Bamberg January 6-31

I was back in Bamberg by the early afternoon of Wednesday January 6 after a routine flight from Mumbai to Frankfurt.

I continued to work on the sites and monuments of Jerusalem project. Hanswulf came from Tübingen on Monday and Tuesday January 18 and 19 to discuss progress.

I also had further class periods of my History and Archaeology of Bilad al-Sham from Justinian to Harun al-Rashid. One of the students had a scheduling conflict for the scheduled class time on Fridays, so on Saturday January 9, we had three class periods one after the other as a block seminar.

I also started work on a new article for the upcoming festschrift of Fred Donner, my PhD supervisor at the University of Chicago.

The weather was cold and snowy. The temperatures rose above freezing for only a couple of days the entire month. The snow on the ground was no obstacle for some bicyclists.

Bicyclists in the snow

My apartment building

The art history mural near my apartment

Most weekends I stayed in Bamberg. The one trip I made was to attend a conference in Berlin on Islamic art museums. On Wednesday January 13 I traveled to Berlin by train with Ilse and Anja, and another student, arriving in time for the opening lecture in the Mshatta Hall of the Pergamon Museum by Oleg Grabar, followed by a reception. On Thursday January 14 I attended the conference sessions in the Pergamon Museum and during the lunch break I toured the museum, taking some photographs of the famous façade from the Umayyad period palace of Mshatta in Jordan.

The Mshatta Facade

On Friday January 15 I attended the morning session of the conference and then in the afternoon went to the newly re-opened Neues Museum, which houses the Egyptology collection. The conference was held as part of the process of planning for the new design of the Islamic Art collection and the rest of the Pergamon Museum. The renovation of the building has gotten underway, in the latest phase of the decades-long renovations of the various museums in Berlin’s Museum Island.

The Pergamon Museum under renovation

I then went to the train station in time for a 4:20 departure back to Bamberg. Unfortunately, the unusually cold weather had been causing problems with the train service. My train was delayed and after making some alternative connections, I finally got to Leipzig at 7:45. By then it was too late to catch the last regional train to Bamberg of the day with my cheap ticket, so I had to take an expensive intercity express, which itself left an hour and a half late. So I finally got back to my apartment at 1:15 am.

Among other complications, on the evening of Tuesday January 26 the transformer unit on the power cord of my lap-top computer shorted out. That blew the fuse in my apartment, leaving half of my apartment without power until the next day. I could not find a replacement cord anywhere in Bamberg, so I had to order it over the internet, which took a few days to arrive. I was able to use my desk-top Apple computer, however.

Over the past months I have had wireless internet access in my apartment using a wireless account of some neighbor that was not password protected. On January 28 I called up Zovi in Shillong on her birthday using Skype over that connection. But on Friday January 29 that neighbor put a password on the account, which meant that I no longer had internet access at home. That was not a major problem, because I can use the wireless internet at the university and in fact it was sometime of a blessing in disguise, since I have tended to waste too much time browsing the internet in my apartment.

Among other things, I also bought a new digital camera; my old camera had malfunctioned at the start of my India trip, so I had to use the lower quality camera on my iPhone for my India photographs. My French class on Tuesday evenings continued. I also went to see the movie Avatar in 3-D and on Sunday January 24 I attended an Irish step dance session for a last time on this stay in Bamberg. When Hanswulf came, he brought the German comedian Loriot to my attention; his humorous segments from decades past can be found on Youtube.

Mumbai January 5

The last leg of my India trip was Mumbai. My overnight bus from Hyderabad arrived only at 2:30 pm, hours late. As a result I had to restrict the plans I had for the day to a visit to the ITREB Centre, which I reached only around 4:00 pm. I had come to the Ismaili Tariqa and Religious Education Board Centre, the administrative office for the educational programs in India of the Nizari Ismaili community, the followers of the Aga Khan, to say hello to the people there, as I have done on a number of previous occasions. A number of the participants in a three-week program at the Henry Martyn Institute continue to work there. At the Centre I spent my time writing two recommendation letters for students who had been participants in the 2005 program at the Henry Martyn Institute; over the years I have written a number of recommendation letters for them.

