Galleries

Having visited India at least fifteen times over many decades, I’ve made friends among the musical community that has enabled me to book events in advance of my visits, filling the two short weeks with musical opportunities.  Another enabling factor is my decades-long study of Indian (Hindustani) classical music, starting in 1975 at Ali Akbar College in Marin County, California.  My knowledge of Indian music has enabled me to collaborate with Indian musicians in both classical and jazz-fusion-world-music concerts...

Our Viking China cruise continued to three port cities I had never heard of before.  The Chinese government seeks to increase tourism, and our cruise is one of the first collaborations with the Chinese government and Viking Cruises.  The ship's staff is 100% Chinese, and the entertainers are all Chinese.  So this particular cruise is different from the usual Viking multi-national staff.

Our ship, the Yi Dun, is named after the first Chinese commercial ship launched in 1872, the Yi Dun.

After a long transit from Reno via Los Angeles to Tokyo, we boarded the Viking Orion and enjoyed our first excursion in Japan.

Ha Long Bay Vietnam is a unique location, famous for its thousands of scenic islands in the bay.  Our tour took us to a magnificent cave inside one of the islands.  The photos from this area will tell the story better than my words.

For the third year in a row, Susan and I attended the conference Middle Eastern Nurses Uniting in Human Caring. This year’s title was Human Caring in a Time of World Crisis, a theme chosen almost a year ago, before the most recent war between Israel and Gaza, before the hideous executions by ISIS, most recently of a Jordanian pilot burned alive. . . 

This post is being sent from Aachen, Germany, a historic city on the western side of Germany just a few miles from the borders with Holland and Belgium.  Let’s review the difference between the awareness of history in the US as opposed to Europe. 

Words are inadequate to describe India, absent firsthand experience. But I’ll try…

To tour a country as part of a group tour necessarily results in a superficial introduction to the countries visited. But the advantage is that all the logistical details are covered in advance by the tour company. In the case of this Go Ahead tour, we spent two days in Portugal, followed by five days in Spain, to be followed by a week in Morocco.