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Other entries in Kochi

Another Former Colonial Paradise, HOOT, Paradise.

I arrived in Ernakalum after comfortable night on a deluxe semi-sleeper bus from Mysore.  Semi-Sleeper was something I hadn’t seen before.  It was something like a recliner chair with a foot that extended.  Even without the foot there was a lot of space allowing for lots of reclining and lots of room for feet.  Even better because it was an expensive luxury service, it was also only half full so I had two seats to myself.  Which was wonderous because I cant really sleep on my back.

When we arrived in Ernakulam I had to walk for 20 minutes to the ferry terminal.  The ferry terminal was a small building newly built, incredibly dirty and still under construction.  You could only reach the terminal through a muddy trash filled path. I had to wait 10 minutes for the small passenger ferry.  The ferry took us across the bay and past an island with a naval base and out to Fort Kochi.  Fort Cochi or Cochin was originally a Portuguese colony and then a Dutch colony and finally it was taken by the English.  I think it might have been the first European colony in India and it is almost 500 years old.  The buildings in the old part of town certainly had an interesting amount of colonial architecture. 

The ferry port on the island was 1km from the tourist area of Fort Cochi.  I spent 20 minutes trying to find an ATM after the first one wasn’t working and the second didn’t accept Visa, Mastercard only.  I then started walking again and got stopped at a Sunday morning church service.  The church was big and beautiful and packed full of congregants. It was already starting to warm up so I wasted no more time in my search for a hotel.    The tourist area was small and after walking around once, I was a bit worried but I knew before I started that Fort Cochi was more upscale then most tourist destinations I tend to visit.  A couple of hotel touts were following me around for awhile.  I was more civil than normal realizing I might need there help to find a cheap place.  Even them calling out prices helped me know what kind of price I was going to have to pay.  I walked the whole place once.  I walked past a hotel, saw nice tile floor and real carpeting, knowing that I couldn’t afford it. But then I had only stopped at two other hotels and one was full, so after passing by at least 10 hotels, I decided that I had better make an enquiry.  Much to my luck the place was renting out 3 bed dorms.  The price was expensive for a dorm but good for Cochi at $4. 

Even better the place was nice, and the 17 year old girl working there was clearly pretty liberal and even better comfortable talking to me in a way that’s rare in India.  And by that I meant we could just have a normal chat.   I am not a big fan of the cultural gender segregation present in India as it results in a terrible immaturity in men and an inability for the opposite sex to communicate in mature ways.

Once I had a hotel I went for a nice breakfast at a wonderful art cafe with lots of plants and a garden feel.  And they played jazz.  Any establishment that plays jazz immediately gets a place in my heart, in great part because you have no idea of the amount of crappy local pop music that I have been subjected to.  Given a choice I would probably be grateful for crappy American pop.  And I am not kidding.

After that I tried to go back for a nap in my wonderfully appointed hotel room.  But that was not to be so as they were taking the Styrofoam ceilng tiles and applying glue.  It was a smaller hotel, and I must admit I was a bit ticked.  But what could I do but be my nice civil self and sit in a loungish hallway watching a terrible movie that was part of a three movie DVD that I had bought in Mysore.   It was supposed to be a horror film, I didn’t really get into it, but I still appreciate exposure to my own culture, good, bad, or indifferent.

I then walked around town along the water front. Fort Cochi is famous to tourists for its Chinese Fishing nets which are giant wood contraptions with rocks on one side as counter weights.   It takes 5 or 6 men with great effort to pull the net out of the water.  They say the nets were brought by the merchants of Ghengis Khan 700 years ago.  The design doesn’t look like its changed for any sake of modernity.

During my time at Fort Cochin I got no little joy out of watching the fisherman work.  Another thing that should be noted is that Kerala State in India is the first and only instance of a local populace to freely elected a communist government.  So the there are lots of banners and pictures of Marx and Che Guevera.  By most accounts the government has performed well. The other thing is that a sizeable amount of men wear a traditional style of clothing called the dhoti.  Many are white and it looks like a skirt made of sheets.  When its hot its worn as above the knees, its always hot, very seldom have I seen the dhoti riding low towards the ankles.  I hope to at some point find a tourist man wearing one of these (for the sheer entertainment of it) but it hasn’t happened yet.