The 2005 students who are still working at the Mumbai ITREB Centre

That evening I went to a restaurant for dinner with one of those students, Khairunnissa and her husband Rahim. Then at 10:00 I headed to the airport for my early morning flight back to Germany. There were delays in getting all of the passengers checked in and through security, so the flight left late.

Hyderabad January 2-4

My train arrived at the Secunderabad station at 9:15 pm on Monday January 1 and after walking around a bit, I took an autorickshaw to Abids in the center of Hyderabad. I checked into the Hotel Anmol International at 10:30. The hotel is just a block away from where I used to live, across from the Public Gardens. My hotel room was disappointingly poor. For some bizarre reason, the builders had left a gap in the floor along one wall directly above the lobby one floor down. As a result all the noise of the lobby came into my room loud and clear.

The next morning, Tuesday January 2, I walked around the Public Gardens and Abids area. I ended up at the Big Bazaar shopping mall, where I bought a suitcase. In one sign of Hyderabad’s economic development, McDonald’s has now arrived in the city. KFC (Kentucky Fried Chicken) has been around for a few years.

The McDonalds outlet in Abids

At 11:00 I checked out of the hotel and went to Timothy Marthand’s place in Banjara Hills. Timothy Marthand is the world-class concert pianist, with whom I have stayed during my past few trips to Hyderabad. His parents, with whom he lives, run a music school. Also staying in the house was Shanely Niemi, who has been in Hyderabad for a couple of years and is training as a singer. As we chatted, Timothy told me his latest news that the German arts TV channel is making a documentary about him. They had just finished filming for a first brief promo. The three of us went out for lunch and I did some more shopping. That evening they had some dinner guests and Shanely sang some lieder from Robert Schumann’s Frauenliebe cycle to Timothy’s piano accompaniment.

Timothy and Shanely performing

The next day, Wednesday January 3, the three of us went to Barristas, Timothy’s favorite coffee place, where we met a family for conversation. We then went to a newly opened fancy Japanese restaurant, where we were joined by Shanely’s voice instructor from Poland. We returned to Timothy’s place and I sat in on Shanely’s voice lesson for a bit. Later I had a chat with her voice instructor and also listened to Timothy play for a while and chatted with some friends who had stopped by.

The next day, Thursday January 4, I got up early and went to Christy Femila’s near-by apartment to go to the Henry Martyn Institute campus. Christy is one of my former students who received her Masters degree from Luther Seminary. We also picked up Shobha Gosa who had recently finished her Masters program at Oxford University and is now working for HMI again. We arrived at HMI in time for devotions at 9:45, after which I chatted with people, in particular Qadeer Khawaja, the Islamic studies professor at the institute. HMI now has a wireless internet connection throughout the building, so I spent some time browsing the internet. I had lunch in the hostel cafeteria. Diane D’Souza was also around at HMI that day and in the afternoon she gave a presentation about her doctoral thesis.

Diane D’Souza giving her presentation

Shobha at her new desk

At 4:00 I went with Vijay Shastry to his nearby apartment to talk over what to do with the remaining stack of my personal papers that are there. At 5:30 I returned with Christy and Shobha to the city and packed back at Timothy’s house. That evening I took an overnight bus to Mumbai.

Vijayawada December 31-January 1

On the next leg of my travels, my train arrived in Vijayawada at 12:15 pm. I had passed by Vijayawada a few times on a train, but I had never stopped in the city. So after checking into a hotel, I walked around the city for a few hours. The city holds no special appeal. I also hired a car and driver for a trip to the famous early Buddhist site of Amaravathi the next day. I did not do anything special for New Year’s Eve.

New Years greetings on a street in Vijayawada

The next morning January 1, I met my driver at 8:30 am. We first stopped at the Undavalli Buddhist rock-cut caves outside of Vijayawada. Such rock-cut caves are common-place in India and typically have rich sculptures in the interior. That makes them rather more interesting than the famous Nabatean rock-cut tombs in Petra, which have spectacular facades but only bare interiors.

