Yesterday was one of those perfect days. It turned warm in the afternoon and sunny, promising a great sunset.
There were clouds in the west, the kind of clouds that add just that romantic bit of haziness to the air.
The sunset was as good as its promise.
Then an amazing thing happened. The clouds turned red across half the sky.
And as the dusk grew, the sky became as red as blood.
Last night’s sunset was exquisite. The sun’s moving north, and it’s now setting between Sachem Pond and the North Light. Streaks of clouds added vividness and color.
The sun will also, alas, be setting sometime soon over our tenure in this wonderful location. We bought this unique piece of land the year my daughter was born; we built this house twenty-four years ago; and we have been coming here whenever we could ever since. We love this place, and it will always be close to our hearts.
But yesterday the house officially went on the market. The listing agent is Ballard Hall Real Estate, and you can view the listing here.
I hope whoever buys this wonderful home will find that it is a home not just for your visits and your things but also for your heart and for some deep place that defines who you are.
I ended my trip but began the Indian blog posts, with Varanasi. Time to backtrack now, almost to the beginning. The first stop on the trip was in Kerala–Thiruvananthapuram (a name that I am inordinately fond of, having gone to great lengths to memorize it, but you can call it Trivandrum for short). I’m going to skip Thiruvananthapuram, but I may backtrack here later; I have some pretty neat pictures of a wonderful wooden palace two hours deep into Tamil Nadu but still part of Kerala. But somehow I sense you’re probably pretty tired of architectural wonders.
So let’s skip that for now. Let’s go to the beach.
We arrived early in Varkala, about 10:30 in the morning. We understood that our room would probably not be ready. This was fine. We were happy just to sit near the ocean with nothing to do.
We did not expect to find a serious game of tug-of-war going on just on the other side of our hotel. Wonderful, I thought, that the hotel was organizing games for the guests. But… there was something odd about this particular game. For one thing, where were the women? The children?
Come to that, where were the tourists?
This was no game. This was, it turned out, the local fishermen earning their daily keep. There were two heavy ropes, each being pulled by some ten or twelve men.
As the rope came in, the group on the rock wall moved closer and closer to the one on the beach.
They coiled the rope behind them. At the end of the rope was the end of a very large net, and this too they gathered behind them.
Now both groups, close together, pulled in earnest.
A man riding a kind of a–surfboard?–helped guide in the far edge of the net.
As the net was pulled in, the catch became visible–an abundance of small silver fish.
The fishermen scooped up most of the fish into a basket.
There ensued a heated discussion with a man who, like us tourists, had been only a bystander until this moment. Now emotions ran high.
You didn’t have to speak Malayam to understand that a negotiation was in process. The buyer turned in disgust to leave. One of the fishermen ran after him. More discussion, calmer this time. A price was agreed. Two men took the basket, following the buyer off the beach. The fishermen divided up their gear and the remaining fish. The catch of the day had been disposed of.
Dan and I checked into our room and then went for a walk along the beach. If they could photoshop reality, they would make it look something like this.
The sun, as it usually does, set.
We stopped along the way for a drink (a surprisingly good mojito).
And then later, we had dinner by candlelight on the beach.
Dan and I are back on Block Island this weekend, where the weather is crisp and fresh, cool and sunny. And so I interrupt this torrent of blogging about our trip to India to bring you last night’s beautiful sunset on Block Island, Rhode Island, taken, as usual, from the deck of our home here.
We are truly blessed with a wonderful location with ocean and pond views all around at the very northern edge of the island.
It’s been a long time since I’ve posted a Block Island sky scene in this blog. Time to remedy that. We’re back on the island after more than three months away. The autumn equinox is almost two weeks past, so the sun is setting and rising a little bit south of due west and east. That means the sun is now setting over Sachem Pond again.
September 2, 2013
And it’s rising over the woods and bushes east of the house.
September 3, 2013
But the real sun show of the day yesterday was neither the sunset nor the sunrise. It was a fortunate late-afternoon confluence of clouds and sun that created a bright sundog.
September 3, 2013
It’s been nice. A comfortable stay, if not our normal style (whatever that is).
