charity">the donations page</a>.</p>
-<p>Unfortunately most of the structures in the Durbar Square area were destroyed in a large earthquake in 1934 so, while much of the amazing teak woodwork was salvaged, the actual buildings are all relatively new. On my walk down to Durbar Square I passed hundreds of little shrines lurking in every corner of every streets; so many in fact that it was overwhelming and nearly impossible to keep track of even with my guidebook<a href="#footnote1" title="footnote">&sup1;</a>. <a name="back1"></a>I decided to hire a guide for a walking tour of Durbar Square itself with the hope that maybe that way I wouldn&#8217;t overlook anything. After skipping over the expensive and pushy guides near the entrance to the square, I managed to find one that was willing to work for cheap in exchange for an English lesson after my tour. </p>
-<p>Each temple in the area is generally for a particular god and only a couple were actually open. I went in the Kumari Bahal which is The House of the Living Goddess and is, as the name implies, home to Kumari the living goddess reincarnated in the figure of a little girl. Every decade or so the Nepalis have to find the new Kumari through a process not unlike the way Tibetans find the next reincarnated Dalai Lama. Once found the young girl lives in Kumari Bahal until she reaches puberty at which point the goddess leaves her body and the search begins again. Presumably the girl then returns to her normal life though I didn&#8217;t actually get that part of the story.</p>
-<p>Most of the other buildings and temples are only open on certain festival days, but you can go inside Kasthamandap (from which Katmandu takes its name) which began life as a community center for festivals and ceremonies and was only later turned into a temple for Gorakahnath. Originally built in the 11th century and supposedly constructed from a single tree, Kasthamadap, which means house of wood, was greatly rebuilt following the earthquake. Katmandu and Nepal in general has an interesting mixture of Hindu and Buddhist beliefs which also draw somewhat off of older tribal religions to create a wholly different sort of hybrid. Thus I also saw temples in a Muslim style with statues of Krishna inside and traditional Hindu gods with the head of Buddha. </p>
-<p>The touristy aspect of Durbar Square is unfortunate and part of me spent much of my time wondering what Katmandu was like when the first mountaineers arrived overland from India, or even when the Beatles came and sat up on top of the temple. My guide claimed that many Nepalis thought for a while that these curious bleached skinned longhaired strangers must have come from space, which I didn&#8217;t really believe, but it must have been a strange site to see the Beatles sitting up on the temple steps smoking hash with the sadhus while throngs of Nepalis gathered to watch the incongruous strangers</p>
-<p>After the tour we went to a little cafe and had some chai and I tried to help him understand the English verb &#8220;get, which is harder than it sounds, especially if one takes into account the number of idiomatic expressions that involve get. For instance &#8220;I&#8217;ll get you for that&#8221; or &#8220;how do I get to ______&#8221; none of which seems to translate very well to Nepali. I don&#8217;t know that I helped him all that much, but he seemed to pick up a few things and was satisfied enough to pay for the chai. The walk back to Thamel took me through what amounts to the garment district where I picked up a new hat and a pair of shoes which may well fall apart before I have a chance to wear them, but $3 US is hard to argue with.</p>
-<p>I have slowly adjusting to the sight of my breath in the early morning chill of Katmandu&#8217;s unheated budget hotels. The nighttime temperatures drop near freezing, but, wrapped in a couple blankets and wearing my fleece jacket to bed, I have managed to stay comfortably warm through the night, though I have picked up a bit of a head cold probably due to the continuous and inescapable chill.</p>
-<p><img alt="Swayambhunath Katmandu, Nepal" class="postpicright" height="200" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2005/kathmandubuddha.jpg" width="168"/>In spite of an annoying nasal drip, the next day I set out for Swayambhunath, better known as the monkey temple. I was planning to walk, but about half way there a taxi driver convinced me to take a ride and after seeing the steps up to the main stupa I was glad I gave up the idea of walking. I entered the area from the back where a golden Buddha dominates the entrance to the monastery area and then walked over several smaller hills and then up to the main stupa.  The stupa (the stupa being a sort of hemispherical Buddhist temple structure) is surrounded by numerous smaller shrines some in Buddhist styles and some in Hindu styles, which again illustrates the curious mix of religions in Nepal. The most interesting thing I saw was an inscription in Sanskrit which dates from the 12th century.</p>
-<p><img alt="Monkey" class="postpic" height="199" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2005/monkeybuddha.jpg" width="200"/>And yes there were indeed a number of monkeys in the temple grounds. The monkeys are considered holy because the monkey god once came to the aid of Shiva (at least I believe it was Shiva) when some bad monkey&#8217;s kidnapped one of his wives. I suppose it&#8217;s the curious nature of religious belief that the monkey who rescued her comes to symbolize all monkeys rather than those that kidnapped her. Had it gone the other way I suppose I would be able to dine on monkey some evening.</p>
-<p>I have also been to Pashupatinath by the Bagmati River where the Hindus cremate the dead, but my experiences there were enough to warrant a full article so you&#8217;ll have to wait a day for that one at which point I will also upload some more pictures.</p>
-<ol class="footnote">
-<li><p><a class="footnote" name="footnote1">1</a> Incidentally if you come to Nepal bring something other than the Lonely Planet Guide to Nepal, it&#8217;s terrible. I swapped mine for a Rough Guide, which is much better. <a href="#back1" title="return to paragraph">&#8617;</a></p></li>
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diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2005/12/durbar-square-kathmandu.txt b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2005/12/durbar-square-kathmandu.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index 90ebe86..0000000
--- a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2005/12/durbar-square-kathmandu.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,62 +0,0 @@
-Durbar Square Kathmandu
-=======================
-
-    by Scott Gilbertson
-    </jrnl/2005/12/durbar-square-kathmandu>
-    Thursday, 15 December 2005
-
-<span class="drop">I</span> flew into Katmandu around ten o'clock at night, which meant I unfortunately missed any view of the Himalayas. I spent most of the next day walking the streets of Thamel (the backpackers' area of Katmandu) looking at the endless tables of vegetables, fruits, spices, and most omnipresently, curios of all kinds, statuettes of Buddha and Ganesh, tiny Buddhist prayer wheels, Gurkha knives and swords, wooden carvings of various gods, wooden flutes, endless stalls of wool hats, wool socks, and the nearly ubiquitous stores full of Pashmina shawls, scarves, bedcovers, sweaters and even dresses, most of which are probably 60% pashmina at best, but of course carry the full pashmina price tag. 
-
-
-
-<img src="[[base_url]]/2005/katmanducurios.jpg" width="158" height="200" class="postpicright" alt="Katamandu Curios" />The Thamel area has been the center of tourist activity in Katmandu for so long now that it very much resembles a European city, complete with salami and butter sandwiches available in little garden cafes, which I had quite a few of during my stay in Paris. I suppose you could say that Thamel is the touristiest area I've been in yet, but that hasn't really bothered me. There are all sort of western foods available, everything from tacos to great big pepper steaks. It's a nice change to have a variety of culinary options, I will confess to being sick of Indian food. With the exception of a few nights here and there, I ate exclusively Indian food for 30 days. I don't think I've ever eaten so much of one nationality's cuisine in my entire life, so the change is nice. And from what I've read and heard from other travelers, Nepali food is nothing to get excited about (their chai is certainly lacking by Indian standards). 
-
-<break>
-
-Nearly everything in Thamel is somehow geared to Nepal's biggest tourist draw&mdash;trekking. Every other store on the streets is either a trekking guide company or sells knockoff trekking gear with fake US brand labels. The gear was particularly fascinating to me because I used to work at a North Face store in Costa Mesa and one of the things we were trained to do was spot fake gear that climbers brought back from expeditions. Whether the climbers were conscious of what they were doing or not depended on the individual, but invariably the cheap stuff they bought in Nepal fell apart and, by passing it off as genuine, would be covered by the North Face's lifetime warranty. Most of the time it was pretty easy to spot fakes, telltale signs like terrible stitching or zippers that opened to nothing and existed only because the original had a pocket there, but some of the jackets and backpacks I saw on the streets of Katmandu were pretty good forgeries and it made me wonder if perhaps we missed a few things here and there when I worked at the North Face. There is one legitimate North face store somewhere in Thamel and though I have not been there, I was told that the prices are only marginally less than those in the US.
-
-
-
-<img src="[[base_url]]/2005/katmandudurbar.jpg" width="165" height="200" class="postpic" alt="Durbar Square" />After saturating myself with the streets of Thamel I went on a longer excursion down to Durbar Square (durbar means palace) to see the various pagodas, temples and the old palace. The palace itself no longer houses the King, but is still used for coronations and ceremonies and Durbar Square is still very much the hub of Katmandu. I haven't talked to any Nepalis about it, but the King seems less than popular shall we say. The current King of Nepal came to power under <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/1365739.stm" title="Royal Massacre">rather bizarre circumstances</a> and seems to be unpopular if the local English newspapers are to be believed. I arrived on International Human Rights day, which is an area where Nepal is, um, lacking. Along these lines I have added Amnesty International to the list of charities on <a href="http://luxagraf.com/donate/" title="Donate to Charity">the donations page</a>.
-
-
-
-Unfortunately most of the structures in the Durbar Square area were destroyed in a large earthquake in 1934 so, while much of the amazing teak woodwork was salvaged, the actual buildings are all relatively new. On my walk down to Durbar Square I passed hundreds of little shrines lurking in every corner of every streets; so many in fact that it was overwhelming and nearly impossible to keep track of even with my guidebook<a href="#footnote1" title="footnote">&sup1;</a>. <a name="back1"></a>I decided to hire a guide for a walking tour of Durbar Square itself with the hope that maybe that way I wouldn't overlook anything. After skipping over the expensive and pushy guides near the entrance to the square, I managed to find one that was willing to work for cheap in exchange for an English lesson after my tour. 
-
-
-
-Each temple in the area is generally for a particular god and only a couple were actually open. I went in the Kumari Bahal which is The House of the Living Goddess and is, as the name implies, home to Kumari the living goddess reincarnated in the figure of a little girl. Every decade or so the Nepalis have to find the new Kumari through a process not unlike the way Tibetans find the next reincarnated Dalai Lama. Once found the young girl lives in Kumari Bahal until she reaches puberty at which point the goddess leaves her body and the search begins again. Presumably the girl then returns to her normal life though I didn't actually get that part of the story.
-
-
-
-Most of the other buildings and temples are only open on certain festival days, but you can go inside Kasthamandap (from which Katmandu takes its name) which began life as a community center for festivals and ceremonies and was only later turned into a temple for Gorakahnath. Originally built in the 11th century and supposedly constructed from a single tree, Kasthamadap, which means house of wood, was greatly rebuilt following the earthquake. Katmandu and Nepal in general has an interesting mixture of Hindu and Buddhist beliefs which also draw somewhat off of older tribal religions to create a wholly different sort of hybrid. Thus I also saw temples in a Muslim style with statues of Krishna inside and traditional Hindu gods with the head of Buddha. 
-
-
-
-The touristy aspect of Durbar Square is unfortunate and part of me spent much of my time wondering what Katmandu was like when the first mountaineers arrived overland from India, or even when the Beatles came and sat up on top of the temple. My guide claimed that many Nepalis thought for a while that these curious bleached skinned longhaired strangers must have come from space, which I didn't really believe, but it must have been a strange site to see the Beatles sitting up on the temple steps smoking hash with the sadhus while throngs of Nepalis gathered to watch the incongruous strangers
-
-
-
-After the tour we went to a little cafe and had some chai and I tried to help him understand the English verb "get, which is harder than it sounds, especially if one takes into account the number of idiomatic expressions that involve get. For instance "I'll get you for that" or "how do I get to ______" none of which seems to translate very well to Nepali. I don't know that I helped him all that much, but he seemed to pick up a few things and was satisfied enough to pay for the chai. The walk back to Thamel took me through what amounts to the garment district where I picked up a new hat and a pair of shoes which may well fall apart before I have a chance to wear them, but $3 US is hard to argue with.
-
-
-
-I have slowly adjusting to the sight of my breath in the early morning chill of Katmandu's unheated budget hotels. The nighttime temperatures drop near freezing, but, wrapped in a couple blankets and wearing my fleece jacket to bed, I have managed to stay comfortably warm through the night, though I have picked up a bit of a head cold probably due to the continuous and inescapable chill.
-
-
-
-<img src="[[base_url]]/2005/kathmandubuddha.jpg" width="168" height="200" class="postpicright" alt="Swayambhunath Katmandu, Nepal" />In spite of an annoying nasal drip, the next day I set out for Swayambhunath, better known as the monkey temple. I was planning to walk, but about half way there a taxi driver convinced me to take a ride and after seeing the steps up to the main stupa I was glad I gave up the idea of walking. I entered the area from the back where a golden Buddha dominates the entrance to the monastery area and then walked over several smaller hills and then up to the main stupa.  The stupa (the stupa being a sort of hemispherical Buddhist temple structure) is surrounded by numerous smaller shrines some in Buddhist styles and some in Hindu styles, which again illustrates the curious mix of religions in Nepal. The most interesting thing I saw was an inscription in Sanskrit which dates from the 12th century.
-
-
-
-<img src="[[base_url]]/2005/monkeybuddha.jpg" width="200" height="199" class="postpic" alt="Monkey" />And yes there were indeed a number of monkeys in the temple grounds. The monkeys are considered holy because the monkey god once came to the aid of Shiva (at least I believe it was Shiva) when some bad monkey's kidnapped one of his wives. I suppose it's the curious nature of religious belief that the monkey who rescued her comes to symbolize all monkeys rather than those that kidnapped her. Had it gone the other way I suppose I would be able to dine on monkey some evening.
-
-
-
-I have also been to Pashupatinath by the Bagmati River where the Hindus cremate the dead, but my experiences there were enough to warrant a full article so you'll have to wait a day for that one at which point I will also upload some more pictures.
