Diary

In the morning picked up one of my grandchildren from the railway station in Modi’in (one of two such drives today, because in the evening I had to pick up son). I had a meeting with the accounts department people at the office, then spent the morning doing some cleaning and laundry (but then, forgot to hang the machine till about midnight, discovering it only on my room and lights out check.)

When D came home, she arrived with the negatives scanner I had ordered from China a couple of months ago. I was sure it was lost in the mail, and couldn’t do much about it because I had accidentally indicated that I’d received it. So that was a big surprise. With these orders from China, you never know whether it will arrive in a matter of weeks, or of months, or who will deliver it, or to where. The scanner is mainly for the archival work on old film at the office, but it can be useful for scanning personal film as well. I already tried it, and am quite happy with the results: the challenge is to keep dust away from the negatives, because the slightest speck of dust creates a white spot on the negative.

In the afternoon we visited our neighbours, where we said bye to R who is going back to the UK, where she and her husband are spending a year. In our neighbours’ yard, I found a good specimen of Lantana, a flower I’ve been wanting to photograph (above).

I was telling our neighbour about the interesting novel, “A Life of Holes”, which was narrated to Paul Bowles by Driss ben Hamed Charhadi, a poor and illiterate Moroccan, if Bowles can be believed. I think B would like it.

Travel plans?

I talked with D today about the possibility of continuing the Chemin Le Puy in France, from the point that I had left off in 2021, in Moissac. If I want to do that, it’s either now or in September-October. But we might want to go somewhere else at that time, such as India. I discovered that there are cheap flights to Barcelona, from where it is possible to take a train or a bus.

So it’s a possibility. I’m not sure I actually want to get away just now, because I’m enjoying being at home, but it could be nice. D might join me for part of the way.

Search

My default #search engine is SearX. But what’s the story with DuckDuckGo and Firefox? It used to be there as one of the options. When it disappeared, I installed the DDG extension; however this didn’t actually do anything. It did not include DDG as a search option and (fortunately) did not succeed to make DDG the default engine. Next I tried to include DDG in what should be the standard way: using FF’s OpenSearch option, but it seems that DDG does not play nicely with OpenSearch either. Further, its API no longer works with SearX, so it is not possible to receive DDG’s results in SearX. I no longer trust DDG – I also just read about the deal they made (though last year rescinded) with Microsoft.

Kfar Hittim

Went up to the Sea of Galilee with the family, staying in Kfar Hittim, in the large house of an Israeli-Indian couple who seem to spend most of their time in India. We were 12; 8 adults and four kids. Kfar Hittim is near the place where Salah ad-Din’s forces won a decisive battle against the crusadors towards the end of the 12th century. It’s said that they won by cutting the crusadors off from the lake and then starting a wildfire where they were encamped. The battle decimated the crusador forces. Afterwards, more than 200 knights were beheaded, and the ordinary soldiers were enslaved. The king and some of the barons were shown mercy.

In 1948 the Palestinians were forced out of the area; the village of Hittin and others were evacuated or destroyed.

An earlier battle was fought in the time of Herod against rebels that were holding out in difficult to access caves in the cliffs of Arbel. They were defeated when Herod’s forces sent down soldiers in chests, who set fires at the cave entrances and smoked out the rebel fighters and their families.

The same caves must have been an ideal domicile for the paleolithic people who earlier inhabited them, in an area then teeming with wildlife.

The whole area is geologically extreme, a landscape formed by extinct volcanos and earthquakes, the sheer cliffs plunging almost 400 meters – and the lake itself well below sea level. It’s a small part of the Syrian-African rift – a feature that goes all the way down to Africa’s great lake system. A great tear in the earth’s crust, which till today is disturbed by constant tremors, though most of them are too faint to feel. We looked down over the valley from the edge of one of the two “Horns” of Hittim, as these high cliffs at Arbel were known.

