Adventures in Goa!

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 flags.  We also took a bizarre yoga class taught by a tiny British man wearing only a pair of linen capri pants.  All of his instructions were very confusing and at one point I was hanging upside down on some ropes. 

Beautiful sunset at Anjuna beach

We also explored Old Goa, which used to be the capital and, according to my guidebook, had a population larger than Lisbon when the Portuguese ruled.  There we visited several very old churches that are still in use and met some very cute puppies that were sunning themselves outside the churches. 

Se Cathedral, the largest church in Asia which took 90 years to build.  It's lopsided because one of its bell towers collapsed in 1776 when it was struck by lightning.  

Basilica of Bom Jesus, which contains the remains of Saint Francis Xavier

There are stray dogs everywhere here and if you'd like to read more about Indian attitudes toward them, here's a really interesting articles in the New York Times to check out: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/27/world/asia/mumbai-blue-dogs.html

A puppy and its snack in Old Goa

After a hair raising ride home up and down a mountain, we spent the rest of the week in the hospital.  Unfortunately, the dermatologist was out of town so I was not able to spend time with her, but we did have the opportunity to visit the interventional radiology clinic.  There, we saw several interesting cases, including a stage 3 squamous cell carcinoma of the tongue.
I'll be in dermatology clinic this week, so check back here for updates and an account of our visit to a shrine to Ganesh and the Dargah of Meerasaheb Avalia (shrine to a Muslim saint)!