-
-
-
-<ol class="footnote">
-<li><p><a class="footnote" name="footnote1">1</a> Incidentally if you come to Nepal bring something other than the Lonely Planet Guide to Nepal, it's terrible. I swapped mine for a Rough Guide, which is much better. <a href="#back1" title="return to paragraph">&#8617;</a></p></li>
-</ol>
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-                <h1 class="p-name entry-title post--title" itemprop="headline">Goodbye&nbsp;India</h1>
-                <time class="dt-published published dt-updated post--date" datetime="2005-12-10T17:53:25" itemprop="datePublished">December <span>10, 2005</span></time>
-            <p class="p-author author hide" itemprop="author"><span class="byline-author" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person"><span itemprop="name">Scott Gilbertson</span></span></p>
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-            <p><span class="drop">S</span>trange though it seems my time in India is over, I leave this evening on a plane bound for Nepal where I will be spending the next two weeks. While I am excited to be heading for Nepal, I am sorry to be leaving India. India has been at times challenging, at times overwhelming, at times horrifying, at times gorgeous, at times tranquil and peaceful and at times the most magical place on earth. </p>
-<p>The India people are the friendliest I have ever met and even when they are trying to sell something they are also genuinely interested in you, where you come from and how you like India. Even the touts, while annoying, are something you get used to and even sort of enjoy after a while, provided you aren't already frustrated and tired. </p>
-<p><break></break></p>
-<p>I have taken almost 750 photos and traveled nearly 4000 km (2500 miles) in India, two bus rides and two quick domestic flights, but the vast majority of that distance I traveled by trains, in all classes, even regular chair. I have seen everything from depressing squalor to majestic palaces and yet I still feel as if I have hardly scratched the surface. I can't think of another and certainly have never been to a country with the kind of geographic and ethnic diversity of India. Everywhere I went was nothing like the place before it, and even though it can be overwhelming and hard to deal with at times, I think it's worth it and I would do it again. I plan to return to India someday and see the Darjeeling and Himachal Pradesh areas as well as Varanasi and Kolkata (Calcutta).</p>
-<p>There is really no way to describe or categorize the India people except to say again that they are the warmest and friendliest I have ever met. I have talked with everyone from accountants to hotel owners to waiters and busboys, rickshaw drivers, school children, beggars, shoeshine boys, fruit stand dealers, professional photographers, camel drivers, religious pilgrims, hustlers, con artists, tour guides, bus drivers and just random people on the street. Everyone wants to meet you, know where you are from, what you do, and most of all what you think of India. Nothing makes an Indian happier than the hear you say you love India (though quite a few thought I was crazy because I didn't mind Ahmedabad).</p>
-<p>Still it would be remiss of me to leave India without touching on the subject of poverty. The worst slums and shantytowns in all of Southeast Asia are here in India and at times the poverty of the people can be overwhelming. I have seen things that made we want to cry, but were so shocking I remained mute, temporarily unable to think. But in spite of the obvious and confronting poverty and yes the dirt and cow shit and human waste, in spite of all the pollution, garbage and general filth of many India cities, the people here remain the most gregarious and good natured I have ever met. Just yesterday on the train back from my daytrip to Agra while I was waiting in the station several little boys came up begging for change as they do in every railway station in India. The Indian people generally give a few rupees to the beggars, particularly the older ones badly afflicted and misshapen from Polio or Leprosy, but most western tourists tend to turn the other way or pretend as if the person at their feet simply did not exist. I myself have turned away at times, but at other times I give a few rupees to the beggars, especially the children. Yesterday however I did not have any change so I went and bought a bunch of bananas and gave them to one little boy and it made him very happy. He ate them and then followed me around for the rest of the wait talking in Hindi and playing hide and go seek in the train car until it started to move and then he waved goodbye and jumped off. It isn't hard to bring out a smile even in the most impoverished and seemingly depressed of Indians; their smiles are never more than a kind gesture away. I have had total strangers offer to share their lunch with me as I walked by them in a park or invite me to have chai with their families, even the shopkeepers who bargain hard insist you sit and have a cup of chai before they try to rip you off.</p>
-<p>Several westerners I have traveled with who witnessed me giving money here and there to children have told me I shouldn't encourage children to beg or they'll be begging the rest of their lives. But the truth is they'll be begging the rest of their lives anyway and later many of them will contract Polio or worse from tainted water and will become the misshapen men and women pulling themselves along on their mutilated hands still begging for change. To think that there are opportunities for begging children to improve their lot is naive and delusional. Just as it would be delusional and naive of me to think that I can give anyone more than five minutes of relief from their life. </p>
-<p>I could not begin to suggest what India ought to do to help its poor, but I am glad that Bill and Melinda Gates are pouring a tremendous amount of money into disease research and medical help for India and other countries like it. It is painful to see the victims of Polio and know that Polio is a preventable disease. Polio is rare to nonexistent in the west and yet here thousands die of it every year simply because the vaccines can't get from A to B. I don't know why the vaccines aren't distributed the way they need to be, there are probably a thousand reasons but none of them are good. </p>
-<p>In closing let me also say that I have spent a good deal of time thinking about cultural differences since I have been here. I have learned to never let my left hand get anywhere near food, I've come to the conclusion that squat toilets are actually easier to use, though harder to keep clean than western ones, that lane lines are not necessary, that time is a purely western concern, that driving a rickshaw is actually pretty easy, as is riding a motorcycle, that I can say my name and ask how someone is doing in Hindi, that saying no is impolite, that the sky has more stars than we know, that trains are the best form of transportation and most of all that patience is not a virtue, but a way of life. In spite of that there are some aspects of Indian culture I cannot abide by. My conclusion on cultural differences is that any cultural practice that fails to treat your fellow human beings with the same respect you accord yourself is not a cultural tradition worthy of respect.</p>
-<p>And finally for my fellow Americans, please get out and see the world. We are an isolated country both geographically and culturally and the rest of the world is going to pass us by while we have our heads buried in the sand. The rest of the world looks to us, but then discovers that we are often ignorant and ill-informed, that we start wars and fail to allow for anyone who disagrees with us, that we expect and demand that the world bend to our ways when we have never experienced theirs. We have the power and resources to transform so much of the world for the better and the more of us that come out here and see what the rest of the world is like, what they want, what they love, what they would die to protect, the more we will be able to understand and help them. The day and age when we could be isolationist and ignorant came and went before we were born, we owe it to the world to see them on their own terms. So pack your bags, I'll meet you in Nepal. </p>
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-            <p><span class="drop">S</span>trange though it seems my time in India is over, I leave this evening on a plane bound for Nepal where I will be spending the next two weeks. While I am excited to be heading for Nepal, I am sorry to be leaving India. India has been at times challenging, at times overwhelming, at times horrifying, at times gorgeous, at times tranquil and peaceful and at times the most magical place on earth. </p>
-<p>The India people are the friendliest I have ever met and even when they are trying to sell something they are also genuinely interested in you, where you come from and how you like India. Even the touts, while annoying, are something you get used to and even sort of enjoy after a while, provided you aren&#8217;t already frustrated and tired. </p>
-<p><break></p>
-<p>I have taken almost 750 photos and traveled nearly 4000 km (2500 miles) in India, two bus rides and two quick domestic flights, but the vast majority of that distance I traveled by trains, in all classes, even regular chair. I have seen everything from depressing squalor to majestic palaces and yet I still feel as if I have hardly scratched the surface. I can&#8217;t think of another and certainly have never been to a country with the kind of geographic and ethnic diversity of India. Everywhere I went was nothing like the place before it, and even though it can be overwhelming and hard to deal with at times, I think it&#8217;s worth it and I would do it again. I plan to return to India someday and see the Darjeeling and Himachal Pradesh areas as well as Varanasi and Kolkata (Calcutta).</p>
-<p>There is really no way to describe or categorize the India people except to say again that they are the warmest and friendliest I have ever met. I have talked with everyone from accountants to hotel owners to waiters and busboys, rickshaw drivers, school children, beggars, shoeshine boys, fruit stand dealers, professional photographers, camel drivers, religious pilgrims, hustlers, con artists, tour guides, bus drivers and just random people on the street. Everyone wants to meet you, know where you are from, what you do, and most of all what you think of India. Nothing makes an Indian happier than the hear you say you love India (though quite a few thought I was crazy because I didn&#8217;t mind Ahmedabad).</p>
-<p>Still it would be remiss of me to leave India without touching on the subject of poverty. The worst slums and shantytowns in all of Southeast Asia are here in India and at times the poverty of the people can be overwhelming. I have seen things that made we want to cry, but were so shocking I remained mute, temporarily unable to think. But in spite of the obvious and confronting poverty and yes the dirt and cow shit and human waste, in spite of all the pollution, garbage and general filth of many India cities, the people here remain the most gregarious and good natured I have ever met. Just yesterday on the train back from my daytrip to Agra while I was waiting in the station several little boys came up begging for change as they do in every railway station in India. The Indian people generally give a few rupees to the beggars, particularly the older ones badly afflicted and misshapen from Polio or Leprosy, but most western tourists tend to turn the other way or pretend as if the person at their feet simply did not exist. I myself have turned away at times, but at other times I give a few rupees to the beggars, especially the children. Yesterday however I did not have any change so I went and bought a bunch of bananas and gave them to one little boy and it made him very happy. He ate them and then followed me around for the rest of the wait talking in Hindi and playing hide and go seek in the train car until it started to move and then he waved goodbye and jumped off. It isn&#8217;t hard to bring out a smile even in the most impoverished and seemingly depressed of Indians; their smiles are never more than a kind gesture away. I have had total strangers offer to share their lunch with me as I walked by them in a park or invite me to have chai with their families, even the shopkeepers who bargain hard insist you sit and have a cup of chai before they try to rip you off.</p>
-<p>Several westerners I have traveled with who witnessed me giving money here and there to children have told me I shouldn&#8217;t encourage children to beg or they&#8217;ll be begging the rest of their lives. But the truth is they&#8217;ll be begging the rest of their lives anyway and later many of them will contract Polio or worse from tainted water and will become the misshapen men and women pulling themselves along on their mutilated hands still begging for change. To think that there are opportunities for begging children to improve their lot is naive and delusional. Just as it would be delusional and naive of me to think that I can give anyone more than five minutes of relief from their life. </p>
-<p>I could not begin to suggest what India ought to do to help its poor, but I am glad that Bill and Melinda Gates are pouring a tremendous amount of money into disease research and medical help for India and other countries like it. It is painful to see the victims of Polio and know that Polio is a preventable disease. Polio is rare to nonexistent in the west and yet here thousands die of it every year simply because the vaccines can&#8217;t get from A to B. I don&#8217;t know why the vaccines aren&#8217;t distributed the way they need to be, there are probably a thousand reasons but none of them are good. </p>
-<p>In closing let me also say that I have spent a good deal of time thinking about cultural differences since I have been here. I have learned to never let my left hand get anywhere near food, I&#8217;ve come to the conclusion that squat toilets are actually easier to use, though harder to keep clean than western ones, that lane lines are not necessary, that time is a purely western concern, that driving a rickshaw is actually pretty easy, as is riding a motorcycle, that I can say my name and ask how someone is doing in Hindi, that saying no is impolite, that the sky has more stars than we know, that trains are the best form of transportation and most of all that patience is not a virtue, but a way of life. In spite of that there are some aspects of Indian culture I cannot abide by. My conclusion on cultural differences is that any cultural practice that fails to treat your fellow human beings with the same respect you accord yourself is not a cultural tradition worthy of respect.</p>
-<p>And finally for my fellow Americans, please get out and see the world. We are an isolated country both geographically and culturally and the rest of the world is going to pass us by while we have our heads buried in the sand. The rest of the world looks to us, but then discovers that we are often ignorant and ill-informed, that we start wars and fail to allow for anyone who disagrees with us, that we expect and demand that the world bend to our ways when we have never experienced theirs. We have the power and resources to transform so much of the world for the better and the more of us that come out here and see what the rest of the world is like, what they want, what they love, what they would die to protect, the more we will be able to understand and help them. The day and age when we could be isolationist and ignorant came and went before we were born, we owe it to the world to see them on their own terms. So pack your bags, I&#8217;ll meet you in Nepal. </p>
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diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2005/12/goodbye-india.txt b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2005/12/goodbye-india.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index 60bed03..0000000
--- a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2005/12/goodbye-india.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,32 +0,0 @@
-Goodbye India
-=============
-
-    by Scott Gilbertson
-    </jrnl/2005/12/goodbye-india>
-    Saturday, 10 December 2005
-
-<span class="drop">S</span>trange though it seems my time in India is over, I leave this evening on a plane bound for Nepal where I will be spending the next two weeks. While I am excited to be heading for Nepal, I am sorry to be leaving India. India has been at times challenging, at times overwhelming, at times horrifying, at times gorgeous, at times tranquil and peaceful and at times the most magical place on earth. 
-
-The India people are the friendliest I have ever met and even when they are trying to sell something they are also genuinely interested in you, where you come from and how you like India. Even the touts, while annoying, are something you get used to and even sort of enjoy after a while, provided you aren't already frustrated and tired. 
-
-<break>
-
-I have taken almost 750 photos and traveled nearly 4000 km (2500 miles) in India, two bus rides and two quick domestic flights, but the vast majority of that distance I traveled by trains, in all classes, even regular chair. I have seen everything from depressing squalor to majestic palaces and yet I still feel as if I have hardly scratched the surface. I can't think of another and certainly have never been to a country with the kind of geographic and ethnic diversity of India. Everywhere I went was nothing like the place before it, and even though it can be overwhelming and hard to deal with at times, I think it's worth it and I would do it again. I plan to return to India someday and see the Darjeeling and Himachal Pradesh areas as well as Varanasi and Kolkata (Calcutta).
-
-
-
-There is really no way to describe or categorize the India people except to say again that they are the warmest and friendliest I have ever met. I have talked with everyone from accountants to hotel owners to waiters and busboys, rickshaw drivers, school children, beggars, shoeshine boys, fruit stand dealers, professional photographers, camel drivers, religious pilgrims, hustlers, con artists, tour guides, bus drivers and just random people on the street. Everyone wants to meet you, know where you are from, what you do, and most of all what you think of India. Nothing makes an Indian happier than the hear you say you love India (though quite a few thought I was crazy because I didn't mind Ahmedabad).
-
-
-
-Still it would be remiss of me to leave India without touching on the subject of poverty. The worst slums and shantytowns in all of Southeast Asia are here in India and at times the poverty of the people can be overwhelming. I have seen things that made we want to cry, but were so shocking I remained mute, temporarily unable to think. But in spite of the obvious and confronting poverty and yes the dirt and cow shit and human waste, in spite of all the pollution, garbage and general filth of many India cities, the people here remain the most gregarious and good natured I have ever met. Just yesterday on the train back from my daytrip to Agra while I was waiting in the station several little boys came up begging for change as they do in every railway station in India. The Indian people generally give a few rupees to the beggars, particularly the older ones badly afflicted and misshapen from Polio or Leprosy, but most western tourists tend to turn the other way or pretend as if the person at their feet simply did not exist. I myself have turned away at times, but at other times I give a few rupees to the beggars, especially the children. Yesterday however I did not have any change so I went and bought a bunch of bananas and gave them to one little boy and it made him very happy. He ate them and then followed me around for the rest of the wait talking in Hindi and playing hide and go seek in the train car until it started to move and then he waved goodbye and jumped off. It isn't hard to bring out a smile even in the most impoverished and seemingly depressed of Indians; their smiles are never more than a kind gesture away. I have had total strangers offer to share their lunch with me as I walked by them in a park or invite me to have chai with their families, even the shopkeepers who bargain hard insist you sit and have a cup of chai before they try to rip you off.
-
-
-
-Several westerners I have traveled with who witnessed me giving money here and there to children have told me I shouldn't encourage children to beg or they'll be begging the rest of their lives. But the truth is they'll be begging the rest of their lives anyway and later many of them will contract Polio or worse from tainted water and will become the misshapen men and women pulling themselves along on their mutilated hands still begging for change. To think that there are opportunities for begging children to improve their lot is naive and delusional. Just as it would be delusional and naive of me to think that I can give anyone more than five minutes of relief from their life. 
-
-I could not begin to suggest what India ought to do to help its poor, but I am glad that Bill and Melinda Gates are pouring a tremendous amount of money into disease research and medical help for India and other countries like it. It is painful to see the victims of Polio and know that Polio is a preventable disease. Polio is rare to nonexistent in the west and yet here thousands die of it every year simply because the vaccines can't get from A to B. I don't know why the vaccines aren't distributed the way they need to be, there are probably a thousand reasons but none of them are good. 
-
-In closing let me also say that I have spent a good deal of time thinking about cultural differences since I have been here. I have learned to never let my left hand get anywhere near food, I've come to the conclusion that squat toilets are actually easier to use, though harder to keep clean than western ones, that lane lines are not necessary, that time is a purely western concern, that driving a rickshaw is actually pretty easy, as is riding a motorcycle, that I can say my name and ask how someone is doing in Hindi, that saying no is impolite, that the sky has more stars than we know, that trains are the best form of transportation and most of all that patience is not a virtue, but a way of life. In spite of that there are some aspects of Indian culture I cannot abide by. My conclusion on cultural differences is that any cultural practice that fails to treat your fellow human beings with the same respect you accord yourself is not a cultural tradition worthy of respect.
