Aleze Goes To ...

Taj Mahal Palace Hotel and a typical crowd of selfie-takers We are safely back in the US, but I wanted to do one last post about our last few days in India.  They started out with a trip on the night train from Miraj to India.  The train trip was uneventful (if you don't count trying to use the bathroom while the train was bumping over the tracks), but our driver to the train station was a hoot.  He told us that Miraj was the city of 3 D's: Dust, Doctors and Donkeys.  This is a pretty accurate summary of the main features of Miraj :)  After a very bumpy train ride, we arrived in Mumbai.  On our first day, we visited the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya, or King Shivaji Museum.  Shivaji was the founder of the Maratha Empire, which ruled India in the 18th century, and many places in Mumbai are named after him, including the airport and a train station.  The museum is a beautiful old building surrounded by a perfectly manicu...

Sleepy sheep on the sidewalk in Miraj On our last weekend in Miraj, we took a tour of the area's religious sites.  We started in Sangli at the Ganpati Temple.  Ganpati is another name for Ganesh, the Hindu god of food fortune and remover of obstacles.  He has an elephant head and rides on a ratlike creature.  The drive there went very smoothly, which is unusual for India, until our driver tried to pass through a traffic circle and collided with a truck!  It was a minor fender bender but drew a very large crowd while the drivers argued over who was at fault.  The haggling resulted in our driver receiving 200 rupees or about $3.  Unlike the traffic, the temple was very peaceful with multiple shrines to Ganesh decorated in offerings of flowers and small piles of sugar and rice.  We checked our shoes at the door and tipped a few sari-clad ladies to make sure no one walked away with them. Ganpati Temple Shop selling flower offerings in Mi...

We started our third week in India with a trip to Goa.  Goa is a tiny state just south of Maharashtra, where Miraj is located.  It was a Portuguese colony for 400 years until 1961 and the architecture and food reflects that Portuguese influence.  Goa is also a holiday destination for European and Russian hippies, so many of the restaurants we visited offered kombucha and wheatgrass juice.  While in Goa, we stayed in a cottage by Anjuna beach, where the cows and people sunbathed together.  On our first day we visited Vagator and Chapora, where there is a 17th century Portuguese fort.  We explored the fort and the beach, which was very beautiful and not as crowded with pink tourists and sari wearing ladies offering to henna us as Anjuna beach.  Wall leftover of Chapora Fort Beautiful Vagator beach While in Anjuna, we explored the beach and the tiny roads packed with motorbikes connecting holiday homes and restaurants decorated with prayer ...

Pink apartment buildings seen on a walk through Miraj Week two in India has been quite the adventure.  We started the weekend off with a trip to Sangli, which is a town north of Miraj and apparently known as the turmeric city of Maharashtra because the spice is produced and traded there.  We went there to go to the mall, though, not buy turmeric.  The best part of the visit was the trip to and from Sangli.  We went with two of the residents from the Cardiology department and on the was there we rode of the backs of their motorbikes!  This was a really fun way to experience the traffic here, weaving between trucks, cars and carts pulled by cows.  The mall was just like the mall at home, with a movie theater and a Gold's gym 😂  except with more kurtas for sale.  The trip back was even more exciting because we took our first tuk tuk ride (tuk tuk is the cuter name for auto rickshaw). The mall crew! On Sunday, we went to church with the w...

Today is my fifth day in India so I though I would write a little bit about my trip and Miraj, where I will be staying this month.  Miraj is a city in southern Maharashtra and has a population of around 355,000 people.  We took a 12 hour (!!!) train ride from Mumbai to Miraj the day after we arrived in India.  The train was very crowded and busy with many people getting on and off at each stop and men walking up and down the aisle selling chai and snacks.  When we got to our stop, we walked determinedly away from the man who had come to pick us up because we thought he was just bothering us, which was the case with all of the men at the train station in Mumbai.  But we eventually slowed down enough for him to introduce himself and he brought us safely back to the guesthouse. The guesthouse where we are staying is called Fletcher Hall.  It's an old-fashioned building surrounded by houses for doctors at Wanless Hospital, where we are rotating, some in...