A Different Way of Seeing. Helping You Make Sense of the Overwhelm
Guess where I’ll be this coming weekend – the National Arts Festival in Makhana, formerly Grahamstown. And I’ll be playing a gig while I’m there! I’m one of the artists performing at the Blind Date Variety Show that’s part of the Fringe Festival – details are in the advert. You can book on the National …
I’m always keen to discover how accessible a destination is, not only for me as The Blind Tourist, but for those with other disabilities. As I’ve said before, each disability faces different challenges when traveling. As a simple example, a person in a wheelchair may have difficulty getting around a tourist site, if insufficient work …
Do you have any idea how nervous I felt crossing the multi-lane roads in Kolkata? And that was with sighted assistance. Doing so independently would have made me a nervous wreck! It wasn’t that the roads were busy. Well, it was partially that, because I’ve never experienced such high volumes of traffic, even in the …
You might remember that I started lessons on using a white cane shortly before I left for my trip to India. I shared a few articles on what I was learning just before I left. Today I want to let you know how I put those lessons to good use during my trip. I spent …
As a guide dog, I know that, if there’s going to be a problem on a route, that it will always happen at the same spot. It’s almost an unwritten law amongst us guide dogs and our human partners. Well, in my case, if there’s going to be a problem it’ll happen at what mom …
When we chatted to friends before our trip to India, we were cautioned that the extreme levels of abject poverty would hit us every time we ventured out of the hotel. I know how much I’m affected by seeing people experiencing hardships. So I was concerned that my visit to Kolkata would be overshadowed by …
For years I’ve believed that people with a disability have strong problem-solving skills. This was proven yet again when I was visiting India recently. One of the maintenance staff on our floor of the hotel was hearing impaired and non-verbal. Which wasn’t a challenge until he arrived to service our room and I was on …
“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.” – the Road Not Taken, by Robert Frost. That may be a strange way to start an article about an experience I had in the city of Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) on my recent …
As the 90 000 crowd surged to their feet with a mighty roar, I found myself wondering if I’d somehow slipped from one dimension to another. While it might have felt like it, we weren’t at a rock concert. We were at a cricket match – but a cricket match unlike any I’d seen before. …
Several people told Craig and I that the Victoria Memorial in Kolkata was a “must-see” site. One of them told us to allocate an entire day since it was far from our hotel and there was just so much to see. Another told us we’d probably only need an hour to take in the site. …