-
-And finally for my fellow Americans, please get out and see the world. We are an isolated country both geographically and culturally and the rest of the world is going to pass us by while we have our heads buried in the sand. The rest of the world looks to us, but then discovers that we are often ignorant and ill-informed, that we start wars and fail to allow for anyone who disagrees with us, that we expect and demand that the world bend to our ways when we have never experienced theirs. We have the power and resources to transform so much of the world for the better and the more of us that come out here and see what the rest of the world is like, what they want, what they love, what they would die to protect, the more we will be able to understand and help them. The day and age when we could be isolationist and ignorant came and went before we were born, we owe it to the world to see them on their own terms. So pack your bags, I'll meet you in Nepal. 
diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2005/12/index.html b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2005/12/index.html
deleted file mode 100644
index 00d7e2b..0000000
--- a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2005/12/index.html
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,125 +0,0 @@
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-    <h1> Archive: December 2005</h1>
-    <ul class="date-archive">
-        <li class="arc-item"><a href="/jrnl/2005/12/merry-christmas-2005" title="Merry Christmas 2005">Merry Christmas&nbsp;2005</a> 
-            <time datetime="2005-12-25T18:27:48-05:00">Dec 25, 2005</time>
-        </li> 
-        <li class="arc-item"><a href="/jrnl/2005/12/sunset-over-himalayas" title="Sunset Over the Himalayas">Sunset Over the&nbsp;Himalayas</a> 
-            <time datetime="2005-12-17T21:03:43-05:00">Dec 17, 2005</time>
-        </li> 
-        <li class="arc-item"><a href="/jrnl/2005/12/pashupatinath" title="Pashupatinath">Pashupatinath</a> 
-            <time datetime="2005-12-15T18:02:59-05:00">Dec 15, 2005</time>
-        </li> 
-        <li class="arc-item"><a href="/jrnl/2005/12/durbar-square-kathmandu" title="Durbar Square Kathmandu">Durbar Square&nbsp;Kathmandu</a> 
-            <time datetime="2005-12-15T17:57:48-05:00">Dec 15, 2005</time>
-        </li> 
-        <li class="arc-item"><a href="/jrnl/2005/12/goodbye-india" title="Goodbye India">Goodbye&nbsp;India</a> 
-            <time datetime="2005-12-10T17:53:25-05:00">Dec 10, 2005</time>
-        </li> 
-        <li class="arc-item"><a href="/jrnl/2005/12/taj-express" title="The Taj Express">The Taj&nbsp;Express</a> 
-            <time datetime="2005-12-09T17:49:40-05:00">Dec 09, 2005</time>
-        </li> 
-        <li class="arc-item"><a href="/jrnl/2005/12/camel-no-name" title="On a Camel With No Name">On a Camel With No&nbsp;Name</a> 
-            <time datetime="2005-12-05T22:46:54-05:00">Dec 05, 2005</time>
-        </li> 
-        <li class="arc-item"><a href="/jrnl/2005/12/majestic-fort" title="The Majestic Fort">The Majestic&nbsp;Fort</a> 
-            <time datetime="2005-12-02T17:40:02-05:00">Dec 02, 2005</time>
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-                <h1 class="p-name entry-title post--title" itemprop="headline">The Majestic&nbsp;Fort</h1>
-                <time class="dt-published published dt-updated post--date" datetime="2005-12-02T17:40:02" itemprop="datePublished">December <span>2, 2005</span></time>
-            <p class="p-author author hide" itemprop="author"><span class="byline-author" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person"><span itemprop="name">Scott Gilbertson</span></span></p>
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-            <p><span class="drop">I</span> arrived in Jodhpur on the edge of the Great Thar Desert around midday after an uneventful five or six hour bus ride and disembarked into a sea of shouting gesticulating touts intent on making their commissions. </p>
-<p>Fortunately I had booked ahead on the condition that the guesthouse send someone to get me so, after dodging the touts as best I could, I found the man I was looking for, hopped on the back of his motorcycle and was whisked out of the chaos into the even greater chaos of sprawling Jodhpur. After putting up my things at the guesthouse and arranging for a ticket on the next sleeper train to Jaisalmer, I went out into the ruckus and commotion of Jodhpur's clock tower market. The clock tower is the center of the old town in Jodhpur and from the main square countless markets, each street with its own specialty, from vegetables and fruits to jewelry and silverwork as well as everything from sewing machines to internet cafes, take off from the main square. For the first time in India, somewhere between dodging the camels trotting by and saying no to the shopkeepers grabbing my arm, I got lost. </p>
-<p><amp-img alt="Camel Jodhpur India" height="202" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2005/jodhpurcamel.jpg" width="180"></amp-img>After snacking on some fresh roasted peanuts and enjoying a pineapple lassi I asked around trying to find my way back to the guesthouse. Indians have a curious way of shaking their heads that seems to move on two axis at once so that you can't determine anything like yes or no from the gesture. Having observed this movement in context for three weeks now I've concluded that sometimes it means yes, sometimes no and most often, I don't understand what you're saying but I like to listen to you talk. There is also a feeling here that saying no to anything is rude, so even if someone doesn't know where something is, they'll say they do rather than be what they consider rude and say no I can't help you. I've learned the best policy when asking directions is the take a kind of census and go with the majority opinion. Then once you set off it's best to ask again every now and then and see if the majority opinion still favors your direction. Eventually I made it back to the hotel and everything was fine.</p>
-<p><break></break></p>
-<p>The next day I hopped in a rickshaw and headed up to tour Meherangarh, or the Majestic Fort as it's known in English. As its English name indicates, it is indeed perched majestically atop the only hill around, and seems not so much built on a hill as to have naturally risen out the very rocks that form the mesa on which it rests. The outer wall encloses some of the sturdiest and most impressive ramparts I've seen in India or anywhere else and then within that, mainly on the north side, are a series of palaces and courtyards that, when linked together by the various passages, comprise what was once the ruling seat of the Marwar Empire. The current Maharaja does not actually have any more power than a common citizen, but he does have the deed to the fort and, with no revenue source (i.e. taxes go to the federal government of India, not him), he did the smart thing and formed a trust and turned the fort into the Museum. According the audio tour guide, the initial means of raising money for the restoration of the fort came from selling off the fort's resident bat populations' guano to the farmers in the surrounding area. At some point wealthy investors begin to pour money into the project, including I noticed the J. Paul Getty Trust, and the Fort is now recognized by UNESCO. It has been beautifully restored and just wandering about its various courtyards and palaces gave the feeling of having stepped back in time a few hundred years.</p>
-<p>Each area of the sprawling palace has some fantastical name such as Pearl Palace, Flower Place, or The Courtyard of Treasures which is ringed by arched balconies and hundreds of Jalies (the carved sandstone screens that go over the windows). <amp-img alt="Jalies Majestic Fort, Jodhpur, India" height="210" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2005/jaliesjodhpur.jpg" width="179"></amp-img>Each Jalie is unique in its pattern and the purpose behind them is to provide privacy and yet still let in light, which indeed they do, it is nearly impossible to see in them from the outside and yet on the inside they let through a surprising amount of light which falls in ever-changing geometric patterns that dance across the floor as if forever running away from the sun. The overhanging curved stone eaves of the windows looked like Mongol warrior helmets from a Kurosawa movie, but were actually inspired by the domed huts in the area. </p>
-<p>The roof overhangs with their sweeping oriental curves together with the intricate patterns of the screened windows gives the Courtyard of Treasures a feeling of architectural schizophrenia, embracing the organic and symmetrical and also the asymmetrical and random. This feeling pervades not just this one courtyard, but the whole palace, and yet somehow the way in which the buildings are linked by the walkways between levels forms a bridge between the two styles and holds the design together as a cohesive whole.</p>
-<p><amp-img alt="room majestic fort, jodhpur, India" height="188" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2005/poetsroom.jpg" width="250"></amp-img>Inside the palace is quite magnificent and contains one room that was the most amazing, lavish room I've ever seen anywhere. It was used for poets to recite poetry and musicians and dancers to perform. And to think that most of poets I know have been reduced to reading in the local tavern or some nearly abandoned building on a college campus. I should like to have seen a performance in this room when it was still in use.</p>
-<p>After finishing up the audio tour I set out to walk the length of the ramparts and ran into a German man who had been on my bus the day before. We smoked a cigarette and strolled along the various stone parapets admiring the myriad of cannons on display, including on extremely beautiful one (if one can say that a object of death and destruction is beautiful), that was apparently captured in China during the boxer rebellion, and took in the sweeping views of the blue city below. Once it was just Brahmins that used the blue on their houses, but these days pretty much everyone does it, the house are painted white and then washed in an indigo dye so that the city, when viewed from on high, looks not unlike a sprawling underwater fantasy world.</p>
-<p>The German man, whose name I never did get, was anxious to practice his English so we sat down beside a rather nondescript and long since mute cannon and talked for some time while in the background the sounds of the frenetic clock tower market drifted up the hill with the breeze. He had apparently also been walking around the market yesterday in search of the one street that sells nothing but betel nut in all its various forms. I have seen more than a few betel nut chewers in the last three weeks, it's a habit that seems on par with the coca leaf chewers in Peru and is apparently just as addictive, except that betel nut juice is bright red and rots the teeth and gums. If you ever come to India and see someone who looks like they got their grill kicked in (as Jimmy would say) the night before, that is your betel nut chewer.</p>
-<p><amp-img alt="Majestic Fort, Jodhpur, India" height="138" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2005/majesticfort.jpg" width="250"></amp-img>Later in the evening, after I had returned to the hotel and was waiting for my night train, I sat up at the rooftop restaurant and watched the setting sun turn the distant and very imposing fort ever-brighter shades of red and orange. I tried to imagine the position of an attacking army and what it would require to assault such a fort, which apparently must be more than anyone could ever muster since the fort was never captured. Ten or so India buzzards were circling lazily high of the fort floating on the thermals, some of them able to remain suspended almost perfectly still in the wind, as if they went up there everyday expecting some carnage and feasting they had heard about from their great grandfathers who doubtless could tell tales of carrion banquets after the various attempts to take the fort. </p>
-<p>Later that night I headed over to the train station and caught a sleeper for Jaisalmer (which I've seen spelled that way and also as Jaiselmar—in fact noticing the constant misspellings of English words in India has become a sort of hobby of mine, but this is first time I've seen variable spellings on an Indian word). My time in Jodhpur was short, but I wanted to get up into the desert and I still want to see the Taj Mahal so I must keep moving. </p>
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-            <p><span class="drop">I</span> arrived in Jodhpur on the edge of the Great Thar Desert around midday after an uneventful five or six hour bus ride and disembarked into a sea of shouting gesticulating touts intent on making their commissions. </p>
-<p>Fortunately I had booked ahead on the condition that the guesthouse send someone to get me so, after dodging the touts as best I could, I found the man I was looking for, hopped on the back of his motorcycle and was whisked out of the chaos into the even greater chaos of sprawling Jodhpur. After putting up my things at the guesthouse and arranging for a ticket on the next sleeper train to Jaisalmer, I went out into the ruckus and commotion of Jodhpur&#8217;s clock tower market. The clock tower is the center of the old town in Jodhpur and from the main square countless markets, each street with its own specialty, from vegetables and fruits to jewelry and silverwork as well as everything from sewing machines to internet cafes, take off from the main square. For the first time in India, somewhere between dodging the camels trotting by and saying no to the shopkeepers grabbing my arm, I got lost. </p>
-<p><img alt="Camel Jodhpur India" class="postpic" height="202" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2005/jodhpurcamel.jpg" width="180"/>After snacking on some fresh roasted peanuts and enjoying a pineapple lassi I asked around trying to find my way back to the guesthouse. Indians have a curious way of shaking their heads that seems to move on two axis at once so that you can&#8217;t determine anything like yes or no from the gesture. Having observed this movement in context for three weeks now I&#8217;ve concluded that sometimes it means yes, sometimes no and most often, I don&#8217;t understand what you&#8217;re saying but I like to listen to you talk. There is also a feeling here that saying no to anything is rude, so even if someone doesn&#8217;t know where something is, they&#8217;ll say they do rather than be what they consider rude and say no I can&#8217;t help you. I&#8217;ve learned the best policy when asking directions is the take a kind of census and go with the majority opinion. Then once you set off it&#8217;s best to ask again every now and then and see if the majority opinion still favors your direction. Eventually I made it back to the hotel and everything was fine.</p>
-<p><break></p>
-<p>The next day I hopped in a rickshaw and headed up to tour Meherangarh, or the Majestic Fort as it&#8217;s known in English. As its English name indicates, it is indeed perched majestically atop the only hill around, and seems not so much built on a hill as to have naturally risen out the very rocks that form the mesa on which it rests. The outer wall encloses some of the sturdiest and most impressive ramparts I&#8217;ve seen in India or anywhere else and then within that, mainly on the north side, are a series of palaces and courtyards that, when linked together by the various passages, comprise what was once the ruling seat of the Marwar Empire. The current Maharaja does not actually have any more power than a common citizen, but he does have the deed to the fort and, with no revenue source (i.e. taxes go to the federal government of India, not him), he did the smart thing and formed a trust and turned the fort into the Museum. According the audio tour guide, the initial means of raising money for the restoration of the fort came from selling off the fort&#8217;s resident bat populations&#8217; guano to the farmers in the surrounding area. At some point wealthy investors begin to pour money into the project, including I noticed the J. Paul Getty Trust, and the Fort is now recognized by UNESCO. It has been beautifully restored and just wandering about its various courtyards and palaces gave the feeling of having stepped back in time a few hundred years.</p>
-<p>Each area of the sprawling palace has some fantastical name such as Pearl Palace, Flower Place, or The Courtyard of Treasures which is ringed by arched balconies and hundreds of Jalies (the carved sandstone screens that go over the windows). <img alt="Jalies Majestic Fort, Jodhpur, India" class="postpicright" height="210" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2005/jaliesjodhpur.jpg" width="179"/>Each Jalie is unique in its pattern and the purpose behind them is to provide privacy and yet still let in light, which indeed they do, it is nearly impossible to see in them from the outside and yet on the inside they let through a surprising amount of light which falls in ever-changing geometric patterns that dance across the floor as if forever running away from the sun. The overhanging curved stone eaves of the windows looked like Mongol warrior helmets from a Kurosawa movie, but were actually inspired by the domed huts in the area. </p>
-<p>The roof overhangs with their sweeping oriental curves together with the intricate patterns of the screened windows gives the Courtyard of Treasures a feeling of architectural schizophrenia, embracing the organic and symmetrical and also the asymmetrical and random. This feeling pervades not just this one courtyard, but the whole palace, and yet somehow the way in which the buildings are linked by the walkways between levels forms a bridge between the two styles and holds the design together as a cohesive whole.</p>
-<p><img alt="room majestic fort, jodhpur, India" class="postpic" height="188" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2005/poetsroom.jpg" width="250"/>Inside the palace is quite magnificent and contains one room that was the most amazing, lavish room I&#8217;ve ever seen anywhere. It was used for poets to recite poetry and musicians and dancers to perform. And to think that most of poets I know have been reduced to reading in the local tavern or some nearly abandoned building on a college campus. I should like to have seen a performance in this room when it was still in use.</p>
-<p>After finishing up the audio tour I set out to walk the length of the ramparts and ran into a German man who had been on my bus the day before. We smoked a cigarette and strolled along the various stone parapets admiring the myriad of cannons on display, including on extremely beautiful one (if one can say that a object of death and destruction is beautiful), that was apparently captured in China during the boxer rebellion, and took in the sweeping views of the blue city below. Once it was just Brahmins that used the blue on their houses, but these days pretty much everyone does it, the house are painted white and then washed in an indigo dye so that the city, when viewed from on high, looks not unlike a sprawling underwater fantasy world.</p>
-<p>The German man, whose name I never did get, was anxious to practice his English so we sat down beside a rather nondescript and long since mute cannon and talked for some time while in the background the sounds of the frenetic clock tower market drifted up the hill with the breeze. He had apparently also been walking around the market yesterday in search of the one street that sells nothing but betel nut in all its various forms. I have seen more than a few betel nut chewers in the last three weeks, it&#8217;s a habit that seems on par with the coca leaf chewers in Peru and is apparently just as addictive, except that betel nut juice is bright red and rots the teeth and gums. If you ever come to India and see someone who looks like they got their grill kicked in (as Jimmy would say) the night before, that is your betel nut chewer.</p>
-<p><img alt="Majestic Fort, Jodhpur, India" class="postpicright" height="138" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2005/majesticfort.jpg" width="250"/>Later in the evening, after I had returned to the hotel and was waiting for my night train, I sat up at the rooftop restaurant and watched the setting sun turn the distant and very imposing fort ever-brighter shades of red and orange. I tried to imagine the position of an attacking army and what it would require to assault such a fort, which apparently must be more than anyone could ever muster since the fort was never captured. Ten or so India buzzards were circling lazily high of the fort floating on the thermals, some of them able to remain suspended almost perfectly still in the wind, as if they went up there everyday expecting some carnage and feasting they had heard about from their great grandfathers who doubtless could tell tales of carrion banquets after the various attempts to take the fort. </p>
-<p>Later that night I headed over to the train station and caught a sleeper for Jaisalmer (which I&#8217;ve seen spelled that way and also as Jaiselmar&mdash;in fact noticing the constant misspellings of English words in India has become a sort of hobby of mine, but this is first time I&#8217;ve seen variable spellings on an Indian word). My time in Jodhpur was short, but I wanted to get up into the desert and I still want to see the Taj Mahal so I must keep moving. </p>
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diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2005/12/majestic-fort.txt b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2005/12/majestic-fort.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index a0cd2a2..0000000
--- a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2005/12/majestic-fort.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,44 +0,0 @@
-The Majestic Fort
-=================
-
-    by Scott Gilbertson
-    </jrnl/2005/12/majestic-fort>
-    Friday, 02 December 2005
-
-<span class="drop">I</span> arrived in Jodhpur on the edge of the Great Thar Desert around midday after an uneventful five or six hour bus ride and disembarked into a sea of shouting gesticulating touts intent on making their commissions. 