The Climate Book

I pre-ordered The Climate Book, by Greta Thunberg from Kobobooks, for my ereader and it arrived in time for the weekend. It looks promising: a kind of one-stop-shop climate primer with chapters by more than a hundred experts, thinkers and writers.

Villa Triste

I enjoyed this Patrick Modiano novel as much as another of his that I read last year. His novels are often short, which suits me, as I read very slowly in French and often need to consult my Kobo reader’s French dictionary. I like his particular style of “auto-fiction” and will probably read more of his books.

Lupin

A similar exercise is watching French TV series on Netflix. It’s quite laborious as I need to stop the video often to absorb the subtitles; an hour long show can last a couple of hours, that way. Eventually I will hopefully calm down and stop trying to catch every mumbled throw-away bit of idiom. I tend to approach languages as I did when learning Sanskrit – a mistake, no doubt.

“Lupin” itself is entertaining, though often quite ridiculous. I don’t know if it will continue to hold my interest.

India

During the weekend we were discussing our travels. M said that her impression of India was that, more than in other places, she felt that people were very close to the earth and to the basic realities of life. I know what she means, but I’m not sure that it’s true anymore. It seems to me that many Indians are caught up in illusions and frivolities that have little to do with basic needs.

They can apparently now afford to forget all about the “realities of life”, and instead promote a toxic blend of nationalism and religious fundamentalism. Here are people trying to trying to persuade the courts that mosques that have been standing for a millenium are actually Hindu temples; or that somewhere in the Taj Mahal is a secret cupboard crammed with the Hindu idols pillaged from an earlier temple. Inspired by the destruction of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya, They would like to see thousands more mosques either destroyed or converted into temples.

Fanatics there always are; the problem is that in modern India they are increasingly supported by the government, the police, and sometimes by the judiciary. Fanatics are no longer a small minority but the power in the land. They enjoy popular support. The situation has many parallels to Israel, whose government is also increasingly in the hands of rightwing pyromaniacs. But there are differences. The political agenda here is different and more focused. It’s less about religion, more about colonisation. Zionism and Hindutva may both be nationalistic ideologies that seem to hark back to an earlier era, but they are not quite comparable.

Back home from Camino

We’re back home from the Camino: this time the Camino Portugues. It went well, despite mishaps. The principle mishap was getting COVID about 3 days into the walk. Both I and D got it, by turn. It wasn’t so significant – just fever and a cold for about 3 days – but it slowed us down. We mostly rested those days, and took private rooms, of course, rather than dorms, and wore masks everywhere.

So we didn’t complete the planned 200+ kilometers, and did perhaps 160. The walking was the best part. Of the towns, we enjoyed visiting the old cities. Porto’s amazing – and we spent about 3 days there – but overly touristic. Like other famous cities, it suffers badly from its popularity.

Porto, photo of river and skyline

As we combined the coastal way with the traditional central route, we enjoyed both the coast and the inland areas. Inland, along the Portuguese and Spanish parts, often actually means wide river estuaries. These have been compared to the fjords of Norway.

In Porto, I was inspired by the museums, as I sometimes am. The National Museum in Porto was mostly closed for renovations, but had an amazing exhibition on Magellan – whose expedition was the first to circumnavigate the world. I had never considered the singularity of his attainments and courage – virtually discovering the Pacific Ocean (which he named) and then successfully navigating across it. His expected trans-Pacific voyage of “3 or 4 days” took 3 months and 20 days. Learning about the expanse of the oceans in comparison with the size of the land areas changed human perception of the planet. Magellan’s voyage was really a leap into the unknown – more so than the voyages of Columbus, a few years earlier. I wonder if the men who sailed in those ships would have done so had they known what the voyage would entail? Of 5 ships and hundreds of men, only 18 made it around the world. The rest died of hunger, disease, in battles with indigenous peoples, or in mutinies. The men of one ship fled home earlier, escaping during the search for a passage through the straits at the bottom of Chile. Magellan himself perished in a battle in the Philippines. It was only a stroke of luck that the ship’s chronicler, an Italian by the name of Antonio Pigafetta, made it home and spread the story.

