You may know that I live in the general vicinity of The Great Lakes. A weekend trip to the shores of Lake Huron gave me the chance to try out different settings on the camera. I get the basic idea on f-numbers and aperture settings but do not have a natural instinct for photography. Some results are better than others, obviously because the camera is not expensive enough…. 🙂 🙂
Here are some samples. (more…)
I had lunch with a celebrity. This happened completely by accident.  I’ve met very few celebrities. I did shake hands with Vijay Amritraj and sat next to Kevin Wright once. ( ** see footnotes below ) Now, Michael Lang may not be your idea of a celebrity and lunch with him isn’t strictly accurate either. 🙂 Still, I’m chalking one up on my slate here. Considering the paucity of celebrity encounters I’ve had, I have to take what I can get, sort of like what Janis Joplin sort of meant when she (more…)
Day 9 of The Great Trip dawned bright, sunny and warm and off we went in our Renault 308 to Mont St Michel on the first leg of our Normandy trip. From the Paris suburb of Neuilly-Plaisance to Mont St Michel is a good 4 hour drive.
We took the slightly northern route that skirted past Rouen and Caen on towards Avranches. As  we came off the country roads running through the flat lands of Normandy we (more…)
Yes, that’s the colour ( color, if American ) of spring and to prove it I’m going to show you a set of pictures with lovely hues of blue. First though, lets start with this one.
As you can see, not only are the arms of the bush a brilliant red, the jacket of the old lady sitting sunning herself is also red. But the recycle bin is blue, the garbage bin is grey and if you examine the (more…)
This is the concluding part of the Normandy sub-series within the Punjabi in Paris series. You can, of course, read Part 1 and Part 2. Part 2 has more pictures and even, hold your breath for this one, shaky videos!!
We left Ste Mere Eglise after a late lunch / tea of fries, beer and Coke and drove out towards Omaha beach. Drove down the highway and came to the exit ramp that would take us to St Laurent sur Mer. However, even at this late stage of the day (more…)
The Story so far This is where we left off at the end of the first part of the Normandy Notes 1: We'd missed the morning's parachute drop re-enactment after an exciting and exhausting drive in. I was thinking wistfully about the stained glass windows of the church in Ste Mere Eglise. One of our regular readers had read Normandy Notes 1 and had written in to say how sorry he was that we didn't get to…
So I’m back from Kolkata or Calcutta, as it used to be and will ever be for some, like me. It was a crowded trip, with remembrance services, weddings, school and college reunions interspersed with sporadic maintenance shopping. ( I’ll have to explain that some other day, that “maintenance” thing.)Â It was three years since my last visit, so naturally on my way there I’d wondered what changes I would see, other than the omnipresent blue and white paint I’d been warned about, which is, as you can see from the picture, true.
The short answer is: (more…)
The phone rang in the very early morning hours of Dec 17th, a Sunday. In the USA it was still Saturday, Dec 16th. I rose from the warm bed and padded out into the cold hall to the phone. I heard the pips that foretold a transatlantic call, waited for my oldest brother's voice telling me he was coming for a visit, but there was no voice, just a silence, a silence that seemed too long, before…
Introductory Passage Yes, I do realize that Normandy is not in Paris and so, technically and pedantically speaking, the Punjabi can't be in Paris if he is in Normandy. You are quite right. Wrong, too. For it is entirely possible that he was in Paris when he wrote the Normandy Notes. In actual fact, he is writing this in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan in the Canadian Prairies, far, far away from Paris and Normandy. So why, you ask, does…
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Due to the overwhelming response from the 4 readers who took time off to read this Tale of a Traumatic Travel Trip, The SloWord has been goaded into producing a Boxed Set. Which really means that (more…)