-
-Fortunately I had booked ahead on the condition that the guesthouse send someone to get me so, after dodging the touts as best I could, I found the man I was looking for, hopped on the back of his motorcycle and was whisked out of the chaos into the even greater chaos of sprawling Jodhpur. After putting up my things at the guesthouse and arranging for a ticket on the next sleeper train to Jaisalmer, I went out into the ruckus and commotion of Jodhpur's clock tower market. The clock tower is the center of the old town in Jodhpur and from the main square countless markets, each street with its own specialty, from vegetables and fruits to jewelry and silverwork as well as everything from sewing machines to internet cafes, take off from the main square. For the first time in India, somewhere between dodging the camels trotting by and saying no to the shopkeepers grabbing my arm, I got lost. 
-
-<img src="[[base_url]]/2005/jodhpurcamel.jpg" width="180" height="202" class="postpic" alt="Camel Jodhpur India" />After snacking on some fresh roasted peanuts and enjoying a pineapple lassi I asked around trying to find my way back to the guesthouse. Indians have a curious way of shaking their heads that seems to move on two axis at once so that you can't determine anything like yes or no from the gesture. Having observed this movement in context for three weeks now I've concluded that sometimes it means yes, sometimes no and most often, I don't understand what you're saying but I like to listen to you talk. There is also a feeling here that saying no to anything is rude, so even if someone doesn't know where something is, they'll say they do rather than be what they consider rude and say no I can't help you. I've learned the best policy when asking directions is the take a kind of census and go with the majority opinion. Then once you set off it's best to ask again every now and then and see if the majority opinion still favors your direction. Eventually I made it back to the hotel and everything was fine.
-
-<break>
-
-The next day I hopped in a rickshaw and headed up to tour Meherangarh, or the Majestic Fort as it's known in English. As its English name indicates, it is indeed perched majestically atop the only hill around, and seems not so much built on a hill as to have naturally risen out the very rocks that form the mesa on which it rests. The outer wall encloses some of the sturdiest and most impressive ramparts I've seen in India or anywhere else and then within that, mainly on the north side, are a series of palaces and courtyards that, when linked together by the various passages, comprise what was once the ruling seat of the Marwar Empire. The current Maharaja does not actually have any more power than a common citizen, but he does have the deed to the fort and, with no revenue source (i.e. taxes go to the federal government of India, not him), he did the smart thing and formed a trust and turned the fort into the Museum. According the audio tour guide, the initial means of raising money for the restoration of the fort came from selling off the fort's resident bat populations' guano to the farmers in the surrounding area. At some point wealthy investors begin to pour money into the project, including I noticed the J. Paul Getty Trust, and the Fort is now recognized by UNESCO. It has been beautifully restored and just wandering about its various courtyards and palaces gave the feeling of having stepped back in time a few hundred years.
-
-
-
-Each area of the sprawling palace has some fantastical name such as Pearl Palace, Flower Place, or The Courtyard of Treasures which is ringed by arched balconies and hundreds of Jalies (the carved sandstone screens that go over the windows). <img src="[[base_url]]/2005/jaliesjodhpur.jpg" width="179" height="210" class="postpicright" alt="Jalies Majestic Fort, Jodhpur, India" />Each Jalie is unique in its pattern and the purpose behind them is to provide privacy and yet still let in light, which indeed they do, it is nearly impossible to see in them from the outside and yet on the inside they let through a surprising amount of light which falls in ever-changing geometric patterns that dance across the floor as if forever running away from the sun. The overhanging curved stone eaves of the windows looked like Mongol warrior helmets from a Kurosawa movie, but were actually inspired by the domed huts in the area. 
-
-
-
-The roof overhangs with their sweeping oriental curves together with the intricate patterns of the screened windows gives the Courtyard of Treasures a feeling of architectural schizophrenia, embracing the organic and symmetrical and also the asymmetrical and random. This feeling pervades not just this one courtyard, but the whole palace, and yet somehow the way in which the buildings are linked by the walkways between levels forms a bridge between the two styles and holds the design together as a cohesive whole.
-
-
-
-<img src="[[base_url]]/2005/poetsroom.jpg" width="250" height="188" class="postpic" alt="room majestic fort, jodhpur, India" />Inside the palace is quite magnificent and contains one room that was the most amazing, lavish room I've ever seen anywhere. It was used for poets to recite poetry and musicians and dancers to perform. And to think that most of poets I know have been reduced to reading in the local tavern or some nearly abandoned building on a college campus. I should like to have seen a performance in this room when it was still in use.
-
-
-
-After finishing up the audio tour I set out to walk the length of the ramparts and ran into a German man who had been on my bus the day before. We smoked a cigarette and strolled along the various stone parapets admiring the myriad of cannons on display, including on extremely beautiful one (if one can say that a object of death and destruction is beautiful), that was apparently captured in China during the boxer rebellion, and took in the sweeping views of the blue city below. Once it was just Brahmins that used the blue on their houses, but these days pretty much everyone does it, the house are painted white and then washed in an indigo dye so that the city, when viewed from on high, looks not unlike a sprawling underwater fantasy world.
-
-
-
-The German man, whose name I never did get, was anxious to practice his English so we sat down beside a rather nondescript and long since mute cannon and talked for some time while in the background the sounds of the frenetic clock tower market drifted up the hill with the breeze. He had apparently also been walking around the market yesterday in search of the one street that sells nothing but betel nut in all its various forms. I have seen more than a few betel nut chewers in the last three weeks, it's a habit that seems on par with the coca leaf chewers in Peru and is apparently just as addictive, except that betel nut juice is bright red and rots the teeth and gums. If you ever come to India and see someone who looks like they got their grill kicked in (as Jimmy would say) the night before, that is your betel nut chewer.
-
-
-
-<img src="[[base_url]]/2005/majesticfort.jpg" width="250" height="138" class="postpicright" alt="Majestic Fort, Jodhpur, India" />Later in the evening, after I had returned to the hotel and was waiting for my night train, I sat up at the rooftop restaurant and watched the setting sun turn the distant and very imposing fort ever-brighter shades of red and orange. I tried to imagine the position of an attacking army and what it would require to assault such a fort, which apparently must be more than anyone could ever muster since the fort was never captured. Ten or so India buzzards were circling lazily high of the fort floating on the thermals, some of them able to remain suspended almost perfectly still in the wind, as if they went up there everyday expecting some carnage and feasting they had heard about from their great grandfathers who doubtless could tell tales of carrion banquets after the various attempts to take the fort. 
-
-
-
-Later that night I headed over to the train station and caught a sleeper for Jaisalmer (which I've seen spelled that way and also as Jaiselmar&mdash;in fact noticing the constant misspellings of English words in India has become a sort of hobby of mine, but this is first time I've seen variable spellings on an Indian word). My time in Jodhpur was short, but I wanted to get up into the desert and I still want to see the Taj Mahal so I must keep moving. 
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-                <h1 class="p-name entry-title post--title" itemprop="headline">Merry Christmas&nbsp;2005</h1>
-                <time class="dt-published published dt-updated post--date" datetime="2005-12-25T18:27:48" itemprop="datePublished">December <span>25, 2005</span></time>
-            <p class="p-author author hide" itemprop="author"><span class="byline-author" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person"><span itemprop="name">Scott Gilbertson</span></span></p>
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-            <p><span class="drop">S</span>easons Greeting from luxagraf. I'm in Bangkok, Thailand at the moment and while it doesn't have a very Christmasy feel, but it's a great city. Very much like Los Angeles  — looks similar, weather's about the same, but the food is ten times better and the river actually has water in it. </p>
-<p>I am taking a short break from traveling to do a little working so I don't have much to report. I've seen the two big temples down in the Khaosan Rd area, but otherwise I've been trying to live an ordinary life. Get up in the morning and work, take a lunch break go back to work, ironically most of the things I didn't want to do back home. Strange though it may sound, this routine is actually appealing right now, but that will probably only last another week.</p>
-<p><break>
-I just wanted to post a little seasons greeting message to all of you still following along and thank you for your support. </break></p>
-<p>Cheers!</p>
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-            <p><span class="drop">S</span>easons Greeting from luxagraf. I&#8217;m in Bangkok, Thailand at the moment and while it doesn&#8217;t have a very Christmasy feel, but it&#8217;s a great city. Very much like Los Angeles  &mdash; looks similar, weather&#8217;s about the same, but the food is ten times better and the river actually has water in it. </p>
-<p>I am taking a short break from traveling to do a little working so I don&#8217;t have much to report. I&#8217;ve seen the two big temples down in the Khaosan Rd area, but otherwise I&#8217;ve been trying to live an ordinary life. Get up in the morning and work, take a lunch break go back to work, ironically most of the things I didn&#8217;t want to do back home. Strange though it may sound, this routine is actually appealing right now, but that will probably only last another week.</p>
-<p><break>
-I just wanted to post a little seasons greeting message to all of you still following along and thank you for your support. </p>
-<p>Cheers!</p>
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diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2005/12/merry-christmas-2005.txt b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2005/12/merry-christmas-2005.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index 63a7572..0000000
--- a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2005/12/merry-christmas-2005.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,15 +0,0 @@
-Merry Christmas 2005
-====================
-
-    by Scott Gilbertson
-    </jrnl/2005/12/merry-christmas-2005>
-    Sunday, 25 December 2005
-
-<span class="drop">S</span>easons Greeting from luxagraf. I'm in Bangkok, Thailand at the moment and while it doesn't have a very Christmasy feel, but it's a great city. Very much like Los Angeles  &mdash; looks similar, weather's about the same, but the food is ten times better and the river actually has water in it. 
-
-I am taking a short break from traveling to do a little working so I don't have much to report. I've seen the two big temples down in the Khaosan Rd area, but otherwise I've been trying to live an ordinary life. Get up in the morning and work, take a lunch break go back to work, ironically most of the things I didn't want to do back home. Strange though it may sound, this routine is actually appealing right now, but that will probably only last another week.
- 
-<break>
-I just wanted to post a little seasons greeting message to all of you still following along and thank you for your support. 
-
-Cheers!
diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2005/12/pashupatinath.amp b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2005/12/pashupatinath.amp
deleted file mode 100644
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-                <h1 class="p-name entry-title post--title" itemprop="headline">Pashupatinath</h1>
-                <time class="dt-published published dt-updated post--date" datetime="2005-12-15T18:02:59" itemprop="datePublished">December <span>15, 2005</span></time>
-            <p class="p-author author hide" itemprop="author"><span class="byline-author" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person"><span itemprop="name">Scott Gilbertson</span></span></p>
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-            <p><span class="drop">I</span>t was well past noon before I dragged myself out of the comforts of Thamel and caught a taxi to Pashupatinath. Nestled on a hillside beside the Bagmati River, Pashupatinath is one of the holiest sites in the world for Hindus, second only to Varanasi in India. </p>
-<p>Pashupatinath consists of a large temple which is open only to Hindus, surrounded by a number of smaller shrines and then down on the banks of the Bagmati are the burning ghats where bodies are cremated. After walking around the various pagodas and little temples I made my way across the river on one of the small foot bridges and up the hillside on opposite bank past a series of eleven small temples of Shiva to the top of a terrace. </p>
-<p><break></break></p>
-<p><amp-img alt="Pashupatinath Katmandu, Nepal" height="200" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2005/pashupatinathtemple.jpg" width="187"></amp-img>I sat up above the river on the terrace where there were some wooden benches whose beams seemed perhaps deliberately too far apart to be comfortable, as if comfort were not something to be found here. From the temple across the river came a continual ringing of bells and the sound of a flute which seemed to irritate the resident flock of pigeons sitting on the roof. Every few minutes the pigeons would launch off into a circuitous arcs seemingly blown like leaves, streaking along the river in a cloud so thick it was impossible to distinguish individual birds. Below me another funeral pyre was being prepared. After washing away the ashes of the last fire, workers began stacking cordwood and bamboo at cross patterns like Lincoln logs and then over the wood were draped long garlands of marigold flowers. In each corner of the pyre was a bamboo pole with leaves still at the top to form a canopy over the wood. Around these poles they slowly wrapped more marigold garlands and over the top they laid a piece of red silk. This pyre was for an upper caste person while farther down the river less ornate pyres were still burning. In the air I could smell the smoke of burning bamboo which mixed with the vague odor of burnt flesh though I could never decide whether or not that was merely my imagination.</p>
-<p>After an hour of preparation they brought out a body wrapped in linen and lying on what amounted to a bamboo ladder borne by four Hari Krishna's who lifted the body up on to the pile of wood, covered it with grasses and then, with very little additional ceremony, they lit the pyre. Throughout this process the family of the deceased, who in this case was some sort of dignitary since the pyre was on one of the upper caste platforms, followed behind the Haris signing various songs in Hindi. The family was dressed in white the traditional Hindu color of mourning. Once the pyre was lit and the songs finished the family threw little bits of marigold petals on the fire and then retreated back into the building behind the ghats where there are rooms for the traditional Hindu mourning ceremonies.</p>
-<p>I've remarked before on the number of times death has come up in my travels, but this certainly was the most culturally jarring thing I have witnessed thus far. I've been to a number of funerals in my life and looked in on a couple of autopsies before and the dead are always a strange site, but I had never witnessed a body being destroyed in flames before and something about it was very disturbing. You can't actually see the body burn because the wood and grass is hides it, but it's still a very disquieting just to know that under the grass and wood is a once living human being. I have often thought that I would rather be cremated than buried and I still think that I would, but I'm not sure I would want anyone to watch.</p>
-<p><amp-img alt="Pashupatinath Funeral Pyre Katmandu Nepal" height="160" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2005/pashupatinathpyre.jpg" width="200"></amp-img>After watching the pyre burn for a while I recalled a horrific story I read in the Indian paper about a woman whose family could no longer afford to pay for her health care and since she was catatonic they simply took her to a crematorium and left the body. The man who prepared her fire was about to lift her body into it when he noticed tears in her eyes. At the time I found the story disturbing, but now as I remembered it it produced a slight feeling of vertigo and dizziness as I thought of the woman unable to move and thinking that she was going to be burned alive, able to communicate the pain and loneliness she must have felt only by the welling of tears in her eyes.</p>
-<p>Overcome with a sort of panicky feeling, but a feeling that was distinctly different than an actual panic attack to which I am prone; this was more a feeling of the world spinning as if I had for the first time become aware that even while standing still we are moving at around twenty thousand miles per hour and could feel the motion in my head; I decided to head back to Thamel. I don't have a real distinct memory of getting down, I could not really say how long I had even been up on the terrace. I remember walking down the steps from the terrace because I stopped to make a quick photograph of a doorway that had caught my eye earlier and somehow I centered my attention for long enough to photograph it, but then I don't remember much except that the sky was just then nearly obliterated by a flock of circling pigeons whose flight I watched until I realized I was still very dizzy and needed to sit down again. <amp-img alt="Pashupatinath Katmandu Nepal" height="267" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2005/pashupatinathdoorway.jpg" width="200"></amp-img>I remember thinking that the pigeons looked like a broken kaleidoscope whose fragments had gotten stuck in my eye. And then I leaned against a bench for support and looked up at a little temple or pagoda rather that was next to me and saw the Kama Sutra carvings that often adorn the roof beams of temples in Nepal. </p>
-<p>I leaned there for some time thinking that about the cycle of birth love and death that makes up our lives and that at Pashupatinath the cycle has become a singularity so that the distinction between life and death no longer exists. The strange spectacle around me had brought birth love and death together in one place and compressed it down as if to say, despite the procession of time which makes it seem like a cycle, this progression is in fact not a progression, but a single point from which all other things emanate.  These thoughts gradually pulled me out of my dizziness and the feeling of falling away from myself until at some length I was able to find my way back to Thamel.</p>
-<p>And as the taxi dropped me off in front of my hotel, it occurred to me that losing one's mind might be one of the central attributes of traveling in the first place; not necessarily going crazy, which really I am not, but finding one's mind displaced enough that it begins to feel slightly alien, as if certain contexts which we are raised in and simply accept without ever thinking about become suddenly out of their element and foreign as we absorb different, new and strange contexts.</p>
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-            <p><span class="drop">I</span>t was well past noon before I dragged myself out of the comforts of Thamel and caught a taxi to Pashupatinath. Nestled on a hillside beside the Bagmati River, Pashupatinath is one of the holiest sites in the world for Hindus, second only to Varanasi in India. </p>
-<p>Pashupatinath consists of a large temple which is open only to Hindus, surrounded by a number of smaller shrines and then down on the banks of the Bagmati are the burning ghats where bodies are cremated. After walking around the various pagodas and little temples I made my way across the river on one of the small foot bridges and up the hillside on opposite bank past a series of eleven small temples of Shiva to the top of a terrace. </p>
-<p><break></p>
-<p><img alt="Pashupatinath Katmandu, Nepal" class="postpic" height="200" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2005/pashupatinathtemple.jpg" width="187"/>I sat up above the river on the terrace where there were some wooden benches whose beams seemed perhaps deliberately too far apart to be comfortable, as if comfort were not something to be found here. From the temple across the river came a continual ringing of bells and the sound of a flute which seemed to irritate the resident flock of pigeons sitting on the roof. Every few minutes the pigeons would launch off into a circuitous arcs seemingly blown like leaves, streaking along the river in a cloud so thick it was impossible to distinguish individual birds. Below me another funeral pyre was being prepared. After washing away the ashes of the last fire, workers began stacking cordwood and bamboo at cross patterns like Lincoln logs and then over the wood were draped long garlands of marigold flowers. In each corner of the pyre was a bamboo pole with leaves still at the top to form a canopy over the wood. Around these poles they slowly wrapped more marigold garlands and over the top they laid a piece of red silk. This pyre was for an upper caste person while farther down the river less ornate pyres were still burning. In the air I could smell the smoke of burning bamboo which mixed with the vague odor of burnt flesh though I could never decide whether or not that was merely my imagination.</p>
-<p>After an hour of preparation they brought out a body wrapped in linen and lying on what amounted to a bamboo ladder borne by four Hari Krishna&#8217;s who lifted the body up on to the pile of wood, covered it with grasses and then, with very little additional ceremony, they lit the pyre. Throughout this process the family of the deceased, who in this case was some sort of dignitary since the pyre was on one of the upper caste platforms, followed behind the Haris signing various songs in Hindi. The family was dressed in white the traditional Hindu color of mourning. Once the pyre was lit and the songs finished the family threw little bits of marigold petals on the fire and then retreated back into the building behind the ghats where there are rooms for the traditional Hindu mourning ceremonies.</p>
-<p>I&#8217;ve remarked before on the number of times death has come up in my travels, but this certainly was the most culturally jarring thing I have witnessed thus far. I&#8217;ve been to a number of funerals in my life and looked in on a couple of autopsies before and the dead are always a strange site, but I had never witnessed a body being destroyed in flames before and something about it was very disturbing. You can&#8217;t actually see the body burn because the wood and grass is hides it, but it&#8217;s still a very disquieting just to know that under the grass and wood is a once living human being. I have often thought that I would rather be cremated than buried and I still think that I would, but I&#8217;m not sure I would want anyone to watch.</p>
-<p><img alt="Pashupatinath Funeral Pyre Katmandu Nepal" class="postpicright" height="160" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2005/pashupatinathpyre.jpg" width="200"/>After watching the pyre burn for a while I recalled a horrific story I read in the Indian paper about a woman whose family could no longer afford to pay for her health care and since she was catatonic they simply took her to a crematorium and left the body. The man who prepared her fire was about to lift her body into it when he noticed tears in her eyes. At the time I found the story disturbing, but now as I remembered it it produced a slight feeling of vertigo and dizziness as I thought of the woman unable to move and thinking that she was going to be burned alive, able to communicate the pain and loneliness she must have felt only by the welling of tears in her eyes.</p>
-<p>Overcome with a sort of panicky feeling, but a feeling that was distinctly different than an actual panic attack to which I am prone; this was more a feeling of the world spinning as if I had for the first time become aware that even while standing still we are moving at around twenty thousand miles per hour and could feel the motion in my head; I decided to head back to Thamel. I don&#8217;t have a real distinct memory of getting down, I could not really say how long I had even been up on the terrace. I remember walking down the steps from the terrace because I stopped to make a quick photograph of a doorway that had caught my eye earlier and somehow I centered my attention for long enough to photograph it, but then I don&#8217;t remember much except that the sky was just then nearly obliterated by a flock of circling pigeons whose flight I watched until I realized I was still very dizzy and needed to sit down again. <img alt="Pashupatinath Katmandu Nepal" class="postpic" height="267" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2005/pashupatinathdoorway.jpg" width="200"/>I remember thinking that the pigeons looked like a broken kaleidoscope whose fragments had gotten stuck in my eye. And then I leaned against a bench for support and looked up at a little temple or pagoda rather that was next to me and saw the Kama Sutra carvings that often adorn the roof beams of temples in Nepal. </p>
-<p>I leaned there for some time thinking that about the cycle of birth love and death that makes up our lives and that at Pashupatinath the cycle has become a singularity so that the distinction between life and death no longer exists. The strange spectacle around me had brought birth love and death together in one place and compressed it down as if to say, despite the procession of time which makes it seem like a cycle, this progression is in fact not a progression, but a single point from which all other things emanate.  These thoughts gradually pulled me out of my dizziness and the feeling of falling away from myself until at some length I was able to find my way back to Thamel.</p>
-<p>And as the taxi dropped me off in front of my hotel, it occurred to me that losing one&#8217;s mind might be one of the central attributes of traveling in the first place; not necessarily going crazy, which really I am not, but finding one&#8217;s mind displaced enough that it begins to feel slightly alien, as if certain contexts which we are raised in and simply accept without ever thinking about become suddenly out of their element and foreign as we absorb different, new and strange contexts.</p>
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diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2005/12/pashupatinath.txt b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2005/12/pashupatinath.txt
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-Pashupatinath
-=============
-
-    by Scott Gilbertson
-    </jrnl/2005/12/pashupatinath>
-    Thursday, 15 December 2005
-
-<span class="drop">I</span>t was well past noon before I dragged myself out of the comforts of Thamel and caught a taxi to Pashupatinath. Nestled on a hillside beside the Bagmati River, Pashupatinath is one of the holiest sites in the world for Hindus, second only to Varanasi in India. 
-
-Pashupatinath consists of a large temple which is open only to Hindus, surrounded by a number of smaller shrines and then down on the banks of the Bagmati are the burning ghats where bodies are cremated. After walking around the various pagodas and little temples I made my way across the river on one of the small foot bridges and up the hillside on opposite bank past a series of eleven small temples of Shiva to the top of a terrace. 
-
-<break>
-
-<img src="[[base_url]]/2005/pashupatinathtemple.jpg" width="187" height="200" class="postpic" alt="Pashupatinath Katmandu, Nepal" />I sat up above the river on the terrace where there were some wooden benches whose beams seemed perhaps deliberately too far apart to be comfortable, as if comfort were not something to be found here. From the temple across the river came a continual ringing of bells and the sound of a flute which seemed to irritate the resident flock of pigeons sitting on the roof. Every few minutes the pigeons would launch off into a circuitous arcs seemingly blown like leaves, streaking along the river in a cloud so thick it was impossible to distinguish individual birds. Below me another funeral pyre was being prepared. After washing away the ashes of the last fire, workers began stacking cordwood and bamboo at cross patterns like Lincoln logs and then over the wood were draped long garlands of marigold flowers. In each corner of the pyre was a bamboo pole with leaves still at the top to form a canopy over the wood. Around these poles they slowly wrapped more marigold garlands and over the top they laid a piece of red silk. This pyre was for an upper caste person while farther down the river less ornate pyres were still burning. In the air I could smell the smoke of burning bamboo which mixed with the vague odor of burnt flesh though I could never decide whether or not that was merely my imagination.
-
-
-
-After an hour of preparation they brought out a body wrapped in linen and lying on what amounted to a bamboo ladder borne by four Hari Krishna's who lifted the body up on to the pile of wood, covered it with grasses and then, with very little additional ceremony, they lit the pyre. Throughout this process the family of the deceased, who in this case was some sort of dignitary since the pyre was on one of the upper caste platforms, followed behind the Haris signing various songs in Hindi. The family was dressed in white the traditional Hindu color of mourning. Once the pyre was lit and the songs finished the family threw little bits of marigold petals on the fire and then retreated back into the building behind the ghats where there are rooms for the traditional Hindu mourning ceremonies.
-
-
-
-I've remarked before on the number of times death has come up in my travels, but this certainly was the most culturally jarring thing I have witnessed thus far. I've been to a number of funerals in my life and looked in on a couple of autopsies before and the dead are always a strange site, but I had never witnessed a body being destroyed in flames before and something about it was very disturbing. You can't actually see the body burn because the wood and grass is hides it, but it's still a very disquieting just to know that under the grass and wood is a once living human being. I have often thought that I would rather be cremated than buried and I still think that I would, but I'm not sure I would want anyone to watch.
-
-
-
-<img src="[[base_url]]/2005/pashupatinathpyre.jpg" width="200" height="160" class="postpicright" alt="Pashupatinath Funeral Pyre Katmandu Nepal" />After watching the pyre burn for a while I recalled a horrific story I read in the Indian paper about a woman whose family could no longer afford to pay for her health care and since she was catatonic they simply took her to a crematorium and left the body. The man who prepared her fire was about to lift her body into it when he noticed tears in her eyes. At the time I found the story disturbing, but now as I remembered it it produced a slight feeling of vertigo and dizziness as I thought of the woman unable to move and thinking that she was going to be burned alive, able to communicate the pain and loneliness she must have felt only by the welling of tears in her eyes.
-
-
-
-Overcome with a sort of panicky feeling, but a feeling that was distinctly different than an actual panic attack to which I am prone; this was more a feeling of the world spinning as if I had for the first time become aware that even while standing still we are moving at around twenty thousand miles per hour and could feel the motion in my head; I decided to head back to Thamel. I don't have a real distinct memory of getting down, I could not really say how long I had even been up on the terrace. I remember walking down the steps from the terrace because I stopped to make a quick photograph of a doorway that had caught my eye earlier and somehow I centered my attention for long enough to photograph it, but then I don't remember much except that the sky was just then nearly obliterated by a flock of circling pigeons whose flight I watched until I realized I was still very dizzy and needed to sit down again. <img src="[[base_url]]/2005/pashupatinathdoorway.jpg" width="200" height="267" class="postpic" alt="Pashupatinath Katmandu Nepal" />I remember thinking that the pigeons looked like a broken kaleidoscope whose fragments had gotten stuck in my eye. And then I leaned against a bench for support and looked up at a little temple or pagoda rather that was next to me and saw the Kama Sutra carvings that often adorn the roof beams of temples in Nepal. 
-
-
-
-I leaned there for some time thinking that about the cycle of birth love and death that makes up our lives and that at Pashupatinath the cycle has become a singularity so that the distinction between life and death no longer exists. The strange spectacle around me had brought birth love and death together in one place and compressed it down as if to say, despite the procession of time which makes it seem like a cycle, this progression is in fact not a progression, but a single point from which all other things emanate.  These thoughts gradually pulled me out of my dizziness and the feeling of falling away from myself until at some length I was able to find my way back to Thamel.
-
-
-
-And as the taxi dropped me off in front of my hotel, it occurred to me that losing one's mind might be one of the central attributes of traveling in the first place; not necessarily going crazy, which really I am not, but finding one's mind displaced enough that it begins to feel slightly alien, as if certain contexts which we are raised in and simply accept without ever thinking about become suddenly out of their element and foreign as we absorb different, new and strange contexts.