We also visited the Seralves museum, which is on the outskirts of the city. There were several interesting exhibitions. A common theme, perhaps, was learning to see the world differently. This was true of the filmmakers shown, especially Manoel de Olveira – whose career spanned decades: he began making films in the silent era and continued till close to his death, at the age of 106. In the interviews, it was stated that he didn’t believe in the reality of the world as most of us see it. The same idea – of learning to perceive the world in new ways – was there in all the other exhibitions, including those of Rui Chaves and Maria Antonia Leite Siza. The latter was a young artist of the ’60s who died at the age of 32. The exhibition traces her drawings from the advent of her short career till close to her death. The covers of her bed, in which she enjoys to spend so much time in dreams becomes in the drawings a pupis, through which she rises like a butterfly. Agnès Varda is both a filmmaker and a photographer. In the exhibition is a work on potatoes, in which one sees this earthy vegetable transformed into an object of wonder. The images are shown in a room in which the floor is covered with actual potatoes, so that their fusty odour permeates the space.

I suppose that what art can do for us is to help us change our perception of the world, in this way. The museum is set in a beautiful park; and the park, as well as the architecture, enhances the same purpose.

Seralves Park, Porto

For example, one of the features is a “treetop walk” that allows us to explore nature in a new way. And, back on ground level, there was a venerable chestnut tree, whose characteristic spiny fruit littered the entire surroundings like objects fallen from space. So the park, which we explored afterwards, helped to transport the inspiration gleaned from the exhibitions, outwards into nature.

Seralves Park, Porto: acorns on the ground

Modern Travel

I decided to join D for part of her planned trip to Plum Village, so I’ll be there for her “Lamp Transmission” ceremony. That meant booking flights. There are less options today, following the pandemic, and many trips to Bordeaux involve travel of 20 – 30 hours or more. I struggled for a couple of hours with Expedia, trying to find something cheap and convenient, but eventually gave up. D came to the rescue with E-Dreams, which, in this case, seemed to have more options with the cheapo companies like Veuling, Wiz and whatever. She was able to find a cheaper flight, which I eventually booked.

One thing I learned along the way is that it is much easier to book a flight to France than to order a rail ticket. (It’s true that Air France offers rail arrangements sometimes instead of connecting flights.) I have previously had more success with the SNCF website (and previously have had their telephone app), but this time the experience was awful. First, in order to make any booking, one has to log in. For that to happen, after the password log-in they send a confirmation code by email. After that there’s a CAPTCHA. That’s already three kinds of verification. But a couple of minutes later, a message popped up telling me that I had been blocked, due to suspicious activity, so I simply had to give up. I was using an up-to-date Vivaldi browser, which uses the same rendering engine as Chrome and matches it for all other browsing features. I have Privacy Badger installed, but nothing that blocks ordinary javascript.

Travel is becoming quite a nightmare in our era. Booking rail tickets in France, India, and no doubt in many other countries, is a horrible experience dressed up in the guise of being sophisticatedly modern. Here in Israel we just had a foreign guest who took a bus from the local junction, only to discover that tickets can no longer be purchased on the bus itself. She managed to reach Jerusalem only due to the kindness of a passenger.

Plane, bus and rail companies, whether private or government-run are guilty of the worst form of ableism. Our modern pretenses against all kinds of discrimination against people with disabilities, are a complete sham. They challenge even mentally fit people with their byzantine arrangements, and only work very well if one is equipped with a smartphone full of surveillance apps. The situation is getting worse, not better. If all of this somehow helped to reduce carbon emissions, by making travel less popular, there might be an advantage, but the ones who travel most are not those who feel challenged by these difficulties. And the relative complexity and inconvenience of public ground transportation favors travel by planes and private cars.