The Undavalli caves

The Buddha carving in the interior

We then proceed to Amaravathi. I first went to the main Hindu temple, and then went to the archaeology museum. and the adjacent Buddhist stupa.

The Amaravathi archaeology museum

Next to the museum is the major Buddhist stupa. Curiously, the stupa was lined with small plastic cups for some sort of ritual observance.

The stupa at Amaravathi

The cups lining the stupa

Back in Vijayawada at 1:15, I walked around the city some more, before returning to the train station, where I took a train to Hyderabad that left at 4:15 pm.

Vishakapatnam December 29-30

My flight arrived in Vishakapatnam at 8:15 am. I was met by a driver, who took me to Rani Sarma’s house. I had gotten to know Rani through our mutual interests in Hyderabad’s heritage and I had helped her with her book about the palaces of Hyderabad, which was published in 2008 under the title, The Deodhis of Hyderabad. Her husband was formerly the principal of the Administrative Staff College in Hyderabad, but they are now living in nominal retirement in Vishakapatnam. Rani is now working on two related studies on the early Buddhist presence along the coast of Andhra Pradesh near Vishakapatnam and on maritime trade, so during my two previous visits, they had taken me to see a few of the many nearby early Buddhist sites.

As we were chatting, Rani remembered that on one of my earlier visits, I had spoken about my family background and how my mother’s family lays claim to having the longest-lasting family round-robin letter, which was started in the late 19th century. Rani decided that the people of Vishakapatnam would want to know about this, so she called up a reporter from The Hindu newspaper. The reporter came right away, and so I soon found myself explaining this bit of family history, all the while wondering whether this was really newsworthy. The article, which gets some things garbled, came out in the January 1 Andhra Pradesh edition of The Hindu. It can easily be found be googling “Schick” and “Hindu”.

In the afternoon we went on an excursion to a site north of Vishakapatnam, where a stream flows into the ocean. It would be a prime spot for a port settlement. I did not see much of anything to point to an ancient site there, although apparently the locals bulldozed two large mounds not too long ago.

Fishermen along the coast

For the next day, Wednesday December 30, Rani had organized another trip to visit a Buddhist site with the district archaeologist, but he had to cancel at the last minute. So Rani and I went on our own to visit Bheemunipatnam, an excavated early Buddhist site north of Vishakapatnam. In the 16th century the Dutch had built a residence on the hill top.

Rani Sarma at one of the early Buddhist stupas at Bheemunipatnam, with the Dutch residence in the background.

Rani with a Buddhist sculpture

On the next morning December 31, I took the 6:00 am train from Vishakapatnam to Vijayawada.

Kolkata December 28

On Monday December 28, I got up at 6:00 to leave early, only to find that the gate to the PCI building was locked. I was unable to climb over the fence, so I had to get the building administrator to open the gate up. I then left at 6:30 and walked to Troop Bazaar and got a private car to take me to the airport in Guwahati.

After about 15 minutes, I realized that between failing to climb the PCI fence and rousing the building administrator, I had gone back to my room and taken my waist pouch off, which I then proceeded to leave behind. So I had to return to the PCI building to pick it up. That meant that I ended up leaving Shillong only at 7:30. But that was not a problem since the trip to Guwahati in a private car was quick and under three hours, so I arrived at the airport at 10:15 with plenty of time to spare.

I was able to use the internet at the airport, before passing through security. The security check was extraordinarily chaotic and crowded and I was so focused on trying to understand why the security person was freaking out about my waist pouch that I got distracted and left behind my laptop computer at the x-ray machine. Fortunately, I realized that after about five minutes, so I was able to retrieve it without any problem.

After that second totally scatter-brained episode of the day, things went better. The flight left a bit late at 12:40 pm and arrived in Kolkata at 2:30. I put my bag in storage and walked around the airport area before taking a taxi at 4:00 to the Howrah train station, which took an hour and 15 minutes due to heavy traffic congestion. I walked around the city center for a while, before returning to the Howrah station later that evening. Rather than check into a hotel, I decided to hang out at the train station. I slept for a few hours stretched out on the floor, like a lot of other people, and kept myself entertained by listened as always to podcasts on my iPhone.

