Monthly Archives: September 2012
Doors, Windows and Alleys in Portugal
For some reason I am fascinated by doors windows and alleys. If I take 500 photos on a trip, a hundred are usually of beautiful windows, and doors and the occasional alley. This is especially true in Europe. I just returned from the Travel Bloggers Unite conference in Porto, Portugal. After the conference we were treated to a tour of northern Portugal by the Portuguese Travel Authority. Besides drinking an awful lot of port wine, we saw quite a variety of buildings and churches. This is a photo essay of my trip. Please enjoy it. By the way, I am not uptight about other people using my photos on their site, although I would like credit if you do. So, on with the show.
I hope you enjoyed this. Please share with a friend and/or make a comment.
Inle Lake in Myanmar

Our lodge on Inle Lake
Inle Lake is a very beautiful, tranquil and special place to visit in Burma or Myanmar. There are many hotels on the lake, maybe the best Myanmar has to offer. We stayed at the Inle lakeResort and Spa. It was off season and we were almost alone in a big resort and spa, so the prices were discounted for massages, which is always a big plus.
Even in the off season, there is a lot to see. Of course everywhere you go,you go by boat.
The lake area supports about 70,000 people. Many of them are fishermen. They fish in an unusual manner.

The fishermen stand in their small canoes and row with their feet. They are very stable as they throw and retrieve the nets. This guy was so good he was even able to smoke while doing this feat.
Every year in September/October there is a three week event called Hpaung Daw U Festival.
Included in this festival are races between villages in foot paddled boats. Also during this festival the Royal Barge is brought out of storage and sailed from village to village.

This is a big deal to the inhabitants of the villages around the lake. The journey of the barge takes up almost the entire three weeks. Each town turns out their best as the barge visits them.

One year, a tragedy struck. A storm hit the lake and the barge sank. The real tragedy was that when this barge does the tour, it carries five Buddhas encrusted with gold leaf. Only four were recovered right away, the fifth turned up in a fishing net years later. This is a photo of a painting in a temple alongside the lake depicting the tragedy.

Buddhas encrusted with gold leaf? Yup. In fact there is so much gold on these things they look more like a lump of mashed potatoes than Buddhas. Here I am adding to the treasure and having a spiritual moment.
There are numerous villages on the lake. Each one has a different industrious specialty.

In this village they had the Temple of Jumping Cats. The cats were trained by a monk to jump through a hoop. The monk is long dead, but the tradition survives. I canot get my cat to jump off the couch, so I am amazed by this. Of course I am easily amazed.

In between two villages was a beautiful, very large sanctuary dedicated to the restoration of the Burmese cat to Burma. About ten years ago a wealthy man found out there were no more Burmese cats in Burma. So he went all over the world to find pure bred Burmese cats. They have a playground better than most grammar schools, a huge house to roam. They breed here, but they do not sell the cats. So if you want to see a Burmese cat in Burma, this is the place

Another village is dedicated to weaving lotus stalks into cloth. This is how they extract the fiber from the stalk. The emphasis is on quality not quantity. It takes many man hours (woman hours really) to get enough fiber to weave.

Weaving lotus cloth is much more complicated than cotton or silk, because the strands they have to work with are quite short and must be tied together.

Mary Ann owns more scarfs than I ever owned Grateful Dead T shirts, so I knew she would buy one. All those woman hours do not come cheap, and I imagine the village ate well for a few days after we left.
There were villages dedicated to silver work, paper making and aqua culture. We visited them all.

There are five community market towns surrounding the lake. The market moves from town to town every day. This is the parking lot where we went.

Because we were just visitors we had to park a ways away and use this bridge to cross the water to get to the market town.

It was a long walk from the water to the town. We saw many people who had shopped early returning home.
If you ever go to Burma or Myanmar, be sure to go to Inle. When you do, be sure to see the lost temples.

