Festival: Stage 4

President Obama Visits Savannah

It's not every day that the PRESIDENT of the UNITED STATES comes to Savannah.
But it happened today!
Too bad it was a very dreary day. Savannah wasn't shining her best.

I noticed the police cars and traffic blockade and crowds gathering on Whitaker Street at Taylor as I walked back to the office from lunch. The owner and the maintenance man at the Inn clued me in that the President was in the neighborhood for lunch at Mrs. Wilkes' Boarding House. We set out for a meeting but only made it one block before we were stalled in the confused traffic so we parked at Wayne Street and watched with the crowd at the yellow tape.

Luckily, our timing was perfect. We waited a few minutes, and the motorcade came flying through. As you can see from the photos, they were going fast! However, I saw the smiling face of President Obama, waving as he passed us - and I missed the photo op (He was in the rear seat of the limo in the last photo.) I was too excited. I took my eye to the street rather than the camera. We were surprised at how exciting it was to see the president!

more photos HERE.

Festival: Stage 3

Festival: Stage 2

Festival: Stage 1

WHAT I FOUND in India: Festival

THANK YOU, India

click to enlarge

I've been writing about India in my head for weeks. It is daunting to try to pick up where I left off, yet engage this experience of traveling in India in my work, my life in Savannah.

I've wanted to write here, where I left off. Daunted, though, I perused the web logs of my friends and let the thoughts percolate. [Also - I've been really really busy since I got home so time to write was not in abundance.]

Recently, I became confident that the experiences in India will inform my work naturally, whether I write volumes of travelogue and analysis or not.

While drawing for a commissioned work, I suddenly veered from my drafting table into my sketchbook with rough pencil, then pen, then colored pencil, then watercolor - just a bit. I needed to MAKE SOMETHING to express my gratitude, and to begin to express just a bit of the beauty I saw in India, some of which I was able to capture in photographs.

I MISSED Making Things. My solace was "Making" Photographs but it wasn't quite enough. It's nice to be back at my desk.

I THOUGHT I had traveled enough...but India made my head spin - and I liked it.

I LOVED the wonderful host families who cared for me as their own daughter. Almost everything seemed foreign to us. So the genuine love our hosts showed us reached through all that was foreign to the human heart, cut from the same mold, the real conduit for cross-cultural exchange.

So, THANK YOU Mr. & Mrs. Achar, Kusuma Pai & family, Zubi, Fakhru & the Kunil families, Mr. & Mrs. Rastogi, the Jagadish family, the Sridhar family, the Nagendra family, G.N. Prakash & Vijaya - and all others whose names I've woven into the strands of the sandalwood garland I treasure from our welcome in Mangalore by Captain Pais, Eulalia and the outgoing GSE team.