At 4:00 am I took a taxi from the Howrah Station back to the airport, which without traffic took 15 minutes. I got my bag out of storage and checked in for my flight to Vishakapatnam, which took off at 6:35.

Shillong December 26-27

On Saturday December 26 the special Christmas events continued. But first in the morning I went to Troop Bazaar to get some more photo prints made and then went to an internet place near the PCI building, where I bumped into Sony. I went with her to the nearby hostel for women that she is in charge of; the residents, mostly college students, were all away back home in Mizoram over the Christmas holiday, so Sony had moved into a room at the PCI building for a few days. Sony was a classmate of Zovi and Terini, my HMI student, at Aizawl Theological College in Mizoram.

Sony at the entrance to her hostel building

In the afternoon I went to a 1:30 church service, after which there was a fellowship meeting where some community orphans performed.

The orphans

Then came the big annual community dinner at the church. The meal consisted of rice with various chunks of mystery meat and innards that I did not find very appetizing.

The line up for the community dinner

Zovi on the left and Sony on the right with me at the community dinner

After the dinner, Zovi, Sony and I joined Rev. Pachuau’s family for further chatting in his apartment.

The next day December 27 was a Sunday, so there was the usual church service at 10:00. Over the past week, I had been to more than enough church services, all of which were completely in Mizo. But during the fellowship times, I had a number of interesting conversations with church members who spoke English well, and everybody was very welcoming.

The Presbyterian Mizo Church in Shillong

After the service I joined the fellowship for a while before I went to Zovi’s place, where we chatted for a while, later joined by Sony.

The back side of Zovi’s place

After we had lunch, we three went to the PCI building, where I paid my guest room bill, while they went shopping. At 4:00 we went back to Zovi’s place, some 15 minutes walk from the PCI building, where they cooked dinner. At one point the accumulating steam inside the chili peppers caused them to explode, with a couple landing on the floor. The exploding chili peppers released pungent fumes that provoked a bout of coughing and sneezing until the fumes dissipated.

Zovi and Sony cooking the exploding chili peppers

After the dinner, we watched an Indian league football match on TV. It seems that a couple of Mizo players are on one of the teams, so Zovi is a fan. We then said our goodbyes and I returned to the PCI building and packed for my early departure next morning.

Shillong December 24-25

On Thursday December 24, my day started off with relief when Rev. Pachuau was kind enough to go to a nearby taxi station to retrieve my cell phone that had dropped out of my jacket pocket in the van we were in yesterday. After that problem was resolved, I did some sightseeing in the morning. I went with his two sons to the Don Bosco Ethnographic Museum only to find it closed on Christmas Eve. We then went to a butterfly museum, which was open, and then went to the public library, which also was closed.

The Butterfly Museum

After that excursion I walked around the city and went to the main Roman Catholic cathedral. It was recently painted blue and had a nice Stations of the Cross processional way.

The Roman Catholic Cathedral

One of the Stations of the Cross

I also went to an internet place, got some prints made from the photographs of the past two days, and bought some more video CDs at Planet M in Troop Bazaar. That evening I went with Rev. Lalramliana Pachuau’s family to the Mizo church for a service at 7:00, followed by carol singing and a communal meal until 10:45. That evening for me was the highlight of the Christmas holiday.

The next day, Christmas, I joined Rev. Pachuau’s family for breakfast. We then went to a church service at 10:00. After the service ended at 11:15 I picked up the photo prints that I had ordered yesterday and returned to the church in time for the second service at 1:30, which ended at 3:00. After tea I went to Rev. Pachuau’s apartment for dinner, before leaving for a service at another Mizo church in another part of the city at 6:00. The temperatures there were hovering just above freezing. After the service we had tea and then made a social visit. I got another nice shot of Rev. Pachuau and his wife Marovi on that occasion.