Server

I made good progress today, especially on the matter of file transfers. I discovered earlier that although WebDAV had seemed to work, it actually is only presenting the server folders in read-only format. I cannot change anything. The configuration there is too complex and I gave up on WebDAV just as I’ve given up on GIT, so it was back to FileZilla. Then I discovered Rsync, which, although I knew about it, had never actually used. It’s powerful and amazing. It’s also very quick (at least for what I need it for) and simple to use from the commandline, once you get the syntax right. Furthermore, it’s something that I can execute from within Emacs (where I’m now composing this blog).

So now, for blog posts, I only need to a) save the file b) publish it locally and c) rsync it to the server. All of this happens within emacs itself. When I grow more proficient, I will probably set up a macro to handle these operations even more quickly. Update: done, easily enough. That’s a nice thing about emacs, and probably the Lisp programming that underlies it – that it can be used on a simple level, but provides the opportunity to grow with it. When Stallman talks about the advantage in open source programs that the code is up-front and visible, people like me think that that’s all well and good, but the majority of us are completely unable to read code. However when I look at Lisp code, understanding it seems within reach.

Browser colors

I noticed today that the colors in Vivaldi are brighter than those in SeaMonkey or Chrome. The blue color that I have been using in this blog appears purplish in Vivaldi. I tried to find something about this in the settings and it looks like there may be a configuration option for this, but I didn’t succeed in changing anything.

Still in Kochi

Still enjoying Fort Kochi, a town that is inherently interesting and enjoyable. Perhaps too many tourists, though thanks to them there are so many guest houses, restaurants and cafes. You can’t have it all ways. But the kind of tourists seems to be wealthier and older than in most places in India, which influences somewhat the prices. There are still enough backpackers to ensure that there are also cheaper places to stay and eat. Prices go as low as 250 Rupees or less for accommodation in dormitories. I would not stay in such places. I have a pleasant, though non-A/C room with attached bathroom. It’s clean and in a good location, close to the main tourist area, but on a quiet street.

I’m having trouble sleeping at nights due to the heat. I sleep best in the early morning. Then I wake up refreshed as if I’ve had a full night’s sleep. It’s true that I often have naps in the daytime. It’s always been a puzzle to me why hot weather makes it impossible to sleep at night but is conducive to sleep in the daytime.

When they are open, I have breakfast at the vegan dhaba – just about the same breakfast I have at home: granola (actually muesli) with chopped fruits and coconut milk, together with a cup of coffee. The fruits usually consist of pineapple, papaya, pomegranate and maybe apple. I refill my water bottle there too.

I have lunch in mid afternoon in any one of various restaurants, then have a snack in the evening – a chaat, a sandwich or a dahi puri or something.

In the afternoon to early evening I walk on the promenade by the beach and sometimes sit on the rocks. There’s always a pleasant breeze blowing from the sea. There are cultural activities, but these are of the kind specifically for tourists.
I’ve enjoyed taking many photos, just with my mobile camera, while here.

Kochi 2

There’s a nice little vegan dhaba around the corner that’s run by two Japanese women. Yesterday I arrived just a little early for lunch and so had to eat there a second breakfast; a kind of muesli that was was more like a bowl of smoothie. There I got talking to a young English guy called Joseph who was in India for the first time. He’d just been writing his diary. I was telling him about the many Malayalis who come to Israel and the Gulf countries. He’d read an article about the mistreatment of foreign workers in Dubai, and said that after reading it he’d decided to cross Dubai off his list of destinations. I said that if I started like that I would need to cross off Israel, where I live, and India, which I often visit, and there would be no end to it. He hadn’t heard a thing about the latest political developments in India and said that he’d stopped watching the news.

I had a better meal there today; a miso soup and plate of mixed vegies and beans; good and worth the money. The place is frequented by foreigners, as far as I can see. A young Indian man stopped by on his bike and asked for some juice – maybe papaya? The woman told him they didn’t have any. So he asked for a smoothie, and she also said she didn’t have any. So, a little flustered, he walked out. I wonder if my understanding of the situation was correct? If so, it may be that she had weighed him up in a certain way. He hadn’t sat down to read a menu, as other people would, but walked right up to the counter. Maybe she decided that he was really there because he’d seen a pretty foreign girl seated in front. Probably her reaction was based on some previous experience.