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-                <h1 class="p-name entry-title post--title" itemprop="headline">Sunset Over the&nbsp;Himalayas</h1>
-                <time class="dt-published published dt-updated post--date" datetime="2005-12-17T21:03:43" itemprop="datePublished">December <span>17, 2005</span></time>
-            <p class="p-author author hide" itemprop="author"><span class="byline-author" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person"><span itemprop="name">Scott Gilbertson</span></span></p>
-                <aside class="p-location h-adr adr post--location" itemprop="contentLocation" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Place">
-                    <span class="p-region">Pokhara</span>, <a class="p-country-name country-name" href="/jrnl/nepal/" title="travel writing from Nepal">Nepal</a>
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-            <p><span class="drop">I</span>t was around four in the evening when I walked down to the lake shore with the intention of renting a boat. I had spent the morning and early afternoon walking the streets of Lakeside looking up at the soaring peaks of the Annapurna Range and stopping in at some of the dozens of nearly identical curio and fabric stores, occasionally bargaining for a piece of cloth or vaguely interesting knickknack though in truth I did it more for the game of bargaining then any desire to possess the items in question. </p>
-<p>Any time I could get a store owner below 25% of the original asking price I felt as if the game were over and I obligated to complete the exchange by handing over money and departing with the object. In this way I came to own several shawls, a mask supposedly antique which I don't really believe though it is of superior quality to all the others I saw, and one wooden flute, all of which excepting the mask will be given to friends when I return home. After stopping off at my hotel to deposit the days catch on the unused second bed which I had pushed up against the wall beneath the window, I went out as I said to rent a boat and paddle about Fewa Lake.</p>
-<p><break></break></p>
-<p>At just over $2 US per hour the boats were hardly a bargain (my hotel is the same per night) but I rented one anyway and opted to paddle myself, partly for the exercise and partly to escape the constant barrage of questions I had endured throughout the morning and early afternoon. <amp-img alt="boats Fewa Lake Nepal" height="180" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2005/fewaboats.jpg" width="250"></amp-img>It is very difficult to find any peace and quiet in areas like Pokhara and while it's fun to talk to the local people, especially the children who are almost always sincerely interested in you, whereas the others usually have an end goal of selling you something, I was wanting some peace and quiet. Part of the reason I talked to so many people is that the off-season had arrived in Nepal and very few tourists remain, in fact in my four or five hours of wandering I came across only two other tourists a woman and her daughter bargaining for some embroidered silk shawls.</p>
-<p>The boat I received for my 150 rupees could easily have seated a family of six and two oarsmen and consequently moved sluggishly with one lone paddler seated at the stern. Once I got past the Varahi Temple, a small island temple not fifty meters from shore where a modest and possibly ceremonial fire was burning on the left side which sent a plume of smoke drifting out across the still lake waters and looked, with the jungle hillsides in the background, not unlike some of the foggy river scenes in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now; I turned back toward shore and saw the cake-icing snows covering the peaks of Lamgung Himal and Annapurna II. <amp-img alt="Annapurna Range Pokhara Nepal" height="150" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2005/fewaannapurna.jpg" width="247"></amp-img>Such views spurred my paddling on until I was well across the lake skirting the opposite shore among a multitude of water striders darting on the placid, hill-sheltered waters where the views were even more spectacular.</p>
-<p>A handful of other boats were on the lake, but I seemed to be the only foreigner out at such a late hour, indeed this was one of many times I felt that I was in fact the only foreign tourist in Pokhara. Most of the other vessels on the water were fishermen bringing in their nets for the day or heavily loaded transport canoes hauling goods from Lakeside to the isolated west shore, which is only reachable by boat or on foot. Here and there were a few people out for fun, including two boats chock full of local school children still in their blue and white uniforms, one boat full of girls and one of boys each racing the other back to the landing. After about forty-five minutes of paddling I reached a point where the views of the Annapurna range were, in the words of an Englishman I met in Katmandu, "gob smacking gorgeous." I put down the paddle and moved to the center of the boat where the benches were wider and, using my bag a cushion, lay back against the gunnel and hung my feet over the opposite side so that they just skimmed the surface of the chilly water. I lay like that for some time snacking on a snickers bar and drinking water as the sun painted very subtly changing orange hues across the mastiff of Machhapuchhre; I thought of all the Nepali people I have met in the last week and a half and how while they are slightly more reserved than Indians they are every bit as friendly and probably even more genuine. I remembered the story a British climber told me about the sherpas that accompanied his expedition, who, despite the fact that their homes were a hard two days hike over mountainous terrain, waited beside the runway until the expedition team's plane had taken off, which, as he told me, was delayed several hours, but the sherpas insisted on waiting. I could picture them standing at the side of the runway smiling and waving as that plane finally lifted off, tucked in its wheels and disappeared. </p>
-<p>I must have laid there an hour or more thinking about how much I have seen and how many little tiny incidents could be entire stories in themselves until finally I noticed the moon rising over the eastern ridge and it occurred to me suddenly that it would soon be dark and I had the better part of an hours paddle back to the landing I departed from. By the time I finally made it back the boats owner was nearly the only person left and he already had his flashlight out to guide me in amongst the boats, but he too seemed unperturbed at waiting.</p>
-<h3>Sarangkot</h3>
-<p>The last day I spent in Pokhara I rented a bicycle in the morning and road around Fewa Lake stopping off occasionally to watch fishermen, women watching clothes in the tributary streams and children herding goats on the now barren hay terraces at the upper end of the lake. <amp-img alt="Upper Fewa Lake, Nepal" height="118" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2005/fewaterrace.jpg" width="200"></amp-img>I rested for a while in the shade of a large tree and several young boys playing on a nearby bridge came over to see if they could ride my bicycle while I rested. While the older boys took off on the bike one younger one who was too small to ride it, sat with me in the shade and I showed him how to use my camera.</p>
-<p><amp-img alt="Local Boy, Nepal" height="200" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2005/fewaboy.jpg" width="150"></amp-img>After using up most of the memory I had left he finally got the hang of having to wait after each picture (no instance gratification on my aging equipment) before taking the next one. He was actually pretty good with the camera, in fact he took the picture of the lake above and then like most other children I've met insisted I take his picture. On the way back the chain on my bicycle broke which made for an unplanned and fairly long, but not unpleasant walk around the lake.</p>
-<p>By the time I made it back to my hotel I was exhausted, but I had only one more chance to get to Sarangkot which is the main overlook for the Annapurna Range. Despite being tired there was no way I was going to be in Nepal and not see the sunset of the Himalayas. I was resting in the garden court of my hotel talking to the owners sun about hiring a taxi to get up to Sarangkot when he offered to take me by motorcycle. I've come to enjoy motorcycles on this trip so I took him up on the offer. Sarangkot is about 1200 meters above Pokhara of which it is possible to climb about 800 of them by road. </p>
-<p><amp-img alt="Annapurna Nepal" height="200" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2005/annapurnasunsetII.jpg" width="180"></amp-img>We parked the bike at the end of the road and began to ascend the nearly vertical stairs that lead up the other 400 meters. I couldn't say how long it took, perhaps an hour, but it was definitely the hardest hiking I've done in quite sometime. For those used to nonmetric systems we climbed roughly 1300 vertical feet in less than a mile of walking. And apparently the Nepalis have never heard of switchbacks.</p>
-<p><amp-img alt="Annapurna Sunset, Nepal" height="200" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2005/annapurnasunset.jpg" width="320"></amp-img>Once we finally made it to the top the exhaustion quickly became a memory and we sat on benches atop the hill looking out at the Annapurna Range. The mountains felt so close you could reach out and touch them. When the sun begin to set the wisps of clouds around the peaks turned into what looked like a pinkish mist, as if someone has airbrushed it into the scene. There is really no way to describe the view and unfortunately my camera was not up to the task either. I have put up the new photos, but they fail to capture it for me, the mountains were in fact much closer than the lens of my camera makes them seem. Nevertheless I have the images in my memory and I am glad that I made this side trip to Nepal. </p>
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-                <time class="dt-published published dt-updated post-date" datetime="2005-12-17T21:03:43" itemprop="datePublished">December <span>17, 2005</span></time>
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-            <p><span class="drop">I</span>t was around four in the evening when I walked down to the lake shore with the intention of renting a boat. I had spent the morning and early afternoon walking the streets of Lakeside looking up at the soaring peaks of the Annapurna Range and stopping in at some of the dozens of nearly identical curio and fabric stores, occasionally bargaining for a piece of cloth or vaguely interesting knickknack though in truth I did it more for the game of bargaining then any desire to possess the items in question. </p>
-<p>Any time I could get a store owner below 25% of the original asking price I felt as if the game were over and I obligated to complete the exchange by handing over money and departing with the object. In this way I came to own several shawls, a mask supposedly antique which I don&#8217;t really believe though it is of superior quality to all the others I saw, and one wooden flute, all of which excepting the mask will be given to friends when I return home. After stopping off at my hotel to deposit the days catch on the unused second bed which I had pushed up against the wall beneath the window, I went out as I said to rent a boat and paddle about Fewa Lake.</p>
-<p><break></p>
-<p>At just over $2 US per hour the boats were hardly a bargain (my hotel is the same per night) but I rented one anyway and opted to paddle myself, partly for the exercise and partly to escape the constant barrage of questions I had endured throughout the morning and early afternoon. <img alt="boats Fewa Lake Nepal" class="postpic" height="180" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2005/fewaboats.jpg" width="250"/>It is very difficult to find any peace and quiet in areas like Pokhara and while it&#8217;s fun to talk to the local people, especially the children who are almost always sincerely interested in you, whereas the others usually have an end goal of selling you something, I was wanting some peace and quiet. Part of the reason I talked to so many people is that the off-season had arrived in Nepal and very few tourists remain, in fact in my four or five hours of wandering I came across only two other tourists a woman and her daughter bargaining for some embroidered silk shawls.</p>
-<p>The boat I received for my 150 rupees could easily have seated a family of six and two oarsmen and consequently moved sluggishly with one lone paddler seated at the stern. Once I got past the Varahi Temple, a small island temple not fifty meters from shore where a modest and possibly ceremonial fire was burning on the left side which sent a plume of smoke drifting out across the still lake waters and looked, with the jungle hillsides in the background, not unlike some of the foggy river scenes in Francis Ford Coppola&#8217;s Apocalypse Now; I turned back toward shore and saw the cake-icing snows covering the peaks of Lamgung Himal and Annapurna II. <img alt="Annapurna Range Pokhara Nepal" class="postpicright" height="150" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2005/fewaannapurna.jpg" width="247"/>Such views spurred my paddling on until I was well across the lake skirting the opposite shore among a multitude of water striders darting on the placid, hill-sheltered waters where the views were even more spectacular.</p>
-<p>A handful of other boats were on the lake, but I seemed to be the only foreigner out at such a late hour, indeed this was one of many times I felt that I was in fact the only foreign tourist in Pokhara. Most of the other vessels on the water were fishermen bringing in their nets for the day or heavily loaded transport canoes hauling goods from Lakeside to the isolated west shore, which is only reachable by boat or on foot. Here and there were a few people out for fun, including two boats chock full of local school children still in their blue and white uniforms, one boat full of girls and one of boys each racing the other back to the landing. After about forty-five minutes of paddling I reached a point where the views of the Annapurna range were, in the words of an Englishman I met in Katmandu, &#8220;gob smacking gorgeous.&#8221; I put down the paddle and moved to the center of the boat where the benches were wider and, using my bag a cushion, lay back against the gunnel and hung my feet over the opposite side so that they just skimmed the surface of the chilly water. I lay like that for some time snacking on a snickers bar and drinking water as the sun painted very subtly changing orange hues across the mastiff of Machhapuchhre; I thought of all the Nepali people I have met in the last week and a half and how while they are slightly more reserved than Indians they are every bit as friendly and probably even more genuine. I remembered the story a British climber told me about the sherpas that accompanied his expedition, who, despite the fact that their homes were a hard two days hike over mountainous terrain, waited beside the runway until the expedition team&#8217;s plane had taken off, which, as he told me, was delayed several hours, but the sherpas insisted on waiting. I could picture them standing at the side of the runway smiling and waving as that plane finally lifted off, tucked in its wheels and disappeared. </p>
-<p>I must have laid there an hour or more thinking about how much I have seen and how many little tiny incidents could be entire stories in themselves until finally I noticed the moon rising over the eastern ridge and it occurred to me suddenly that it would soon be dark and I had the better part of an hours paddle back to the landing I departed from. By the time I finally made it back the boats owner was nearly the only person left and he already had his flashlight out to guide me in amongst the boats, but he too seemed unperturbed at waiting.</p>
-<h3>Sarangkot</h3>
-
-<p>The last day I spent in Pokhara I rented a bicycle in the morning and road around Fewa Lake stopping off occasionally to watch fishermen, women watching clothes in the tributary streams and children herding goats on the now barren hay terraces at the upper end of the lake. <img alt="Upper Fewa Lake, Nepal" class="postpic" height="118" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2005/fewaterrace.jpg" width="200"/>I rested for a while in the shade of a large tree and several young boys playing on a nearby bridge came over to see if they could ride my bicycle while I rested. While the older boys took off on the bike one younger one who was too small to ride it, sat with me in the shade and I showed him how to use my camera.</p>
-<p><img alt="Local Boy, Nepal" class="postpic" height="200" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2005/fewaboy.jpg" width="150"/>After using up most of the memory I had left he finally got the hang of having to wait after each picture (no instance gratification on my aging equipment) before taking the next one. He was actually pretty good with the camera, in fact he took the picture of the lake above and then like most other children I&#8217;ve met insisted I take his picture. On the way back the chain on my bicycle broke which made for an unplanned and fairly long, but not unpleasant walk around the lake.</p>
-<p>By the time I made it back to my hotel I was exhausted, but I had only one more chance to get to Sarangkot which is the main overlook for the Annapurna Range. Despite being tired there was no way I was going to be in Nepal and not see the sunset of the Himalayas. I was resting in the garden court of my hotel talking to the owners sun about hiring a taxi to get up to Sarangkot when he offered to take me by motorcycle. I&#8217;ve come to enjoy motorcycles on this trip so I took him up on the offer. Sarangkot is about 1200 meters above Pokhara of which it is possible to climb about 800 of them by road. </p>
-<p><img alt="Annapurna Nepal" class="postpicright" height="200" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2005/annapurnasunsetII.jpg" width="180"/>We parked the bike at the end of the road and began to ascend the nearly vertical stairs that lead up the other 400 meters. I couldn&#8217;t say how long it took, perhaps an hour, but it was definitely the hardest hiking I&#8217;ve done in quite sometime. For those used to nonmetric systems we climbed roughly 1300 vertical feet in less than a mile of walking. And apparently the Nepalis have never heard of switchbacks.</p>
-<p><img alt="Annapurna Sunset, Nepal" class="postpic" height="200" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2005/annapurnasunset.jpg" width="320"/>Once we finally made it to the top the exhaustion quickly became a memory and we sat on benches atop the hill looking out at the Annapurna Range. The mountains felt so close you could reach out and touch them. When the sun begin to set the wisps of clouds around the peaks turned into what looked like a pinkish mist, as if someone has airbrushed it into the scene. There is really no way to describe the view and unfortunately my camera was not up to the task either. I have put up the new photos, but they fail to capture it for me, the mountains were in fact much closer than the lens of my camera makes them seem. Nevertheless I have the images in my memory and I am glad that I made this side trip to Nepal. </p>
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-                <span class="who"><b>Carol</b></span>
-                <span class="when">September 28, 2008 at  3:09 p.m.</span>
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-                <p>Your blog rings back such happy memories! I can&#8217;t wait to go back to Nepal. I too have the same problem with the pics not doing the mountains justice. How on earth does one capture the &#8220;bigness&#8221; of that immense scenery?</p>
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-                <span class="when">September 30, 2008 at  3:12 p.m.</span>
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-                <p>@Carol-</p>
-<p>Thanks for stopping by, I&#8217;m always happy to trigger good memories.</p>
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diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2005/12/sunset-over-himalayas.txt b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2005/12/sunset-over-himalayas.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index 334e426..0000000
--- a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2005/12/sunset-over-himalayas.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,51 +0,0 @@
-Sunset Over the Himalayas
-=========================
-
-    by Scott Gilbertson
-    </jrnl/2005/12/sunset-over-himalayas>
-    Saturday, 17 December 2005
-
-<span class="drop">I</span>t was around four in the evening when I walked down to the lake shore with the intention of renting a boat. I had spent the morning and early afternoon walking the streets of Lakeside looking up at the soaring peaks of the Annapurna Range and stopping in at some of the dozens of nearly identical curio and fabric stores, occasionally bargaining for a piece of cloth or vaguely interesting knickknack though in truth I did it more for the game of bargaining then any desire to possess the items in question. 