Around dinner time I popped up to the only tallish rooftop cafe in town. I made the mistake of looking at the menu in the crowded and hot downstairs restaurant before going upstairs.  Some of the dishes were priced 50% more.  Of course the dishes that were nearly identical were vegetarian Indian ones, which lucky for me I have become wonderfully fond of the richer ones.  The food was excellent and I enjoyed some of the people watching.

The next day I spent some good time reading Ghandi’s Autobiography, which  I must say I became quite addicted to and fascinated with.  Ghandi was shy, and on many occasions he suffered from stage fright so severe that he couldn’t read his speech.  He was also obsessed with diet, truly obsessed, and experimenting with it, and also on taking vows.  For the last 42 years of his life he didn’t have sex with his wife feeling that carnal lust devalued his love for her and his own spiritual purity.  Mostly I was inspired by his ability to confront an unjust situation and see that it could be resisted and people believed in him.

I also loved reading about his first experiences of European culture in London, because for me my impressions of spending so much time in Indian culture are quite vivid and I can still feel the friction between myself and the culture that surrounds me.  Sometimes its like a burlap cloak on a hot day.  Later I loved reading about his experiences in India and how he was upset by the lack of hygiene and the lack of reverence in many Hindu temples.  I am not Hindu, I understand little of it, but one of my many impressions of Hindu temples was a lack of respect, like littering in the temple grounds and groups of young men goofing around in loud and inappropriate ways.

For lunch I went to the same art cafe with a set lunch menu.  I joined Osnat an Isreali woman and because the cafe was full we ended up chatting with Sara from Switzerland who was studying a medical text.  It was a long lunch filled with some lively conversation.  Later there would be confusion because there was an Isreali man who was in our hotel and he claimed she was Jewish and Australian and they were speaking English to each other.  I was confused more by this because earlier I had heard her speaking Hebrew with another Isreali couple.  It was a matter of intrigue, and really Cochi could probably use more intrigue, it’s a laid back place.

I joined Osnat again for Dinner and we ended up at the outdoor Salt and Pepper cafe.   We weren’t impressed the service and the food was just ok.   I did some more reading and writing that evening.  I was reading pretty late in the hallway when a Portoguese man and an Australian man started chatting about world travel and India (a popular topic). The Australian man had just arrived in India and the Porgoguese man had been there the same amount of time that I have been, a little too long.  Some travelers don’t last long in India, that’s no joke.  Anyways the whole thing devolved into a story telling slumber party  among like minded men. I appreciated someone who had been in India a long time, and felt the same sort of cultural friction that I did, it was cathartic and I felt much better just having an opportunity to express myself to someone who clearly felt similar.  But it was all on the air of a comedy, especially to our Australian friend who just listened and laughed. I had rickshaw drivers puncture the tire on my rental bike, and that’s just one incident, and while its immediately quite funny and I smile as I write this, change is good for traveling.

For my third day I did a lot of writing realizing that I am starting to feel some anxiety about the age of some of the unwritten entries in this journal.   So I sat around and wrote about visiting Angkor Wat in November 2006 while sitting down by the beach occasionally watching men work their fishing nets. Nets that hadn’t changed in 700 years.   I also spent good amounts of time day dreaming and planning about going for a long walk on the Appalachian Trail.  I have never been to Maine or really even New England, and if I walked my way out of Maine on that Trail, it would serve as the longest walk I have taken at a distance of 280 odd miles (450 km).  But for me I dream of something longer, and the Applachian Trail is longer than I am.  So I am saying that I want to walk a thousand miles.  It’s a worthy goal and even miserable failure in that goal could be quite a good amount of fun.

Knowing that I would eventually have to leave on my last day in Cochi I went for a long walk towards Jew Town, and the Jewish Synagogue. I stopped along the way at the hipster Solar Cafe and had a fancy lassy and excellent pineapple cake that was as thick as mud.  I skipped a Dutch Palace and really with the tour buses and the crazyness there was a culture of harassment near the Synagogue.   The synagogue was fine but it had a group of 40 school kids from Pune all in bright red uniforms, so it wasn’t very quiet.  I would have described it as modest.  I visited many Synagogues in Eastern Europe. My Isreali friends told me that the Jewish community only numbered 17 people and that needed at least 10 men to have a worship service. 

