house of fun

A very different day today.  All the other wedding guests from the UK have gone home now.  So we abandon the pool and the beach in favour of a bit of culture/history.  There’s no public transport in and out of the area we’re staying in, so we do a deal with a friendly taxi-driver and book him for a day’s sight-seeing trip to the Goan capital, Panjim.

It soon becomes clear that Goa has a split personality.  The area around the beach is the Goa of the holiday brochures; sand, sea and surfing.  They even use the words ‘hippy’ and ‘laid back’.

The roads that service the tourist trade are noisy and chaotic; cars, scooters, bicycles, pedestrians all getting in each others’ way.  But it all seems to be done in a good-natured, accepting sort of way.  Laid-back, even.

After just a few miles, the noise has gone and we’re in another India.  The sort you might see on a travel or nature tv programme.  Green fields, groups of women tending crops, water-buffalo and egrets.  You get the idea.

But it doesn’t take long before we hit the big city.  As you might expect the roads are noisy and chaotic but much more so than at the coast.  And it’s noticeably hotter here as well.

We wander round the Latin Quarter - an area of the city where much of the Indo-Portuguese architecture from the 17th century has been preserved.  But it’s full of tourists posing for selfies in front of doorways.  Much like people do anywhere when confronted with picturesque reminders of how people used to live - and still do.  I put my camera away - it’s too hot anyway.

A few miles outside the city is the oddly named Houses of Goa Museum.  It was the taxi-driver’s suggestion we visit this place and it was a good one. Apart from the serious stuff about the 400-odd years of Portuguese influence on architecture (v.interesting btw) the whole place has a sense of fun (see Anniemay’s blip).  There are many odd buildings around the place and none of them are quite what they seem.

My blip, for instance is a house with odd-shaped windows and door.  But it’s not until you take a photograph does it become a face.  You can stare at it all you like, but it only takes on this other facet once you see it on the screen.  Welcome to the house of fun.  And now I have Madness ear worm.