Yesterday I was seated at a juice bar, Kochi Walla, just next to the field where all the young guys play informal cricket games, all day long. Five guys were seated there, as usual, chatting away the evening. Their motor scooters were parked out in front. A man walked by wearing an immaculate white vesti and kameez. All the young guys politely got on their feet and greetings were exchanged. I decided this must be a local politician – someone they all evidently knew and felt required to show respect to. Next door there are a couple of small municipal buildings; one called the “village office”, which is a bit strange, for a city, and another which seems to house an anti-drugs program, as there lots of scary murals about the damage caused by drugs, on the surrounding wall.

Enjoying Cochin

I arrived on Monday morning in Kochi, a direct flight on Arkia. The plane was full of middle-aged to elderly Israeli tourists, many of whom appeared to be part of organized tour groups. A few young people; two or three Malayalis returning home. But it was an easy flight. Arkia, unlike what seems to have been the arrangement a few months ago, took a route that skirted Saudia Arabia, heading down the Red Sea as far as Djibouti, then turning east. So it was longer than in could have been. But since it was a night flight, it didn’t make any difference. While on the plane and waiting for departure, I booked a room in a guest house. Although this wasn’t necessary, I think it makes a better impression with the immigration people if one has an address to give upon arrival. The room wasn’t great; full of mosquitoes, and cockroaches emerging from the bathroom grate at night. By the second day I found something more suitable, though still inexpensive.

In Fort Kochi this is at about the end of the tourist season. Southern India is beginning to heat up. I was once here in August, during the monsoon time, and it was more pleasant. But early morning and from about 4 PM the temperatures are fine. Today, I went out at lunch time, intending to visit the nearby Indo-Portuguese museum, but finding it closed, took a longer walk, shaded by my umbrella. The latter I bought in Kumily last year, but it was made in Aleppy, not far from here. As Dorab says, in India it’s always a good idea to carry an umbrella, because it is good against both the rain and the sun. And Indian umbrellas usually have a silver underlining against the rays of the sun.

I walked along the road that goes down by the ferry port, hoping to find a small cafe I had remembered from my earlier visit, but it seems to have gone. I found another, the Los Angeles cafe, which, despite its name, was very nice. I had a vegetable thali (supposedly a complete meal tray) and a glass of lemon iced tea. It was a tourist style variation on a thali, really – with papad, pickle, sabji and a whole grain, but quite good and nourishing. Here in Kochi the main speciality is fish and shellfish, but these are off the menu for me. It’s quite easy to be a vegetarian and now even a vegan however. Trying to be completely vegan is something I have not bothered with much in India. But here, besides the traditional vegan options, many restaurants offer more eclectic vegan portions and desserts. And I’ve discovered two entirely vegan restaurants so far.

Along the road by the ferry, there are many old homes with courtyards overlooking the sea, or rather the inlet between the mainland and the island. I snapped a couple of photos of these along the way home, as well as some of the graffiti on the walls siding the streets.

The Guardian today has one of its Long Read articles about India, “How Hindu Supremacists are tearing India apart”, which seems to give a good account of the troubling slide in secularism that worries everyone not subscribing to the ideology of the BJP. But so many quite ordinary people do. Just as in Israel, in the UK, in Italy, the US, and so many other places, inquiring into the views of one’s neighbors can be very disappointing. As the article points out, the danger in India, may be still greater than these other places, given the country’s existing propensities for civil unrest and its shaky union between so many disparate cultures, languages, religions, castes and ethnicities. The Muslim minority in India constitutes 180 million people.

