Back home...
Tuesday, Marijn and me went back to the Netherlands after two weeks of pretty intensive hacking. Only KPresenter needs to be made compatible with QGraphicsView, and we got a long way there as well. Basically, where KOffce assumed that a canvas was a QWidget, it now assumes a generic base class, one that can be implemented by a QWidget, QGraphicsWidget or something we haven't seen yet.
It wasn't all hacking, though. I've already blogged about our first weekend, but since we needed to be in India for another Monday to hand over to Jos van den Oever (and have dinner with the students), we had another weekend. Friday night, we went home with Amit. The idea was to stay at his place so we could make an early start so we could do some sightseeing outside town. We spent an enjoyable evening with great food (I so miss South Indian food when I'm in the Netherlands that I returned home with a pound of sambar powder...) and looking at Amit's wedding pics
The next morning, we went for Nandi hills, a hill station about 50 kilometers outside Bangalore:
There were monkeys along the way
The view from Nandi Hills was staggering:
From there we visited a number of temples: first one on the hill itself, then one at the foot of the hill. In contrast to the temple in Somnathpur, these temples were in active use, and I've been blessed at least four times by Hindu priests that Saturday!
(This is not the big temple on top of Nandi Hills, but a small one with an endlessly looping praying blaring out of the loudspeakers.)
Especially the Bhoganandishwaraswamy temple at the foot of Nandi Hills is amazing. It's really big, more a complex of temples build over the course of several hundred years, all still in use.
On our way back we stopped at the Devanahalli fort. We didn't really know what it was, but on the way to Nandi hills we'd seen the huge old walls and wanted to investigate. Turns out this was one of Tippu Sultan's forts against the British. The gates are enormous:
And the village is right inside the fort:
And plenty of monkeys (which are not cute, not close-up and in real life):
At the Samrat restaurant in Bangalore we were able to forget the horrible lunch we had in the village at the food of Nandi Hills (that was a swanky place with cool pavillions and so on, but the food wasn't cooked very well). The dosa masala was great:
Finally we
(Amit borrowed my camera for this snap) visited Bangalore's famous Big Bull Temple, where the bull is, indeed, big:
It was a great day. Thanks guys! It was a great expedition.
Church
On Monday, when I told the people at the office that we had had a great weekend, with the trip to Nandi Hills on Saturday, Mek meeting with a KStars developer in Bangalore and me going to Church, Vidhya was surprised -- and a bit annoyed. If she had known I had wanted to go to Church, she would have taken me! Still, I am glad I went on my own, because I'd found an Orthodox Church quite close to our apartment: the St George Church in Marathahalli.
Going there was wonderful. Malayalam is a very nice sounding language, and the deacon had a really good voice. It's different from our church, of course, since the Orthodox Church in India follows the Syriac rite, but I could follow most of the service, went to confession and received communion.
The church in Marathahalli is really new, only a couple of months old, and already almost too small, with, I think, at least two hundred people attending, men to the left, women to the right, the opposite from Churches in Greece.
I was the only non-Indian, but I felt very welcome and had some good conversations over coffee after the Liturgy.
Coda
By the way: this might well be the tastiest crisps I've ever had:
/urlaub |
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