Even though all the protesters have been ridden-down by the Calvalry and the streets are safe again, it's still ninety dusty degrees outside and we don't have the energy to be milling around. And anyway, we've had a pretty thorough tour of this neighborhood during the last week.
So tonight is Chinese New Year's eve. So we'll be having a nice prosperous dinner at the hotel tonight. (We're not as excited as you might expect -- the dining room service there is punishingly, brutally slow. It starts to become like a sick comedy after a while) As well, we have sets of brand-new, never worn clothes to wear. It's Chinese custom to wear new things on Chinese New Year, otherwise you open yourself up to a year of poverty. Kind of like setting the tempo for the year.
It is our last night in Kochi. Tomorrow we'll transfer back to the mainland, to the city of Ernakulam, in anticipation of flying back to Singapore on Sunday evening.
The only thing left to do in Kochi is to catch Saturday's festival of a local Catholic girls' school in the field across from the hotel. All week long we've seen these long-suffering girls practice their classical Indian dances and John Phillip Sousa marches in the blistering sun and choking dust. It's hilarious to see a tiny Indian girl dressed in her blue pinafore (looks exactly like the notorious Singapore St. Nicholas outfit) marching with a giant bass drum.
We've been burning through books here a furious pace. A tiny bookstore chain called 'Idiom' has been our source. They specialize in books about the area (cooking, art, fiction, non-fiction), we've bought at least a dozen books there. An added bonus is that they're printed specifically for India -- therefore they're cheap.
I finished up the innapropriately selected history of English code breaking efforts against Napolean's forces during the Iberian campaign. The effort ran a very similar course to anythign you'd read on the Enigma or Purple ciphers of world war two, except that it was one guy doing it, not five hundred. At any rate, the cipher aspect of the book become almost tertiary at the time, and acted just as an excuse to write a very good history of the Wellington's campaign against Napolean in Spain and Portugal. This is a bit of history I was completely ignorant of. It was well done and interesting.
Next I moved onto Paul Theroux's "Great Railway Bazaar." I also feared this would be a poor choice. After too many of them, I have started getting sick of modern travel novels. If anything, perhaps his books (this was written in 1975) might be the genre's archetype. God damn it was funny. It deserves a full writeup, complete with excerpts (I underlined a hundred different passages in the book anyway) but in short, he had this strange first-person tone that seemed like hybrid of Edward Abbey and Elmore Leonard. I don't really know if the dialogues he reports were true or not, but they were pissingly funny.
Now I am in the middle of the modestly short but immodestly deep 'Siddhartha' by Herman Hesse. Hollingsworth told me about it a long time ago, but only now, fittingly while in India, that I have mustered the time and will to read it. Too early to comment on it.
Just kicked off my shoes... my mosquito bites are flaring up again. All the bites on my legs and feet have become a deep, dark red. They follow my main veins and arteries in such a way that it looks like one of those computer-graphics of a ballerina or baseball pitcher or horse with bits of tin taped to their joints and filmed in their respective acts. Except in my case, instead of my joints, it's my circulatory system.
Ling has successfully fought off a chest cold. I think all the credit has to goto Dr. Feelgood Cooper from where I got a host of useful pills labelled with my own applications ("Pink Pzifers -- Chest Infections" "Suppository -- Food poisoning so violent I can't hold down a pill" "Cipro -- Kill! Kill! Kill!" and "Unlabelled, large green pills -- death marches and difficult cruxes").
(Really glad I shed my shoes -- I found that I stepped on a large ball of street asphalt which is now working it's way around, sticking to any and every goddamned part of me.)
At any rate, perhaps tomorrow I'll find a keyboard witha lighter touch and a faster connection and I can write more. Photos will have to wait until next week, when we return and I can process the dozens of rolls we shot.
Regards and Gong Xi Fa Cai!