-
-Any time I could get a store owner below 25% of the original asking price I felt as if the game were over and I obligated to complete the exchange by handing over money and departing with the object. In this way I came to own several shawls, a mask supposedly antique which I don't really believe though it is of superior quality to all the others I saw, and one wooden flute, all of which excepting the mask will be given to friends when I return home. After stopping off at my hotel to deposit the days catch on the unused second bed which I had pushed up against the wall beneath the window, I went out as I said to rent a boat and paddle about Fewa Lake.
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-<break>
-
-At just over $2 US per hour the boats were hardly a bargain (my hotel is the same per night) but I rented one anyway and opted to paddle myself, partly for the exercise and partly to escape the constant barrage of questions I had endured throughout the morning and early afternoon. <img src="[[base_url]]/2005/fewaboats.jpg" width="250" height="180" class="postpic" alt="boats Fewa Lake Nepal" />It is very difficult to find any peace and quiet in areas like Pokhara and while it's fun to talk to the local people, especially the children who are almost always sincerely interested in you, whereas the others usually have an end goal of selling you something, I was wanting some peace and quiet. Part of the reason I talked to so many people is that the off-season had arrived in Nepal and very few tourists remain, in fact in my four or five hours of wandering I came across only two other tourists a woman and her daughter bargaining for some embroidered silk shawls.
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-
-The boat I received for my 150 rupees could easily have seated a family of six and two oarsmen and consequently moved sluggishly with one lone paddler seated at the stern. Once I got past the Varahi Temple, a small island temple not fifty meters from shore where a modest and possibly ceremonial fire was burning on the left side which sent a plume of smoke drifting out across the still lake waters and looked, with the jungle hillsides in the background, not unlike some of the foggy river scenes in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now; I turned back toward shore and saw the cake-icing snows covering the peaks of Lamgung Himal and Annapurna II. <img src="[[base_url]]/2005/fewaannapurna.jpg" width="247" height="150" class="postpicright" alt="Annapurna Range Pokhara Nepal" />Such views spurred my paddling on until I was well across the lake skirting the opposite shore among a multitude of water striders darting on the placid, hill-sheltered waters where the views were even more spectacular.
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-
-
-A handful of other boats were on the lake, but I seemed to be the only foreigner out at such a late hour, indeed this was one of many times I felt that I was in fact the only foreign tourist in Pokhara. Most of the other vessels on the water were fishermen bringing in their nets for the day or heavily loaded transport canoes hauling goods from Lakeside to the isolated west shore, which is only reachable by boat or on foot. Here and there were a few people out for fun, including two boats chock full of local school children still in their blue and white uniforms, one boat full of girls and one of boys each racing the other back to the landing. After about forty-five minutes of paddling I reached a point where the views of the Annapurna range were, in the words of an Englishman I met in Katmandu, "gob smacking gorgeous." I put down the paddle and moved to the center of the boat where the benches were wider and, using my bag a cushion, lay back against the gunnel and hung my feet over the opposite side so that they just skimmed the surface of the chilly water. I lay like that for some time snacking on a snickers bar and drinking water as the sun painted very subtly changing orange hues across the mastiff of Machhapuchhre; I thought of all the Nepali people I have met in the last week and a half and how while they are slightly more reserved than Indians they are every bit as friendly and probably even more genuine. I remembered the story a British climber told me about the sherpas that accompanied his expedition, who, despite the fact that their homes were a hard two days hike over mountainous terrain, waited beside the runway until the expedition team's plane had taken off, which, as he told me, was delayed several hours, but the sherpas insisted on waiting. I could picture them standing at the side of the runway smiling and waving as that plane finally lifted off, tucked in its wheels and disappeared. 
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-
-
-I must have laid there an hour or more thinking about how much I have seen and how many little tiny incidents could be entire stories in themselves until finally I noticed the moon rising over the eastern ridge and it occurred to me suddenly that it would soon be dark and I had the better part of an hours paddle back to the landing I departed from. By the time I finally made it back the boats owner was nearly the only person left and he already had his flashlight out to guide me in amongst the boats, but he too seemed unperturbed at waiting.
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-
-
-<h3>Sarangkot</h3>
-
-
-
-The last day I spent in Pokhara I rented a bicycle in the morning and road around Fewa Lake stopping off occasionally to watch fishermen, women watching clothes in the tributary streams and children herding goats on the now barren hay terraces at the upper end of the lake. <img src="[[base_url]]/2005/fewaterrace.jpg" width="200" height="118" class="postpic" alt="Upper Fewa Lake, Nepal" />I rested for a while in the shade of a large tree and several young boys playing on a nearby bridge came over to see if they could ride my bicycle while I rested. While the older boys took off on the bike one younger one who was too small to ride it, sat with me in the shade and I showed him how to use my camera.
-
-
-
-<img src="[[base_url]]/2005/fewaboy.jpg" width="150" height="200" class="postpic" alt="Local Boy, Nepal" />After using up most of the memory I had left he finally got the hang of having to wait after each picture (no instance gratification on my aging equipment) before taking the next one. He was actually pretty good with the camera, in fact he took the picture of the lake above and then like most other children I've met insisted I take his picture. On the way back the chain on my bicycle broke which made for an unplanned and fairly long, but not unpleasant walk around the lake.
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-By the time I made it back to my hotel I was exhausted, but I had only one more chance to get to Sarangkot which is the main overlook for the Annapurna Range. Despite being tired there was no way I was going to be in Nepal and not see the sunset of the Himalayas. I was resting in the garden court of my hotel talking to the owners sun about hiring a taxi to get up to Sarangkot when he offered to take me by motorcycle. I've come to enjoy motorcycles on this trip so I took him up on the offer. Sarangkot is about 1200 meters above Pokhara of which it is possible to climb about 800 of them by road. 
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-
-
-<img src="[[base_url]]/2005/annapurnasunsetII.jpg" width="180" height="200" class="postpicright" alt="Annapurna Nepal" />We parked the bike at the end of the road and began to ascend the nearly vertical stairs that lead up the other 400 meters. I couldn't say how long it took, perhaps an hour, but it was definitely the hardest hiking I've done in quite sometime. For those used to nonmetric systems we climbed roughly 1300 vertical feet in less than a mile of walking. And apparently the Nepalis have never heard of switchbacks.
-
-
-
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-<img src="[[base_url]]/2005/annapurnasunset.jpg" width="320" height="200" class="postpic" alt="Annapurna Sunset, Nepal" />Once we finally made it to the top the exhaustion quickly became a memory and we sat on benches atop the hill looking out at the Annapurna Range. The mountains felt so close you could reach out and touch them. When the sun begin to set the wisps of clouds around the peaks turned into what looked like a pinkish mist, as if someone has airbrushed it into the scene. There is really no way to describe the view and unfortunately my camera was not up to the task either. I have put up the new photos, but they fail to capture it for me, the mountains were in fact much closer than the lens of my camera makes them seem. Nevertheless I have the images in my memory and I am glad that I made this side trip to Nepal. 
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-                <h1 class="p-name entry-title post--title" itemprop="headline">The Taj&nbsp;Express</h1>
-                <time class="dt-published published dt-updated post--date" datetime="2005-12-09T17:49:40" itemprop="datePublished">December <span>9, 2005</span></time>
-            <p class="p-author author hide" itemprop="author"><span class="byline-author" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person"><span itemprop="name">Scott Gilbertson</span></span></p>
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-                    <span class="p-region">Agra</span>, <a class="p-country-name country-name" href="/jrnl/india/" title="travel writing from India">India</a>
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-            <p><span class="drop">W</span>hen I first planned my travel route through India I was woefully ignorant. I tried to see too much too fast. I don't regret what I have done, but were I to do it again I would spend twice as long and try to cover half as much ground. When I return, and return I shall, I will come for at least two months and concentrate on two or three states at the most. As it is I nearly missed the Taj Mahal. </p>
-<p>It wasn't until a couple of days before I headed to Delhi that I realized it would be silly to come all the way to India and not see the Taj Mahal. Luckily for me there is the Taj Express train which runs daily from Delhi to Agra (home of the Taj Mahal) and takes only about two and a half hours each way. On the train into Delhi I met a fellow American named John who had the same plan as I did so we got tickets and somehow managed to get up at 5:30 AM and catch the train.</p>
-<p><break></break></p>
-<p>But before I saw the Taj Mahal I visited the Agra Fort. I have seen about five forts in India now and I went to the Agra Fort more to pass the time than out of any real desire to see anything, but I was pleasantly surprised by the experience. <amp-img alt="Agra Fort, India" height="153" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2005/agrafort.jpg" width="240"></amp-img>The Agra Fort is a massive red sandstone structure constructed by several rulers over a couple hundred years. It was originally built as an actual fort and then later a palace was added in. As is typical of India designs that were started by one ruler and finished by another, the fort has a sort of split personality. Half done in ornately carved red sandstone and half done in also ornately carved white marble, the blend is not so contrasting as you would think.</p>
-<p><amp-img alt="Archways Agra Fort India" height="150" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2005/agraarches.jpg" width="113"></amp-img>The sandstone is finely carved which I know I have said before, but the thing you have to realize is that sandstone crumbles and is probably the weakest stone out there, so to build with it, let alone carve anything out of it, is nothing sort of astonishing and to carve it with the kind of detail that the Indians have is extraordinary. It must be a very frustrating process, I imagine pieces must have frequently chipped or broken and had to be started all over again. Agra Fort was of a more Muslim design than those I saw in Rajasthan and owes this style of scalloped, arched colonnades to the influence of Persia. I was never able to find out for sure, but the Pearl Palace section seemed like it must have been designed by the same minds behind the Taj Mahal as it uses similar inlaid stones to create floral patterns in the marble.</p>
-<p><amp-img alt="Sunbeam Agra Fort, India" height="240" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2005/agrasunbeam.jpg" width="180"></amp-img>In one area of the fort right near the entrance to the main palace there was a very dark room with a single screened window that let through an extraordinary little beam of light like a spotlight of sun that slowly migrated across the floor as the morning went on until, by the time we left, it was gone entirely.</p>
-<p>After a few hours in the Fort, my traveling companion and I walked through a rather large park separating the Fort from the Taj Mahal. Like Prospect Park in Brooklyn this park leaned to the wild rather than cultivated side, though there were some areas with fountains and the like. Unfortunately the smog in Agra is very bad and most of the trees had a brownish cast and thick coating of diesel dust on their leaves. Since he was leaving Delhi by plane the next morning, John wanted to do a little shopping while I opted to just head straight into the Taj Mahal complex. After paying the exorbitant 750 rupee entrance fee, you walk past a few red sandstone structures and hang a left toward the massive red sandstone entry gate which is inscribed with verses from the Koran. </p>
-<p><amp-img alt="Entry Gate, Taj Mahal, India" height="141" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2005/tajentry.jpg" width="200"></amp-img>The room you pass through is rather dark and it was difficult to see much detail on the inside, but I think the point of the darkness was really to emphasis what the entry arch opens up into. As I have mentioned previously the Taj Mahal is one of the Seven Wonders of the World, along with the great wall in China, the pyramids in Egypt etc. Given this level of hype I was fully prepared to be underwhelmed, but in fact I find it difficult to describe what it's like to pass out of the gate and into the Taj Garden area, there are probably at least dozen synonyms of beautiful that I could toss out, but none would begin to cover the experience. I have never in my life seen anything so extravagant, elegant and colossal. It took twenty-two years to build, but standing in front of the garden waterways staring out at the sheer mass of marble that must of flattened at least one mountain, possibly more for its creation, twenty-two years sounds unbelievably fast.</p>
-<p>The main building, the famous one you see in pictures, is the single most massive structure of marble I've ever seen. It sits on a raised platform about twenty meters high and then towers over everything in the surrounding area by at least two hundred meters. The main building is flanked on either side by a pair of mosques, only one of which is actually a mosque, the other, because it faces the wrong way, is purely for symmetry. And symmetry is the theme of the Taj Mahal; the main mausoleum building is perfectly symmetrical and looks exactly the same on all four sides. In each corner, set about one hundred meters from the building are four minarets made of the same semi-translucent white marble that makes up the rest of the mausoleum. The marble is covered in inlaid stone and semi precious minerals some or which are floral patterns and some of which form verses of the Koran. The vaulted archways of the main building have some of the most complicated curves and vaulting you can possibly imagine and yet are made of massive blocks of marble, a marvel of engineering that probably couldn't be repeated today without laser saws. And let me point out that when I say massive and colossal I don't necessarily mean just big, it is big, but not that big, it is, well it's so solid, so unbroken by windows or anything else save archways which really just make it seem even more solid. It's very difficult to capture with words.</p>
-<p><amp-img alt="Taj Mahal India" height="200" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2005/taj.jpg" width="232"></amp-img>I spent about three hours wandering around the garden sitting down on different benches and just staring at the Taj Mahal. It's quite literally indescribable. I finally sat down on one bench on the west side of the garden and tried to let the place sink in a little bit but it just wouldn't do it. It is too big, too massive, too marble, too beautiful to swallow. Where the Louvre would take two lifetimes to see every work of art, the Taj Mahal would take two lifetimes simply for its existence to become real to me. The grounds were crowded with tourists, Indian and Foreign alike, but not so crowded as the guidebooks make it sound, they milled about pointing cameras at the Taj often with friends or lovers in the foreground as if just the building itself would be too much, that it needed some sort of human reference point beside it to make any sense.</p>
-<p><amp-img alt="Taj Mahal Sunset, India" height="240" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2005/tajsunset.jpg" width="200"></amp-img>Perhaps what makes the Taj Mahal so magnificent is that it provokes no singular association, no context, no memory that can be associated with it, but rather seems to call on all your references, all your memories and all your past associations at once so that your brain is overwhelmed and goes completely blank leaving you with the sensation that it might be a threat to your very existence, that the Taj were capable of wiping you to a blank slate and then writing or not writing whatever it might choose, so that the feeling you are left with is that the Taj Mahal seems mythically, spiritually, as well as architecturally, to have risen from nowhere, without equal or context.</p>
-<p>And that is the only stab I will make at describing what is a singular experience, and I will not even begin to tell you what is on the inside in the hope that perhaps one day you will make the journey to see it for yourself. </p>
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-                <h1 class="p-name entry-title post-title" itemprop="headline">The Taj Express</h1>
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-                    <h3 class="h-adr" itemprop="address" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/PostalAddress"><span class="p-region" itemprop="addressRegion">Agra</span>, <a class="p-country-name country-name" href="/jrnl/india/" title="travel writing from India"><span itemprop="addressCountry">India</span></a></h3>