While here I have been reading some of the writings of Paul Bowles, who I only recently discovered. “The Sheltering Sky”, his writings on travel, and now “The Spider’s House”. He’s an intriguing writer, with a fascinating life story. He was acquainted with some of the significant writers, musicians and artists of the 20th century. It was Gertrude Stein who persuaded him to go live in Tangiers, where he settled and lived for decades. I read a little of his travels here in Kerala today. What a different style of travel from today! He carried with him eighteen suitcases. He describes how at a border check between two Indian states, the customs officers were concerned that he was planning to sell clothing. “Why would I want to sell my clothes?” he asked them.

I think that the kind of travel writing that he describes has completely gone by the wayside today, and perhaps some people would say, good riddance. Especially that of white people discovering Africa and India. Amitav Ghosh’s book, “In an Antique Land”, was perhaps more interesting; a post-colonial traveler whom the “natives” (Egyptian villagers) saw as coming from a still more backward place (India). But that book too was published almost thirty years ago.

Bowles is a sensitive traveler. His novels are very well written, and obviously distance themselves from the views of their sometimes racist protagonists. To what extent, Bowles’ own views might be out of date, I’m not sure yet. Certainly, all writers are a product of their times; and earlier times usually equates to less enlightened than our own (though sometimes we’re proved wrong about that. But amusingly, it’s much easier to pick out the imperfections of earlier times, and much harder to notice the flaws in the mannerisms and ways of thinking of our own times. I’ve lived long enough to know that much.

Munnar and the Tea Museum

In Munnar i had some extra time so, for a lark, visited The Tea Musem, which traces.the origin of the plantations in the Western Ghats from the time of the British to the present time. Today , according to their film, the Kenan Devan Hills Plantations Company is 82% privately owned by the plantation workers themselves, and run with a bottom up management “the first and largest participatory management company in India, with 12,500 employees as shareholders “(2005). They have started to change over some of their plantations to organic teas and are doing research on organic methods. Unfortunately their teas, under the Ripple brand name, are available only in Kerala, according to the sales woman.

The man who gives the talk at the museum is an inspiring example of a person given a comparatively simple role of museum guide, but using it to advance a personal agenda to change the world. He started by saying that our lives would be permanently changed by his talk. He then launched on a deep discussion of the health benefits of green tea as a universal panacea. But he didn’t resrict himself just to tea, but advocated a healthy lifestyle that included yoga, cleansing of the bowels, proper ways to evacuate these and more. Daringly , for a tea company p.r. person, he pointed out that most indians have no idea how to make tea and were actually poisoning themselves with the stuff. He advocated a special green tea making device which is available in the gift shop by the exit. I think his talk was effective – i saw people buying it.

Quiet time in Kerala

For meals I’m kind of under house arrest, in this rainy and remote location. They bring them to my “cell” twice a day. In the morning it was idli (fermented rice cakes) and vegetable curry; and in the evening I just had a chapatti and a fiery dhal (bean or lentil dish). Admittedly there would be chicken or perhaps fish, if I weren’t vegetarian. I saw the son of the household with a fishing line this morning.

At midday, on my walk, I bought coffee and a cake from a stall on the road. It was a beautiful walk, by the river, passing tea and coffee plantations, waterfalls, in the lush Kerala hill country.

In Kerala

There are big differences from place to place in India. Kerala – at least this small town – seems a lot better organized than what I saw in Tiruvannamalai. At night sometimes there, I had to close the shutters, despite the 30+ degree heat, because people burn rubbish in the streets, including plastics, which create dangerous fumes. They burn it because the municipality doesn’t collect it. It doesn’t collect it because the officials are corrupt, and, according to my host there’s questionable arguments, because people there are mostly illiterate, don’t understand anything about health or hygiene and have no idea what cancer is. Whereas here in Kumily, they separate the garbage, collect it every day, fine anybody who tries to burn it, and even smoking in public is a punishable offence. The national park is off-limits to anybody who doesn’t have a permit, and they have eliminated poaching of animals and sandalwood trees by placing guards and CCTV cameras everywhere.