On my way out of the neighborhood a man got right in my face and shouted in a loud tone, Excuse ME, I replied back in a rude imitating tone,  No Excuse ME.  I don’t like people in my face and I can guess that the fact that I was walking in a stride instead of grazing like a tourist was what inspired him to heckle me.  He knew that I wasn’t going to buy anything.  After the third rude exchange, I stopped realized that he was baiting me, but he kept shouting even after I was 50 meters distant.  I wonder how that was good for business.  It reminded me a bit of the bazaar at Luxor where a man grabbed me and I nearly hit him.  I was just glad that things were calm by the remnants of the fort and the fishing nets that the tourists had set up camp in.  If my hotel was near shopkeepers like that, and many were the pushy sort who don’t respect a casual no thanks, I doubt I would have lasted long enough in Cochi to find a hotel before wanting to leave.

On the way back to my hotel I decided to take a different approach, knowing that with the orientation of the islands streets, I would certainly get lost, and lost I went.    Quickly I had no indication that I  was walking in the right direction and there were a few times that I thought I was about to complete a circle.  It was quite entertaining.  I decided asking for directions would take the challenged out of the Lost in Cochi Walk.  Eventually knowing that I could keep walking aimlessly, I thought of the map sitting in my hotel room and knew that the only direction I could have gone to become too lost was South, as I was walking around the northern side of the Island.   It being late in the afternoon to determine a west setting sun, I went in a course that I thought was northerly and 10 minutes later I found myself in back allies in the personal space of two different neighborhoods.

So I got a bit lost and met this family.  They were having tea and snacks and painting the house for a brother who was about to get married.  They quickly invited me to the wedding the next week.  As soon as we did names I knew that it was a muslim family and I was so surprised that  the wife and the older daughter and mother were allowed to sit and freely observe a strange male while we sat around and chat.  The wife wasn’t even shy.  For muslims they certainly weren’t the conservative type that I seen much of. 

They gave me tea and insisted that I eat some snacks.  They were middle class and quite nice to me.  Before I left I asked if I could see the inside of the house, and the man of the house obliged me.  It was 3 small bedrooms a kitchen befitting a restaurant (and nicely kept) and a communal living area.  Nothing you would consider large, but it didn’t seem cramped either.  The last thing I saw in the second hallway was  a cage with about 10 pidgeons in it   His English wasn’t excellent but he told me that they had finished a certain race in 13 hours.  He also showed me the the metal bar on his roof that they would land on.   They were painting the house bright pink with blue shutters.  I had an overwhelming desire to pick up the paint brush and make a use of myself but I didn’t  because it wouldn’t have been proper to let a guest engage in work.

I said goodbye acknowledging everyone in the family, and they asked me to come to the wedding one more time.  Part of me felt quite good and open, because you always know that you choose to visit places that are well worn and lined with 100 silly souvenair stalls.  But if you do a good enough job getting lost you can find people who have no financial interest in you, and that’s the start of good cultural interaction.  It usually involves tea.  And that leads me to think of a list of all the great people and places that I have shared tea with interesting people.  I think the tea train started in Moscow and continued through Siberia, was wonderfully appointed in Mongolia and completely revived in all the Muslim cultures I visited from Turkey to Tajikistan.  I could be the spokesperson for the, “Drink Tea, See the World”, campaign.

When I was nearly in front of my hotel I bumped into Sara the medical student from Switzerland again.  I unabashedly encouraged her to join me for a performance of Kathakali.  Kathakali is a unique traditional dance form from South India.  I took a few minutes to freshen up after more than two hours of walking in the hot sun and then waited while she completed a few tasks with the travel agent making some transportation enquiries and trying to cash a traveler’s check.

I ended up buying her copy of the “Kite Runner” at a used price. There were intense and ongoing negotiations for the rest of the evening over the matter.  This book didn’t take long to read.  It’s a story about redemption for an Afghani kid with the backdrop of all the different conflicts in Afghanistan. Some of the writing was quite beautiful, and the story was great, there were three times when the story nearly reduced me to tears.  But its all an indication that I am well served by reading more novels, I always appreciate a good story.