-                     &ndash;&nbsp;<a href="" onclick="showMap(27.17280401257652, 78.04176806317186, { type:'point', lat:'27.17280401257652', lon:'78.04176806317186'}); return false;" title="see a map">Map</a>
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-                <time class="dt-published published dt-updated post-date" datetime="2005-12-09T17:49:40" itemprop="datePublished">December <span>9, 2005</span></time>
-                <span class="hide" itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person">by <a class="p-author h-card" href="/about"><span itemprop="name">Scott Gilbertson</span></a></span>
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-            <p><span class="drop">W</span>hen I first planned my travel route through India I was woefully ignorant. I tried to see too much too fast. I don&#8217;t regret what I have done, but were I to do it again I would spend twice as long and try to cover half as much ground. When I return, and return I shall, I will come for at least two months and concentrate on two or three states at the most. As it is I nearly missed the Taj Mahal. </p>
-<p>It wasn&#8217;t until a couple of days before I headed to Delhi that I realized it would be silly to come all the way to India and not see the Taj Mahal. Luckily for me there is the Taj Express train which runs daily from Delhi to Agra (home of the Taj Mahal) and takes only about two and a half hours each way. On the train into Delhi I met a fellow American named John who had the same plan as I did so we got tickets and somehow managed to get up at 5:30 AM and catch the train.</p>
-<p><break></p>
-<p>But before I saw the Taj Mahal I visited the Agra Fort. I have seen about five forts in India now and I went to the Agra Fort more to pass the time than out of any real desire to see anything, but I was pleasantly surprised by the experience. <img alt="Agra Fort, India" class="postpicright" height="153" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2005/agrafort.jpg" width="240"/>The Agra Fort is a massive red sandstone structure constructed by several rulers over a couple hundred years. It was originally built as an actual fort and then later a palace was added in. As is typical of India designs that were started by one ruler and finished by another, the fort has a sort of split personality. Half done in ornately carved red sandstone and half done in also ornately carved white marble, the blend is not so contrasting as you would think.</p>
-<p><img alt="Archways Agra Fort India" class="postpic" height="150" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2005/agraarches.jpg" width="113"/>The sandstone is finely carved which I know I have said before, but the thing you have to realize is that sandstone crumbles and is probably the weakest stone out there, so to build with it, let alone carve anything out of it, is nothing sort of astonishing and to carve it with the kind of detail that the Indians have is extraordinary. It must be a very frustrating process, I imagine pieces must have frequently chipped or broken and had to be started all over again. Agra Fort was of a more Muslim design than those I saw in Rajasthan and owes this style of scalloped, arched colonnades to the influence of Persia. I was never able to find out for sure, but the Pearl Palace section seemed like it must have been designed by the same minds behind the Taj Mahal as it uses similar inlaid stones to create floral patterns in the marble.</p>
-<p><img alt="Sunbeam Agra Fort, India" class="postpic" height="240" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2005/agrasunbeam.jpg" width="180"/>In one area of the fort right near the entrance to the main palace there was a very dark room with a single screened window that let through an extraordinary little beam of light like a spotlight of sun that slowly migrated across the floor as the morning went on until, by the time we left, it was gone entirely.</p>
-<p>After a few hours in the Fort, my traveling companion and I walked through a rather large park separating the Fort from the Taj Mahal. Like Prospect Park in Brooklyn this park leaned to the wild rather than cultivated side, though there were some areas with fountains and the like. Unfortunately the smog in Agra is very bad and most of the trees had a brownish cast and thick coating of diesel dust on their leaves. Since he was leaving Delhi by plane the next morning, John wanted to do a little shopping while I opted to just head straight into the Taj Mahal complex. After paying the exorbitant 750 rupee entrance fee, you walk past a few red sandstone structures and hang a left toward the massive red sandstone entry gate which is inscribed with verses from the Koran. </p>
-<p><img alt="Entry Gate, Taj Mahal, India" class="postpicright" height="141" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2005/tajentry.jpg" width="200"/>The room you pass through is rather dark and it was difficult to see much detail on the inside, but I think the point of the darkness was really to emphasis what the entry arch opens up into. As I have mentioned previously the Taj Mahal is one of the Seven Wonders of the World, along with the great wall in China, the pyramids in Egypt etc. Given this level of hype I was fully prepared to be underwhelmed, but in fact I find it difficult to describe what it&#8217;s like to pass out of the gate and into the Taj Garden area, there are probably at least dozen synonyms of beautiful that I could toss out, but none would begin to cover the experience. I have never in my life seen anything so extravagant, elegant and colossal. It took twenty-two years to build, but standing in front of the garden waterways staring out at the sheer mass of marble that must of flattened at least one mountain, possibly more for its creation, twenty-two years sounds unbelievably fast.</p>
-<p>The main building, the famous one you see in pictures, is the single most massive structure of marble I&#8217;ve ever seen. It sits on a raised platform about twenty meters high and then towers over everything in the surrounding area by at least two hundred meters. The main building is flanked on either side by a pair of mosques, only one of which is actually a mosque, the other, because it faces the wrong way, is purely for symmetry. And symmetry is the theme of the Taj Mahal; the main mausoleum building is perfectly symmetrical and looks exactly the same on all four sides. In each corner, set about one hundred meters from the building are four minarets made of the same semi-translucent white marble that makes up the rest of the mausoleum. The marble is covered in inlaid stone and semi precious minerals some or which are floral patterns and some of which form verses of the Koran. The vaulted archways of the main building have some of the most complicated curves and vaulting you can possibly imagine and yet are made of massive blocks of marble, a marvel of engineering that probably couldn&#8217;t be repeated today without laser saws. And let me point out that when I say massive and colossal I don&#8217;t necessarily mean just big, it is big, but not that big, it is, well it&#8217;s so solid, so unbroken by windows or anything else save archways which really just make it seem even more solid. It&#8217;s very difficult to capture with words.</p>
-<p><img alt="Taj Mahal India" class="postpic" height="200" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2005/taj.jpg" width="232"/>I spent about three hours wandering around the garden sitting down on different benches and just staring at the Taj Mahal. It&#8217;s quite literally indescribable. I finally sat down on one bench on the west side of the garden and tried to let the place sink in a little bit but it just wouldn&#8217;t do it. It is too big, too massive, too marble, too beautiful to swallow. Where the Louvre would take two lifetimes to see every work of art, the Taj Mahal would take two lifetimes simply for its existence to become real to me. The grounds were crowded with tourists, Indian and Foreign alike, but not so crowded as the guidebooks make it sound, they milled about pointing cameras at the Taj often with friends or lovers in the foreground as if just the building itself would be too much, that it needed some sort of human reference point beside it to make any sense.</p>
-<p><img alt="Taj Mahal Sunset, India" class="postpicright" height="240" src="https://images.luxagraf.net//2005/tajsunset.jpg" width="200"/>Perhaps what makes the Taj Mahal so magnificent is that it provokes no singular association, no context, no memory that can be associated with it, but rather seems to call on all your references, all your memories and all your past associations at once so that your brain is overwhelmed and goes completely blank leaving you with the sensation that it might be a threat to your very existence, that the Taj were capable of wiping you to a blank slate and then writing or not writing whatever it might choose, so that the feeling you are left with is that the Taj Mahal seems mythically, spiritually, as well as architecturally, to have risen from nowhere, without equal or context.</p>
-<p>And that is the only stab I will make at describing what is a singular experience, and I will not even begin to tell you what is on the inside in the hope that perhaps one day you will make the journey to see it for yourself. </p>
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diff --git a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2005/12/taj-express.txt b/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2005/12/taj-express.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index e6e7409..0000000
--- a/bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2005/12/taj-express.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,46 +0,0 @@
-The Taj Express
-===============
-
-    by Scott Gilbertson
-    </jrnl/2005/12/taj-express>
-    Friday, 09 December 2005
-
-<span class="drop">W</span>hen I first planned my travel route through India I was woefully ignorant. I tried to see too much too fast. I don't regret what I have done, but were I to do it again I would spend twice as long and try to cover half as much ground. When I return, and return I shall, I will come for at least two months and concentrate on two or three states at the most. As it is I nearly missed the Taj Mahal. 
-
-It wasn't until a couple of days before I headed to Delhi that I realized it would be silly to come all the way to India and not see the Taj Mahal. Luckily for me there is the Taj Express train which runs daily from Delhi to Agra (home of the Taj Mahal) and takes only about two and a half hours each way. On the train into Delhi I met a fellow American named John who had the same plan as I did so we got tickets and somehow managed to get up at 5:30 AM and catch the train.
-
-<break>
-
-But before I saw the Taj Mahal I visited the Agra Fort. I have seen about five forts in India now and I went to the Agra Fort more to pass the time than out of any real desire to see anything, but I was pleasantly surprised by the experience. <img src="[[base_url]]/2005/agrafort.jpg" width="240" height="153" class="postpicright" alt="Agra Fort, India" />The Agra Fort is a massive red sandstone structure constructed by several rulers over a couple hundred years. It was originally built as an actual fort and then later a palace was added in. As is typical of India designs that were started by one ruler and finished by another, the fort has a sort of split personality. Half done in ornately carved red sandstone and half done in also ornately carved white marble, the blend is not so contrasting as you would think.
-
-
-
-<img src="[[base_url]]/2005/agraarches.jpg" width="113" height="150" class="postpic" alt="Archways Agra Fort India" />The sandstone is finely carved which I know I have said before, but the thing you have to realize is that sandstone crumbles and is probably the weakest stone out there, so to build with it, let alone carve anything out of it, is nothing sort of astonishing and to carve it with the kind of detail that the Indians have is extraordinary. It must be a very frustrating process, I imagine pieces must have frequently chipped or broken and had to be started all over again. Agra Fort was of a more Muslim design than those I saw in Rajasthan and owes this style of scalloped, arched colonnades to the influence of Persia. I was never able to find out for sure, but the Pearl Palace section seemed like it must have been designed by the same minds behind the Taj Mahal as it uses similar inlaid stones to create floral patterns in the marble.
-
-
-
-<img src="[[base_url]]/2005/agrasunbeam.jpg" width="180" height="240" class="postpic" alt="Sunbeam Agra Fort, India" />In one area of the fort right near the entrance to the main palace there was a very dark room with a single screened window that let through an extraordinary little beam of light like a spotlight of sun that slowly migrated across the floor as the morning went on until, by the time we left, it was gone entirely.
-
-
-
-After a few hours in the Fort, my traveling companion and I walked through a rather large park separating the Fort from the Taj Mahal. Like Prospect Park in Brooklyn this park leaned to the wild rather than cultivated side, though there were some areas with fountains and the like. Unfortunately the smog in Agra is very bad and most of the trees had a brownish cast and thick coating of diesel dust on their leaves. Since he was leaving Delhi by plane the next morning, John wanted to do a little shopping while I opted to just head straight into the Taj Mahal complex. After paying the exorbitant 750 rupee entrance fee, you walk past a few red sandstone structures and hang a left toward the massive red sandstone entry gate which is inscribed with verses from the Koran. 
-
-
-
-<img src="[[base_url]]/2005/tajentry.jpg" width="200" height="141" class="postpicright" alt="Entry Gate, Taj Mahal, India" />The room you pass through is rather dark and it was difficult to see much detail on the inside, but I think the point of the darkness was really to emphasis what the entry arch opens up into. As I have mentioned previously the Taj Mahal is one of the Seven Wonders of the World, along with the great wall in China, the pyramids in Egypt etc. Given this level of hype I was fully prepared to be underwhelmed, but in fact I find it difficult to describe what it's like to pass out of the gate and into the Taj Garden area, there are probably at least dozen synonyms of beautiful that I could toss out, but none would begin to cover the experience. I have never in my life seen anything so extravagant, elegant and colossal. It took twenty-two years to build, but standing in front of the garden waterways staring out at the sheer mass of marble that must of flattened at least one mountain, possibly more for its creation, twenty-two years sounds unbelievably fast.
-
-
-
-The main building, the famous one you see in pictures, is the single most massive structure of marble I've ever seen. It sits on a raised platform about twenty meters high and then towers over everything in the surrounding area by at least two hundred meters. The main building is flanked on either side by a pair of mosques, only one of which is actually a mosque, the other, because it faces the wrong way, is purely for symmetry. And symmetry is the theme of the Taj Mahal; the main mausoleum building is perfectly symmetrical and looks exactly the same on all four sides. In each corner, set about one hundred meters from the building are four minarets made of the same semi-translucent white marble that makes up the rest of the mausoleum. The marble is covered in inlaid stone and semi precious minerals some or which are floral patterns and some of which form verses of the Koran. The vaulted archways of the main building have some of the most complicated curves and vaulting you can possibly imagine and yet are made of massive blocks of marble, a marvel of engineering that probably couldn't be repeated today without laser saws. And let me point out that when I say massive and colossal I don't necessarily mean just big, it is big, but not that big, it is, well it's so solid, so unbroken by windows or anything else save archways which really just make it seem even more solid. It's very difficult to capture with words.
-
-
-
-<img src="[[base_url]]/2005/taj.jpg" width="232" height="200" class="postpic" alt="Taj Mahal India" />I spent about three hours wandering around the garden sitting down on different benches and just staring at the Taj Mahal. It's quite literally indescribable. I finally sat down on one bench on the west side of the garden and tried to let the place sink in a little bit but it just wouldn't do it. It is too big, too massive, too marble, too beautiful to swallow. Where the Louvre would take two lifetimes to see every work of art, the Taj Mahal would take two lifetimes simply for its existence to become real to me. The grounds were crowded with tourists, Indian and Foreign alike, but not so crowded as the guidebooks make it sound, they milled about pointing cameras at the Taj often with friends or lovers in the foreground as if just the building itself would be too much, that it needed some sort of human reference point beside it to make any sense.
-
-
-
-<img src="[[base_url]]/2005/tajsunset.jpg" width="200" height="240" class="postpicright" alt="Taj Mahal Sunset, India" />Perhaps what makes the Taj Mahal so magnificent is that it provokes no singular association, no context, no memory that can be associated with it, but rather seems to call on all your references, all your memories and all your past associations at once so that your brain is overwhelmed and goes completely blank leaving you with the sensation that it might be a threat to your very existence, that the Taj were capable of wiping you to a blank slate and then writing or not writing whatever it might choose, so that the feeling you are left with is that the Taj Mahal seems mythically, spiritually, as well as architecturally, to have risen from nowhere, without equal or context.
-
-
-
-And that is the only stab I will make at describing what is a singular experience, and I will not even begin to tell you what is on the inside in the hope that perhaps one day you will make the journey to see it for yourself.
author	luxagraf <sng@luxagraf.net>	2024-10-10 15:18:00 -0500
committer	luxagraf <sng@luxagraf.net>	2024-10-10 15:18:00 -0500
commit	84abb974c8fc4cf74e929d8497b29771e7d9c84a (patch)
tree	dc5552902468569877d280790ffd5d63ac5ce39c /bak/oldluxpages/jrnlold/2005/12
parent	16a38bf5d206b23b79b0cd2b6edd3673d9d9d70b (diff)