There is one area on the lake where (in relative terms) they recently discovered hundreds of small temples that the jungle had consumed. Most of them are visible now, and some are restored. It is a great place for a walk.
One more quirky thing to show you.

Whenever you leave the main body of water to go near a village or a lodge, you must go over a speed bump! I have never seen a speed bump on water before.
That is it for Inle. Thanks for reading please hit share to send this to all your close friends on FB, and if you get truly adventurous, make a comment.
The Third Secret of Fatima Revealed
Just in case there is someone reading this who is not at least somewhat familiar with the legend about Our Lady of Fatima, I will give you a brief irreverent rundown. If you want more, you can always go to Wikipedia, but my version is more fun!
Fatima is a small village about two hours drive out of Lisbon, Portugal. In 1917 three young Portuguese shepherds (all cousins) were (according to the legend) visited by a Marian apparition, six times over a six month period. The apparition is now referred to as Our Lady of Fatima. Our lady of Fatima is said to have entrusted the shepherd children with three secrets. The first is a description of hell. It is quite graphic and enough to make you give up drinking.
The second described the end of WWI and the coming of WWII. Once you get past the fire and brimstone, the second prediction was amazingly accurate.
Now we come to the third secret. Two of the cousins died at a young age from Influenza. The third, a woman named Lucia, who had become a nun, fell ill to Influenza in 1943. She had never revealed the third secret, saying that the world was not ready to hear it. So, the local bishop visited her bedside and convinced her to write it down, so it would not be lost to the world. Nuns tend to do what Bishops tell them to do, so she wrote it down. She sealed the secret in an envelope and told the church not to open it until 1960, when it would be better understood.
The envelope was stashed in the Fatima area until 1957 when it was delivered to Rome. As everyone knows, Rome can keep a secret. They did just that until 2000 when rumor and speculation around the secret were rampant. People around the world wanted to know…did Our Lady of Fatima reveal the end time? Why won’t the Church tell us anything? One person was so desperate he hijacked a plane, with his only demand the revelation of the third secret.
In 2000 the Church told the world what was in it. Basically nothing, they said. It sort of predicted the 1981 assassination attempt of Pope John Paul II, they said. They released some heavy fire and brimstone words describing fire and lights and flaming swords, all this supposedly the vision had by the three children and written down by Sister Lucia, they said.
Many people were quite disappointed and many more quite skeptical. There just has to be more to it, or why would they have kept is secret for so long.
Well in my first hour in Fatima I realized what Sister Lucia wrote down, and I am about to reveal it here. One sentence, no fire, no brimstone, no end of the world. What did she write? Ready? Here it is, hold on, sit down, take a deep breath. She simply wrote:
IF YOU BUILD IT, THEY WILL COME
Build what you might ask.

Quite simply the largest souvenir stand I have ever been in. If you take all the souvenir stores in Cooperstown and put them under one roof, it would not be as large as this place. They were doing enough business to keep the economy of Portugal alive for another generation. Mary Ann bought a statue of Our Lady of Fatima, I bought a ball cap made from cork. They sold Fatima wine, but I just could not fathom buying any. Maybe some of the Fatima Holy Water, but naaah.
I must say once you got past the gift shop, the church did a beautiful job of creating a shrine for the faithful.

The basilica has masses all day long to cater to the continuous line of tourist buses bringing the faithful, the curious and the likes of me. The three shepherds are buried in this basilica. They were beatified in 2000.

Services are also continuously held a hundred yards in front of the church which is the sight of the original apparitions.
This photo is from the front of the basilica overlooking the esplanade built to accommodate the over one million pilgrims who attend service here on May 13 and October 13, the dates of the most significant Fatima apparitions. In the far distance you can see the Church of the Most Holy Trinity which holds over 9000 worshipers.
Thanks for reading. You can now sleep easy at night knowing that Our Lady of Fatima and the Mayans were not on the same calendar!
Please share this with all your social media friends, all it takes is a click on a button! Stick around, come back soon for more about our recent trip to Portugal.