Contemplations and Ruminations

And when the earth fades Falls from my eyes And you stand before me I know You love me I was in church with Jen yesterday when they started singing this song and immediately we glanced at each other and smiled. It is one of the songs we sang when we were in the choir and whenever I hear this song, this stanza makes time stop for a few minutes. Nothing that is happening around seems to register as I am suddenly transported to a moment between two worlds. That moment when the earth fades, you wonder how it will be... you wonder what comes next. There are a number of books we can read, stuff we can research to try to know what happens after we breathe our last breath... but I don't think anything can prepare us for the final event. It will be good, of course, no doubt there... life gets transformed, but still, that point, that exact moment when the earth fades... it's just too big to put into words, it always leaves me pondering, hoping that it will be as beautiful as my hu...

Celebrated Holi yesterday and it was pure madness... random people coming upto you and rubbing colour on your cheeks was a little disconcerting at first, but after a few minutes you get the hang of it and it's crazy fun after that. I've always wanted to be part of the colourful Holi celebrations, like the ones we see in movies and pictures of India... that look so captivating and brimming with energy. This was exactly like that, and despite the rainbow hued aftermath that followed, I know I want to do it all over again next year with better protection, now that I know what to expect. Play mostly with kids and people who give you the good vibe, ignore the rest and go with a bigger crowd. Here's a slideshow of the pictures we took (use the link if the above video doesn't seem to play)...

So where do I start.... January was fun, been so buried under books, didn't really find time to jot down stuff here. January started off on a fun note; after a midnight mass under flashing lights that were really giving me a headache, yeah, my church in the village is really big on tacky lighting... it's almost like a contest here. The more tackier and multicoloured the lighting the more it depicts your devotion I guess, and every religious establishment takes this rule dead seriously. I'm not kidding, I even went and told the guy in charge to please switch off the flashing lights during the service and he had the audacity to tell me to go inside the church and sit with the humongous crowd. Anyway, I went back to my place and whispered to my brother in law about the lack of etiquette in church festivals, and my sister glared at us and asked whether we had any ourselves...  The church with the flashing lights and multicoloured stars... After the midnight mass, we ca...

Every year, setting up the crib is an experience... when we were kids, the crib was made with this sweet smelling wild reed that dotted the landscape back home. I don't know what they call it, but the scent of the freshly built crib wafting through the house spiked the excitement levels. The reed though it smelled nice and looked great, was a time consuming project that involved dexterity, planning and patience.  So over the years, buying the reed gave way to other forms of constructing the Nativity scene... it became much easier to form a basic structure in the shape of a hut and then put a different spin on it every year. like the one in 2013   and  2012 ... Here is this year's crèche, named it the Interstellar crib... cause of those floating specks of light wafting through the time space continuum. You can't see it here, but it sort of looks surreal with only these specks lighting up the nativity scene.  And with a little bit of light, it become...

So after spending most part of the day in the Sanctuary, we decided to head out to the town square... to get a feel of authentic French cuisine and to soak in the French atmosphere.  And we weren't disappointed, the roads are so pretty... and walking along them aimlessly is kinda wonderful.  Check out the lamp posts in the previous picture. Every freaking lamp has flowers sprouting out of it... whoever thought up this idea has a beautiful soul. Lamps that brighten up streets during the day, pretty cool... A pretty fountain... ate lunch at a restaurant near this. Quaint little streets with flowering lamps on one side and a trickling fountain nearby.... beautiful times.  I think my sister ordered this salad... So anyway, at every restaurant we went to, we would ask for the wi-fi password and most restaurants would give them out immediately. So we asked this young man who was waiting on us for the password, he said something quite fast like, 'opencafeviffy'...

Just wanted to show you the Christmas decorations that start appearing towards the end of October in shops like Manor, a Swiss department store chain.   Wreaths, Christmas balls, cages...  Candles, lanterns...  Snow men....  This was the one I loved the best... glowing orbs  Reindeer's...    More decorations...   Christmas-y stuff...  Santa Claus...  Fairy lights... I loved these too.  These lights were the best thing...  How uniform and homogeneous... so pleasing to the senses. I wonder about this so often, how people there have an eye for the aesthetic quality in things, whereas here they just mix and match colours till it looks like a drunken rainbow threw up on things. An example would be the lighting in my church back home, during the festival season it was garishly lit up with every imaginable colour of the spectrum and now during the Christmas season they have ...

So after the evening mass on Sunday,   we climbed up the 284 winding steps...  Of the Arc de Triomphe, here she is lit up at night... And from the top of the Arc, this is how the Eiffel Tower looks at night... It sparkles a few minutes every hour... and then people start kissing on top of the Arc. It was cute until this one teenage guy almost ate his girlfriend's face, licking and kissing with so much ferocity, she almost looked like voldemort when he was done. But everybody else was cute and the whole atmosphere up there on the Arc was pretty exciting...  Pretty neat huh...  Champs Elysees Avenue as seen from the Arc... we went strolling along this avenue on the way back. You'll find many street performers on this avenue... The next day being our last day in Paris, the guys decided on a Seine cruise and I learnt the reason for this later on. They didn't want to walk and so they made sure I was stuck on a boat, this way I could...