So, you are probably thinking, if this is not our normal style, then how did we end up here? And for six days, yet? It’s a very good question. The answer is complicated, involving the way Dan accumulates and uses various points in his business travel and our lack of any good clue regarding a more “local” establishment. Whatever the reason, I’m glad we stayed here.
The Budapest Marriott Hotel enjoys a central location, right on the Danube River on the Pest side, between the Elizabeth and Chain Bridges (Erzsébet híd and Széchenyi lánchíd). The room is light and airy and comfortable. And the front-desk and concierge staff absolutely couldn’t have been more friendly and helpful.
There’s only one drawback, and I’ll be right up front with it. From the outside, the Marriott’s architecture does not fit in well with its environment. As part of the riverscape, it is not in keeping with the historic city–and it’s worse on the side facing the street, which presents an unfriendly wall of concrete.
Trust me, though, it’s not nearly as out-of-keeping with the environment as the Intercontinental, two buildings to the north–for what that’s worth.
From the inside, the Marriott is a whole different story. The corridors have windows that bring in daylight and city views, and every room has a superb river view. This is a part of the view from our room:
We are looking across the Danube at the Buda side of the city, crowned with its royal palace.
What has made our stay even more enjoyable is that as a Gold frequent-stayer with Marriott, Dan is entitled to access to the Executive Club on the ninth floor, with its outdoor terrace overlooking the river. Here, we enjoyed the early morning mist and sunshine along with a full breakfast–juices, breads, croissants, cheeses and deli, scrambled eggs and breakfast potatoes, fruit, cereal, yogurt, coffee, and tea.
In the evening the Executive Club offered a substantial (if limited in choices) supper–enough so that if we ate a hot dinner at a restaurant during the day, this completely served for a satisfactory evening meal (though there were a couple of nights when the hot entree featured beef or veal, which Dan and I don’t eat). It included cocktails, wine and beer; appetizers such as marinated mushrooms, grilled zucchini and artichoke hearts, duck breast and goose liver; a variety of cheeses and breads; a hot dinner such as chicken with potatoes, vegetarian ravioli, or duck stew with noodles; and a variety of desserts. It also included stunning late afternoons and sunsets from the deck.
The evenings, too, were glorious from this vantage point.
Finally, I have to mention the staff at the Executive Club, who are charming and friendly. And the fellow guests we had a chance to meet and chat with.
The Marriott has been a pleasant place to stay, and though we’re eager to be going home, we’ll miss it.
On our second evening in Fes, and having discovered that with the help of our map, we were capable of handling the challenge of finding our way through the medina’s maze, we made our way over to the Sofitel Palais Dar Jamai to watch the sunset from the terrace.
Of course we were not quite capable of handling the challenge of fending off friendly medina residents who wanted nothing more than to help us get wherever we were going–with stops at their father’s shop and their cousin’s restaurant along the way. So somewhere en route we picked up a boy of maybe ten years old who knew enough English to be a voluble guide to the district, but hadn’t seemed to have learned the phrase “No thanks.” He did an admirable, if slightly roundabout, job of guiding us to the hotel that we were perfectly capable of finding on our own, and we paid him 2 dirhams for the assistance. And, frankly, for the delightful company.
The view from the terrace of the hotel was expansive, as the guidebook had promised. And the patterns of the rooftops and towers of the medina were entrancing.
What we hadn’t expected was the smog. We should have, of course. Even though no cars or motorbikes are allowed in the medina, the rest of the city is busy with them, and air pollution knows no boundaries. And the smog seemed to get worse as the dusk deepened. It’s sad, really, in such a beautiful city.
Some sunsets are too beautiful to bear.
December 6, 2012
It’s finally happened–a sunset so photogenic that I can’t winnow the photos down to just two or three. Yesterday evening it pretty much didn’t matter which vaguely southwesterly direction I was looking in or how far down the sun actually was or how much zoomed in the camera was–everything was perfect!
See what I mean? But I’ve narrowed it down to only six more, and so without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, I present: December 5, 2012!
Sunset from the ferry to Block Island
Pt. Judith, Rhode Island, December 3, 2012