Goa, Velha Goa

We just came back after 5 days in Goa and had a blast! I went to the Taj Spa everyday to get Ayurvedic massages and enjoyed the Goan seafood and entertainment. Took lots of pics of the Cathedral of Bom Jesus, the Shantadurga and Mangeshi temples, and all the other sights in Goa and I will try to sort them all out when I get back home to D.C. this Saturday and post them up on this blog.

Goa is very different from the rest of India. Known for being very liberal, this live and let live town still counts hippies from the 60s as its residents. The clubs are world famous and the cuisine is unique with lots of seafood as the main ingredient.

Goa is also the place from which my ancestors came. The main language spoken here is Konkani, which is the linguistic group to which my family belongs. It was comforting to hear everyone speaking Konkani and seeing the temples that go back hundreds of years in my family. During the Portuguese Inquisition of the late 1600s, many Hindu Konkanis fled down the coast and settled in places like Mangalore. They then moved to Bangalore in the early 20th century to work in the cotton mills, which also brought my family to Bangalore. My ancestors can be traced to a village north of Mangalore called Tonse. Many Konkanis took the name of the village in which they settled and that's how our last name became Tonse.

Tracing the movement back to Goa before the Inquisition was interesting. When we went to the Mangeshi and Shantadurga temples we saw the idols that had been smuggled out of Goa to protect them from the Inquisitors. When peace was made and some Konkanis returned to Goa, the temples were rebuilt with a Portuguese architectural influence. I will post pics of the temples when they are sorted out.

So we are back in Bangalore. I visit my grandmother tomorrow and some shopping Friday and then it's off to the airport Friday night for a 1:55 a.m. flight back to Paris and then home to D.C.