Touring east of Cherbourg

Today we had the second partly-sunny day in a row, with no rain in the forecast until the evening, so we decided to rent a car and do some walking in the harbor towns east of Cherbourg. We have visited these before, but under less-than-ideal conditions, so being able to get out and walk without (much) fear of being rained on was really nice.

Our first stop was Gatteville Lighthouse (Phare de Gatteville), the second lighthouse east of Cherbourg. This picture is actually from our earlier visit, made shortly after we returned from our trip to Dusseldorf for the big European boat show.

The tide was very high, with waves crashing over the seawalls on the access road.

[See the update to this, below.]

From there we drove to the nearby town of Barfleur, which has a harbor with a nearly 10-meter tidal swing during spring tides (which is what we had today). Katy took some pictures (not shown here) of the boats actually floating; the last time we were there, they were sitting on the seabed.

There is a lovely church at the entrance to the harbor, which has this sad, if attractive, memorial.

In memory of the fishermen of Barfleur and the surrounding area perished at sea

It seems that all French towns, no matter how small, have at least one very nice Catholic church.

Our next stop was Saint-Vaast-la-Hougue, which has an much larger harbor but, unlike Barfleur, well protected from the raw tidal swing by a lock at the harbor entrance. We walked around the harbor and through the town, and had lunch and coffee. Between lunch and coffee, we discovered this nearly-hidden semi-public garden. I just loved the rooflines from the interior.

We also shopped for some specialty foods at Maison Gosselin, which our landlord, Christian, had suggested we visit, and took in a shop near the harbor that had lovely hand-painted postcards. It also had a serving dish with this image, which really captures life on the Cherbourg peninsula in winter.

By then it was almost supper time, so we drove back to Cherbourg and our apartment, making a second, low-tide stop at Phare de Gatteville on the way. Fittingly, it started to sprinkle just as we were walking from the parking lot to our front door.

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So much for the travelogue. You may be wondering how we are. Well, life in Cherbourg is quite pleasant. Our apartment is cozy (small, but comfortable),  there's an excellent farmer's market on Saturdays (and other days, too, but that's the big one), and our boat is coming along well. Katy and I are, IMO, adapting well to being together nearly all the time. We get pissy with each other occasionally, but actually less so than I think we did in Cambridge. We really enjoy cooking together, and with the excellent fresh ingredients we have here, we've been eating very well. We both have folding bicycles, and I've been riding at least 10km most mornings, and usually much more. I've lost a lot of weight, and feel great.

I am loving being retired.

That said - we miss our friends and family pretty ferociously, and that's been aggravated by the scary news we get regarding COVID-19. Given our somewhat solitary live style, I think we're unlikely to be stricken by it soon, and since we're both in pretty decent health, we're not terribly worried about it. But we do worry about all of you back in the U.S. It seems like this will hit the dance and music communities very hard -- not necessarily the illness itself, but the knock-on effects of cancelled dances and concerts. 

It's also strange watching the presidential election season play out from the other side of the Atlantic. We both voted via absentee ballots in the primary and will vote in the general election, but we don't really discuss politics much with each other. That's perhaps a good thing, since it's so generally unsettling. But events in the U.S. feel remote and somewhat unreal. 

We enjoy getting email from y'all, and we're also available on WhatsApp and Signal. Ping us!

-- Jerry

Update to our visit to Gatteville Lighthouse

The day after this entry was posted, we drove back out to Barfleur and walked up the lighthouse - 350 steps or so. The actual light is really nifty.

The view from the platform is pretty incredible.

Towards Cherbourg

Towards Balfleur

Thanksgiving, and leaving Hyderabad

I've been back in the U.S. since November 16th and insanely busy. Today, though, is the Friday after Thanksgiving, and I'm sitting at the desk in the Kurtz house at the Cape, looking out at Waquoit Bay and finally able to catch my breath a bit.

the view from the desk

First, a few pictures from my next-to-last week-end in Hyderabad. (There are more than just these few in the Picasa album.) Srinivas took us to a temple in Jubilee Hills on Friday night after work. I would have liked to have gotten back to get daylight pictures, but these will have to do. The entrance is flanked by these imposing gentlemen, who look to me like carnival strongmen.





The temple itself was lit like a Christmas tree.



The interior was lovely.



On Saturday I took my final bike ride. The bike continued to give me trouble, with the left pedal crank and splash guards loosening, requiring frequent stops. As I climbed the last hill near the guest house my right pedal broke (it turns out it's plastic, not metal...), and I was able to limp the last half mile home only thanks to a heavy application of duct tape from my water bottle. I've certainly learned a lot about what to look for in a bicycle on this trip.

Anyway, I rode through Jubilee Hills towards Durgam Cheruvu, and up to the "Grand View" water tower I visited last year. This let me get a second take on a view I photographed last year in July.

last year

this year

I used a dirt path to cut across the scrub and into the back of BNR Hills, a gated community I was never able to explore on my previous trips. This brought me to a hill overlooking this:

Is Cinderella home?

They have a nice view out the back, though.



Here's the back of the entrance to BNR Hills.

The southern end of Durgam Cheruvu

My sister Jeannie asked me to bring her a rock from Hyderabad. I did (although she doen't know it yet...), and here's where I collected it.



