Ahmedabad Old City and more ...

Well, I bet you thought Leslie had run away. I'm still here and in fact although we are writing about Ahmedabad, we are safely in Singapore, having arrived this morning.

The first morning in Ahmedabad we visited the Calico Museum, a very hard place to get into, with bookings needing to be made ages in advance. No piccys were allowed and although we were marched through there fairly smartly to enable us to see everything on view in the time allocated, most of us agreed it was one of the highlights of the trip

First piccy is the view from our hotel room of the Sarbamati River. A huge wall has cut the river off from being viewed at street level by the general populace. The government has decreed that there will be a sort of promenade, but who wants that separated from  the rest of the world? The Hotel Cama there was a lovely old place which was home for 3 nights.

Morning of 2 November saw us walking through the old town with our guide Nirav Panchal. He has a great knowledge of the heritage of the old town as it is his home town and a particular interest of his. You can see his office in high up in part of the old wall. We also saw that goats lived amongst the people there as well as pigeons catered for in a coop like an artificial tree.

Robyn loves her doorways, and we saw a variety of those. She managed to show up the rest of us when she took on the ironing with a huge old iron filled with charcoal, help;ing out a woman in a Muslim part of town.

In many of the towns we saw little squirrels, and Ahmedabad was no exception. We also saw angels as well as other decorations on the houses.  Then, as usual, we sussed out the markets. Spices, seeds and dried fruits abounded along with goats ready for a ride.

Last place on the heritage walk was the  early 15th Century Friday Mosque which was being swept with a broom made from the tail feathers of a peacock.  Again, beautifully carved decorations as well as wonderfully incised stone screens.

As the market is so central to life, we always had to walk through part of it to get to anywhere else, at least that's our excuse. We stopped to admire some very glitzy work and were told it was part of a bridal outfit, and the owner insisted dressing me up in it, much to the high amusement of the other stall holders, and the group.

Another goat later, we were waiting for the shop of Gamthi Wala to open. Inside there were beautiful fabrics many of which were block printed on a fine cotton. Jill and I know what was the most beautiful thing in the shop.

Later that afternoon we visited Ghandi's ashram. It was moving to see the sparseness of his living quarters, his spinning wheel and his few possessions. This made me reflect somewhat on the possessions we had been gathering over our journey. A gentleman was demonstrating spinning cotton with one of the travelling spinning wheels Ghandi used. It folded up into a small box, just the right size for her to purchase, Robyn thought. Unfortunately for her, she never found one. However, she did buy some khadi cloth, the sort Ghandi had woven from his spun cotton.

One evening while in Ahmedabad we were privileged to see a performance of a play (in English, lucky us) that was part of the first Ahmedabad Festival of Arts. The amphitheatre was in part of a private home. How gracious of the family to share their love of the arts with the folk of the city.