Rev. Lalramliana Pachuau and his wife Marovi. Note the charcoal heater at their feet

That evening back at the PCI guest room, I copied onto my laptop computer a number of video CDs of the popular Mizo Gospel singer Lalruotmawi that I had borrowed from Rev. Pachuau. Getting some CDs of her music was one of my objectives in the trip, since my father finds her music particularly attractive. She sings her Gospel songs to American Country-Western-style music; some samples can be found on Youtube. In the Presbyterian Mizo church services I have been to, however, they sing hymns to more traditional Mizo melodies, using the tonic solfa method of notation. The Mizo language is written using the Latin alphabet. One of the few words of Mizo that I have learned is “Lal”, meaning Lord or King, and is used in many personal names.

Mawlynnong December 23

On Wednesday December 23 I went sightseeing again. There was mix-up about the van and driver, so Zovi, a friend, the teenage children of Rev. Pachuau, and I did not get underway until after 11:00. My friends had mostly not been to any of the places we visited today or yesterday.

We went to Mawlynnong village, an eco-village that advertises itself as the cleanest village in India, if not Asia. They have waste baskets all along the various paths in the village, although I did spot a pile of trash behind one rock. The villagers have set up a bamboo lookout tower with a view down to the plains just across the border into Bangladesh. The landscape has lush vegetation, a sharp contrast to yesterday.

Mawlynnong village with the waste baskets

The bamboo lookout tower with some trash behind the rock

Me with Bangladesh in the background

We then went to see a balancing rock outside the village.

The Balancing Rock

Then we had picnic lunch of rice (what else?) before going to a most remarkable living root bridge formed out the roots and trunks of a number of trees.

The picnic lunch

The Group at the Living Root Bridge

The Living Root Bridge

The Living Root Bridge

On the way back in Shillong we got stuck in a traffic jam that delayed our return for about an hour and a half. Once back at the PCI building, I joined a church fellowship group in the apartment of Rev. Pachuau. It happened to be his and his wife Marovi's 25th wedding anniversary.

The fellowship group. Rev. Lalramliana Pachuau is playing the guitar and his wife Marovi is next to him in the red shawl.

Cherrapunji December 22

On Tuesday December 22 I went sightseeing. I hired a van with a driver for the day and Zovi, her sister and her friend Sony and four of the teenage children of Rev. Pachuau joined me. We went to Cherrapunji, the place that receives the highest annual rainfall of any place on the planet at more than 11 meters / 450 inches per year and more; in one peak year there was 23 meters / 900 inches of rainfall. The title however is disputed with the nearby village of Mawsynram. We first stopped near Cherrapunji village at the Nohkalikai Falls, the fourth-highest waterfall in the world.

The Nohkalikai Falls

Cherrapunji is just about the most bizarre place I have ever been. Even though it receives more rainfall than anywhere else, the area suffers from drought, with only dried-out low-lying scrub brush to be seen. Meghalaya as a whole consists of a high mountain plateau. Cherrapunji is on the edge of the high plateau, right where the plateau drops off at an exceptionally high sheer cliff, as the photograph of Nohkalikai Falls shows. During the summer months of the monsoon season, moisture-filled winds blow up from the Bay of Bengal across the wide, low-lying plains of Bangladesh but are then funneled into narrower valleys and then hit the cliffs. The winds are pushed up and rapidly cool to produce uniquely heavy torrential downpours in the immediate area. That makes perfect meteorological sense.

But why the area is so dry remains a mystery, since I have not been able to find anything on the internet that explains that satisfactorily. Deforestation is cited as a cause, but that does not make much sense, because it does not explain why there seem to be no lakes, ponds or water reservoirs in the area. It seems that the locals do not harvest much of the rainfall to use throughout the year. Instead they have to have water brought in by tanker truck for much of the year. It only rains during the monsoon months, and not much during the rest of the year (there was some fog, but no rain during my week in Shillong).

I do not know how much more forested the area was in the past, but today the only trees around are in sheltered low-lying areas or on the mountain slopes. In most areas the ground surface consists of bare bedrock with only the thinnest of soil covering.

The landscape around the Nohkalikai Falls

We then went to the nearby Mawsmai natural cave, which extended for a couple hundred meters.

The group at the entrance to the Mawsmai Cave

The group in the Mawsmai Cave

Along the way to the Mawsmai Cave I spotted a store identified as a cement dealership. In an episode of intercultural bewilderment, my friends just could not understand why I found it odd to note the other sign advertising pure honey for sale. They recognized of course that the store was in fact a general store that sells a variety of products, not just the combination of cement and honey that is advertised.