My last week in India was complicated by a somewhat unexpected wrinkle: my colleague Andy and I were asked to make a two-day trip to Delhi to visit some customers. This meant we had to check out of our guest house and drive to the airport at 5AM Tuesday morning to fly to Delhi.

We had no time whatsoever to do any siteseeing in Dehli, so I took essentially no pictures. The one shot I have is of the entrance signage for the IBM office we worked out of.

From The Final Days

We returned to Hyderabad late Wednesday night. Thursday night the folks at work took Andy and me out to dinner.







Andy and I spent the last few nights at the IBM guest house in Kondapur. It's a pretty decent place: close to the office, nice staff, clean rooms. The view out the dining room window nicely captures modern India:



Note the satellite TV antenna on the roof. This is right next door:



Yes, it's a rice paddy.

Andy left on Friday night. My flight out was Saturday night, so I had Saturday to tie up loose ends. I took Srinivas to an Internet cafe and helped him set up a gmail account. Receiving mail from him is part of what triggered this blog entry. I'm so pleased that I could help him with that. We also went shopping for, of all things, those little plastic buckets that every Indian bathroom has; Katy has expressed a desire to have a particular style for our home. I'd been looking for them since my arrival, without success; we finally found them in a shop in Ameerpet. (I'll post a picture later.) The shop was near this Gurudwara.



After shopping we stopped at a nearby restaurant for tea. I sipped that lovely Indian masala tea and wrote in my journal, and on the way out took these pictures.





From Ameerpet Srinivas and I drove to Nagarjuna Circle to meet with Feroz for dinner. Here are some pictures I took out the car window on the way. I've spent so much time in Hyderabad that I almost don't notice this stuff anymore.





I spent my final dinner in Hyderabad at Feroz's flat in Khairatabad. Srinivas and I picked up food at Chutney's and followed Feroz (who was on scooter) to his place. I finally got to meet Feroz's wife (whose name, sadly, I did NOT retain...). She's very cheerful, but for some reason she looks so somber in all these pictures.









After dinner Srinivas drove me out to the airport, on a newly-opened segment of the Outer Ring Road. (It literally opened the day I left.) I said my goodbye and then entered the in-between space that is modern air travel. I managed to get a business class upgrade for the Hyderabad to Frankfurt leg, making sleep possible. Waiting in the usiness class lounge I had the usual mixture of anticipation and depression that I feel when I leave India. Life in the U.S. just doesn't seem real any more.

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Anyway. Here I am in Falmouth, spending Thanksgiving weekend, as ever, with Katy's family. The sailboat was still in the water, and this morning's activity was to sail the boat to Falmouth inner harbour to be pulled for the winter. Here's the boat leaving, and Katy returning to the dock after dropping off the sailing crew.







Happy Thanksgiving, all.

Eating Out

Last night we went to dinner as a group to Les Bains. Essentially all of the conversation was in French; I ate what was ordered for me (salad, goat cheese, a rice with sauce concoction in red pepper skins, roasted tomatoes, and other vegetable matter I couldn't identify, but ate anyway). All in all a weird experience; I was totally out of my league.

Tonight Shyam and I want to Le Shiva, a nominally Indian restaurant. The food was distinctly Frenchified, but at least I could more-or-less recognize what it was. We conversed in blessed English. The food was affordable, if strange.

I think this is going to be a long trip.


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Back on the road - and out of my depths - again

I'm again out of the country, this time in Montpellier, France, working with a benchmarking group at IBM's Products and Solutions Support Center. I left Boston on Tuesday evening (the 26th), transferred to another plne in Paris, and arrived in Montpellier at 9AM Wednesday. In spite of flying business class, I arrived fried; the guy in the seat next to me stank (cigarette smoke, B.O. and killer farts...) and snored, and so I got very little sleep.

Getting to IBM's office was painless; hail a cab, point at the address, and arrive 15 minutes later. My badge was activated and I began meeting the people I'll be working with. I managed to hang on until about 1PM. When the rest of the team broke for lunch, I walked to the hotel (Suitehotel Montpellier Antigone), checked-in, and crashed for a few hours. I woke up about 4:30 and spent the next hour or so fiddling with the Wifi service from Orange; it basically works, but I can't get the VPN domain name resolution to work with IBM addresses, which seriously crimps the usefulness.

I eventually gave up and started thinking about dinner. After some Googling, backed by infromation from the Lonely Planet guide, I settled on Tripti Kulai. I walked there, and in the process discovered that this is a very beautiful city. After eating, I wandered my way back to the hotel very indirectly (with the GPS running); the Place de la Comedie area I was in is chock full of restaurants and bars. I won't have trouble finding food. The track is a bit sketchy; there are a lot of seriously narrow urban canyons here, which give the GPS fits.


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I'm trying to learn at least a little French; the waitress at the restaurant seemed very pleased that I made the effort, even if we mostly used English.

This is in some ways more foreign-feeling than Hyderabad; superficially it looks like the U.S (well, a really nice place in the U.S....), but then there's this massive language barrier. Hyderabad was just so obviously bizaare that I didn't expect to be able to manage well.

Sleep. Must get sleep.