December 26-27

We got into our 2 cars (the children had become very close to Na'ama
by then and wanted to join her on the drive). We started off at Aihole
which is an architectural lab - a site with
temples of many different styles. We drove on to Badami (Ritvik
developed some kind of stomach flu as we were driving so we had a few
vomiting stops). It was around 3:30pm and we had not eaten lunch yet.
This turned out to be quite a task - the first hotel we tried refused to
take us for some reason, the second restaurant was very crowded so we
could not fit in and then Jaikumar found a very strange place - an empty
large hall which apparently is a banquet hall and they managed to serve
us some mediocre food in some very dirty dishes. So far we had no ill
effects.

We were very tired and felt we had seen enough temples but as we had
time before having to go to the train station we stopped at the Badami
temples (Sumana stayed with Ritvik in the car as Ritvik was feeling very
badly). We walked listlessly up, turned a corner - and were amazed -
caves dug out of an almost sheer brown-pink rock. These were very old
caves with the most exquisite carvings - amazing what they could do 1500
years ago. The place was very crowded and seeing all the colorful saris
on the background of the rock was amazing. As in any other site there
were dozens of school groups there - all the students in their school
uniforms and all very excited to see us (apparently many of them live in
villages and don't see too many foreigners).

We drove to the train station, released the drivers and boarded the
train (it was late but that is to be expected). The berths are quite
comfortable and we all slept reasonably well. Now we are almost in
Bangalore, and will be very happy to arrive at the hotel and take long
hot showers...

A few hours later... we feel much cleaner after those showers and a very nice breakfast with lots of Western food. Indian food is great, but after a week of hardly any Western food, the change is nice.

Turns out that the conference reserved 2 rooms for us in the hotel for the rest of our stay. So we decided to stay here rather than move again to Irith & Alan's. Irith will come over here soon and later we will all go to hear Avi's talk. One of the plenary speakers had to cancel due to illness and Avi is the emergency replacement. Jaikumar was tasked with getting Avi to Bangalore (dead or alive?) and it seems everybody is very relieved that he arrived safely...