Kathakali has to be one of the more odd and wonderful types of performance arts I have ever laid eyes on.  We arrived early enough to watch them apply make-up for about 30 minutes.  The first 30 minutes of the performance was all introduction into the forms.  Our performance had a singer with a small symbol who sang in that typical hindi melody and two drummers. Lots of the action was punctuated by the percussion instruments in a way that reminded me of Beijing Opera.  The makeup was surreal and quite impossible in a larger than life sort of way.  The stories usually related to Hindu mythology meaning there were lots of gods and goddesses.

There was also no dialogue.  But instead a series of 24 direct hand signs and seemingly countless combinations of dance, gestures, hand signals, to express anything from mother and father to sun and moon and while eyes and lips were simple and took 4 seconds each, breasts in a typical immature Indian way accounted for 12 seconds of gestures.  All the actors were men and in more traditional times I doubt women were allowed in the audience either, but that’s pure speculation.  They also showed us various gestures in combination with different moods and emotions and I began to get some idea of the complexity of the art form. They said it required many years of schooling and I had no trouble believing that.

We quickly moved into the story.  Earlier they had provided a simple English synopsis of the story.  It was about a god who tried to seduce and then rape a women on her way to buy wineskins.  This scene was long and it was at least 20 minutes of his sinister dialogue and patent abuse before the poor maiden (played by a man) even responded with her own set of handsignals.  Really it just made me angry because the scene went on forever and it was just abuse and insult slumped on top of each other. But in the end the girl managed to escape with her honor intact.

The second much sorter scene was the girl telling her father what happened.  The third scene was the father pretending to be the girl hiding under a sheet.  When the fighting started a blanket was pulled up so that we couldn’t see the action, but there was shuffling and yelling (more hand signals perhaps) and someone kept hitting the sheet.  The last part which lasted a full five minutes was of the father twisting the knife and restraining the dying man like a slaughtered sheep. It was graphic and after a minute blood started pouring out of his mouth. It just lasted and lasted and had a certain realism to it that I hadn’t seen in stage performances.  I had been around when they were slaughtering a sheep at the boarder post in Kyrgyzstan and the man in my homestay in Karakul proudly showed me the video of a large family outing on the summer pasture,  well of the sheep slaughter.  I tried not to shrink from it, so I watched it.  Because really, should you eat the mutton if you aren’t willing to recognize the sacrifice of the lamb?  So yes the death scene left an impression on me.

Sara and I then went on a quest for some mysterious and nonexistent restaurant that her guesthouse had recommended to her.  I then indicated a restaurant down the street.  I was thinking of the Italian place that was already closed, but she thought I wanted the “Talk of the Town” restaurant were one of the staff made a pass at her, and then later in town didn’t seem to understand her complete lack of interest.  We finally ended up back at the Salt and Pepper place right next to the Kathakali Hall,  we spent about 30 minutes completing a full circle.   She had fish masala and I had fish Manchurian.  Love that Indian spice.  There was a conversational harmony that we reached and I truly enjoyed her presence and spirit.  I felt like I knew her well, and it made me realize how I miss having a meal with good friends.

We tried to go for coffee afterwords but one place was closed and another place didn’t want to serve us coffee or tea.  Salt and Pepper, refused us coffee and since we were sitting within ear shot of all the staff I remarked loud enough to be heard, “They wont serve us tea I wonder if it is because they are lazy or they just want us to order something more expensive.”  I was encourage to say that after they tried to intently to get us to order a beer, but it wasn’t the drinking sort of evening.  But the ratio of  tea price to beer price is 10 to 1.  To be fair I have had other restaurants refuse to serve tea in the evening, ones that were oriented at tourists, but come on, how hard is it to heat up some water.

So we were in a place that wouldn’t serve tea and it was late enough that little was open, so I did the only thing I knew how to do and ordered some stale cake and a wonderful rum-like chocolate ball. Sara ate nothing as it was well and truly time for late tea.  I said goodbye and crawled up into my dorm room.

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