Where are we now?


View Where are we now? in a larger map Jo, Annie, Miles and I are living in Northport, Alabama and working at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. We've been glad to be in one place for a bit after what appeared to be semi-permanently traveling (in actuality for a period of 2.5 years).We started this blog to catalogue some of the adventures when Jo and I were sequentially conducting our dissertation research in India and Brazil. While we've fallen off the blogging bandwagon somewhat during recent trips to Brazil, we're trying to pick it up again now that we're back in India!


Thursday, August 11, 2011

Sunday, June 12: Deer Park and Mom heads home

Last notes from the traveling desk of Rita Meek


Today is my last day in India. My flight leaves at 10:50 pm from Delhi and is a straight flight to Newark, NJ where I will arrive after 15 hours at 0400 am.

David, Jim, and Jonathan leave tomorrow morning for their long-awaited trip to Ladakh where they will hike for a week or so in the Himalayas, enjoying homestays, amazing scenery, and incredible time together.

Much of David’s non-educational efforts for the last few months has been to design a backpack violin and banjo case so that he and Jon could have their instruments on this trek and enjoy many hours of music together. He has worked incredibly hard on this, revising, redoing, strengthening, modifying, sewing with the help of a machine donated by their friend Tannie, exploring new places in search of specific types of fabric – and getting up at 5 am for many mornings, working on this project.





Today he was up at 0500 again, working on his project == and Rita was up by 0600 working on completing the scrapbook albums, which includes putting the cover on correctly (which is much much harder than it seems). After a while we were joined by Jim, Jo, and Jonathan and after a breakfast of yoghurt, granola, and watermelon and mangos we were off to Deer Park.

Off we went in two autorickshaws to the park. It was very hot, and was getting progressively hotter. The park is the largest one in the city of Delhi, and much of it is green, although there are certainly some areas that are parched.



We started off and saw amazing strutting male peacocks, showing off their plumage. The poor peahen was not very attractive and certainly didn’t compare with her counterpart. We continued to walk around the park, and Jo decided to sit in the shade for a while. In another part of the park, we saw white-spotted deer eating and drinking.


Jon and Dave did the obligatory brotherly cavorting on the exercise equipment, re-enacting a gladiator duel...



Jim thought he saw a famous movie star....perhaps Robert Pattinson (from the Twilight trilogy)

but it turns out it was only David in disguise...

If only these 4 unsuspecting folks new that when they asked to pose with him for a picture....




We then decided it was too hot to be outside and David and Jo took us to a beautiful South Indian restaurant where we had rassam ( a very interesting bouillion-like drink == with lots of spice), papadum, iced coffee with (David and Jon) and without ice cream (me), pomegranate juice (jo), and sweet and salty lemonade (Jim). Too bad it was only 11 am and we couldn’t justify lunch!

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