ear
visitor, welcome to
he
main objective for this site is to tell and share the stories of my travels.
Often people have told me to write a book about my adventures; I made
a few half hearted starts on it several years ago, before the times of
computers. After producing a dozen or so pages of scribbled sentences
with uncountable footnotes and forgotten bits inserted wherever I found
some free space, it all got to be such a mess I gave up in disgust. With
a computer it's child's play to write and edit, and great fun to create
and design.
y site is a constant work
in progress; one by one I'm adding my travel stories and adventures, my
recipes, and other topics to it. My way of working is time-consuming: Doing
the graphics, searching through heaps of old photos, scanning and readying
the selected ones, hunting in the recesses of my mind for half-forgotten
incidents and doing the necessary research to give my visitors some coherent
background information on the different countries, their geography and their
history, their people, flora and fauna or whatever is called for. That was
the official explanation for my slow progress. You could also say I'm no
great expert at time management, I get easily sidetracked when I do searches
on the web, I can hunt for a single pic I need for days, and I can go over
an important graphic for as long until I'm happy with the results. 
ite
Navigation is fairly simple: From the main index, you can access all the
different topics. In each section, "home"
always means the start of the section, not of the whole site. Like if you
are reading about Brazil, home will mean the start of the Brazil acount.
You can always get back to the main index page via any of the small roses
found all over the site, often at the bottom of a page, and always at the
start of a new section.
s
to the name of my site, Gulab Mahal, it literally means “Rosewater
Palace”, but actually ”Rose Palace”, because in Indian
languages the word ”Gulab” is commonly used for “Rose”
and not for “Rose Water”, which in India is called Gulab Jal.
My guess is that the word “Gulab” was brought to India back
in the times of the Islamic invaders.“Gulab” has its root in the Persian word “Gul”, meaning rose. "Ab" means water, like in the name of the Indian/Pakistani province “Punjab”, meaning “five waters” (rivers in that case). There are many girl names starting with “Gul”, like “Gulshan”, in Farzi, Turkish andseveral more languages of that region. Gulab is a boys name as well; additionally, it is also a common family name in countries like Afghanistan, Pakistan or India.
lease
come back once in a while to check for new additions to my site. The story
about travelling through the Sahel on our own camels and later, after
having sold the animals, passing by local transport through several more
West African countries up to Timbuktu is my latest addition.
or
any questions about my site or a featured topic, feel free to contact me
at: webdesign@gulabmahal.com .:: have phun ::.