The cement dealership that also sells honey

We then went to the nearby Mawsmai Eco-Park, where I saw the first foreigner since leaving Delhi; throughout the week I only saw a handful of foreigners in Shillong. Here again the landscape is drier than even the bleak prairie of South Dakota, where my father grew up on a farm.

The Mawsmai Eco-Park

The Mawsmai Eco-Park

The Mawsmai Eco-Park with some ancient monoliths

But one indication of the amount of rain that can fall during the monsoon season is the walk-way bridge over a water course that is now nearly dry.

The Mawsmai Eco-Park Bridge

On the way back, we stopped at the Elephant Falls on the outskirts of Shillong.

The Elephant Falls

We also stopped at a scenic outlook over the city of Shillong, but it was too misty and cloudy to see much of anything.

Shillong December 20-21

I began my week-long stay in Shillong by walking around the neighborhood in the morning of Sunday December 20, before returning to the Presbyterian Church of India building, where I met the family of Rev. Lalramliana Pachuau, the administrative secretary, who lives in an apartment in the building. I went with them to the 10:00 church service at the nearby church of the Mizo community, where I met Zovi. After the hour-long service, I chatted with people and then I walked around the city center with Zovi and a friend of hers. We stopped at the Ward’s Lake public park and paid a social call on a family, before ending up at another Presbyterian Church of India building where Zovi lives. We talked about my plans for the next week, and then I returned to my hotel.

Zohmangahi Rokhum aka Zovi or Zohmai

The Presbyterian Church of India building where she lives

My friend Zovi and most of the people I met during my time in Shillong are Mizos, the principal ethnic tribal group in the nearby Northeast state of Mizoram, who are in Shillong for work. I had met Zovi in April of 2006, when I traveled to Mizoram to meet Terini, one of my students at the Henry Martyn Institute during the 2005-2006 academic year, and we stayed in contact. I had wanted to make another visit to the very interesting Northeast states of India, and things fell into place for me to come to Shillong to visit her now. Zovi started working for a women’s outreach program at the Presbyterian Church of India office a few months ago.

A photo from April 2006 in Aizawl, Mizoram. Zovi is in the yellow dress on the far right and Terini is in the red blouse on the left.

The next day, Monday December 21, I decided to check out of my hotel and move into the guest room of the PCI building. My small hotel room was unpleasantly cold; there being no heating and since it faced north, no chance for sunshine to warm the room up in the daytime; overnight lows dropped down close to freezing. Also there was no food available at the hotel, so there was no reason to want to stay there rather than in the guest room at the PCI building, which was warmer, more spacious with a private bathroom and cheaper as well – US$6.50 versus $11 per night. I ate meals a number of times at a nice enough Chinese restaurant up the street and also bought supplies of snacks to eat.

After checking into the PCI guest room, two of the sons of Rev. Pachuau went with me to the Troop Bazaar shopping district in the city center. I walked around and stopped at a Planet M music and video chain store, where I bought a number of movies in video CD format, which at about US$3-4 per movie, is much cheaper than DVDs. I returned to the PCI building at 3:00 to meet Zovi. We went to a nearby friend’s house to join a group paying a Christmas visit to a children’s hospital in the city. However, it turned out that there were no Mizo children patients in the hospital, so we soon returned to the friend’s house for a meal and conversation.

Afterwards I walked around until finally, after having searched for the past couple of days, I found an internet outlet. But I was only able to use the internet for short while before it closed at 6:00. So I walked around until I eventually found another internet outlet, only to have it close at 7:30, shortly after I arrived.

One thing that surprised me about Shillong is the overwhelming prevalence of English. Virtually all shop signs are in English only; only a very few government office have signs in Hindi as well. One sign that amused me was an advertisement for “Indian Made Foreign Liquor”. As was explained to me, that means foreign-type, distilled alcohol produced elsewhere in India, rather than the local varieties of moonshine.

The Indian Made Foreign Liquor sign