First off, second time in India is definitely the charm. Though India is still India, maybe it’s the South or maybe it’s our far more relaxed itinerary (read: no plans at all), but I’m really enjoying the chaos this time around. We just had a wonderful visit from my mother and my brother in the southern state of Kerala. Kerala is known for it’s labyrinth like canals that stretch from the middle of the state around Kochi all the way to the far southern state capital, Thiruvananthapuram (trying saying that 10 times fast, just kidding, you can’t say it at all). Us white people are thankfully aloud to use the colonial name Trivandrum. Anyway, Kerala is a completely lovely state, and, like most states in India, it has an entire language all it’s own called Malayalam, but as far as I know it’s the only language that is also a palindrome. We stayed in the Portuguese colonial town of Fort Cochin also known as Kochi, because every place in India has at least three names in order to confuse foreigners. Fort Cochin was very interesting because the city had one part that was all colonial buildings and white tourists, and another hidden side which Jasleen(Tara) and I discovered only after Evan and my mom left... sorry guys.
The touristy side had beautiful buildings and churches as well as an amazing line of Chinese Fishing Nets that make for a pretty amazing site backlit against the rising sun, while all the sinewy fisherman haul in net after net of sparkling fish/algae. We learned that we were visiting in the dry season so the fishing was not all that great, but the typically entrepreneurial fisherman also had a side business of inviting weakling tourists onto the fishing platform to give the whole process a try... for a small donation.
Because my Mom was in town, an additional aspect of Fort Cochin took on more importance... Shopping! Hooray! Ok, so those were sarcastic exclamation points. Though I’m not immune to the array of very cheap and beautiful trinkets, statues, shawls, rugs, etc. on sale, I am always very aware that my home’s square footage at the moments is the whopping 6 sq. ft. that is my backpack. Not much room for intricate teak carvings or bronze dancing Ganeshas in the 2 bags that make up all my major possessions in the world. Oh well, it was fun to shop vicariously through my Mom, and to a lesser extent through Evan. A quick side note: can anyone explain why practically all Indian shopkeepers are from Kashmir? I mean you can’t get much further from Kashmir in India than Kerala, but there they were, Kashmiri shop after Kashmiri shop. Anyway, they may be nonsensical, but they sure have great rugs, right Mom?
Jasleen and I discovered the hidden side of Fort Cochin when we took our long awaited walk to the synagogue in “Jew Town”(don’t be offended, I didn’t make it up). On the way there we moved further and further out of the tourist track and Jasleen summed up our local very well when she said, “It looks like we just landed in Bagdad!” Yah, it took only a 10-15 minute walk away from the tourist center to get from beautiful cafes and craft stores to middle-eastern war zone. However, despite the derelict buildings around us, there was something beautiful about the fading pastel paint on the buildings and the contrasting brightly Sunday sari’d woman passing by on their way to church. Sure most of the buildings didn’t have roofs, or had a pile of antiques (read: trash) under the stairs, but in a perfectly Indian way, all the entropy and seeming disrepair created a scene that in it’s entirety was as beautiful as any five-star colonial, neo-classically furnished restaurant.
K, that’s all for now... but I’ll actually be adding updating soon as we’re forcing ourselves to stay put until we actually make our blog something worth reading. Also, please enjoy the Driving in India explanation I wrote after our first trip through the sub-continent.
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