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!
Was preparing a big writeup yesterday on our trip through the backwater canals of Kerala. But when we returned to Ft. Kochi we found every single shop shuttered tight and clumps of people loitering uncomfortably. When we dropped the bags off at our hotel, the staff gave extremely vague, extremely uncomfortable answers to what had happened. So we kitted up and headed out to the streets to find out ourselves.
I'm still gathering interviews and newspaper articles (I already found one significant discrepancy!), but it appears something like:
Unlicensed makeshift shops near the Chinese Fishing Nets had been recently ordered CLOSED by the Kochi police in advance of some new tourist zone development. Vendors had not closed down.
Police arrived on scene to remove the stalls. One of the stalls was burnt to the ground. [man-on-the-street said the POLICE burned it down; newspaper said the merchants themselves burned it down]
Angry people [vendors? "gangsters encouraging 'communal violence'"?] decided to reciprocate by burning down similar, licensed stalls owned by a 'prominent citizen' in the same area. They did.
Police riot squads, including giant prison buses and the 'Royal Flying Squadron' (jeep-based policemen w/ bamboo shields and long clubs), arrived and order was restored. It is not clear how big the actual 'rioting' ever was. Some 15+ people were arrested. All afternoon buildings were shuttered, although people wandered about gossiping and rubbernecking.
Regardless of their take on the incident, everyone sought to downplay its signifiance. Shouldn't be a suprise in a tourism-based industry.
It should be interesting to study this further. There seems to be a very complicated taxonomy of strikes, protest, and civil discord in India. {Perhaps not complicated when compared to their religions, but complicated compared to America, where you've got 'riot', 'strike', and 'kook'.} As well, it's all taken seriously--one very normal seeming guy plainly stated that the burning of the businessman's building was just.
These sort of beliefs shouldn't be suprising... In many sectors of the town there are banners for the DYFI (Democratic Youth Front of India), the Indian communist party. You don't have to look too long to see a lot of old 'hammer and sickle' stencils on alleys walls, either.
All in all sort of interesting. I think on the Riot Richter Scale, this would have registered as a 0.001, but still, it was my first civil action experience.
It also was valuable lesson about wringing more out our trips abroad--we should be interviewing people a lot more than we do. We found out much more by milling into the crowd and asking man-on-the-street than just photographic observation of the scene. I think it the disagreement over who burnt down the unlicensed vendor's tent is one of the most important details of the whole experience.
Ling and I had exhausted the standard tourist zone of Kochi and I hankered for some new photography haunts, so yesterday for 2$USD we rented two bikes for 24hrs.
They were brilliant! Ling had a BSA 'ladybird' bicycle and I had the Hercules brand 'Hero Jet.' Both were single-speed bikes made of iron. The front wheel of mine was oversized and the headset angle was odd too. It made me feel like I was riding one of those ancient bicycles you see on tacky wallpaper at Subway -- the thing with the 6' high front wheel and a 6" rear wheel. It also boasted strange cableless caliper brakes that used some metal rods and springs to give the counter-force. The absolute best thing about the bike was the handle-bars -- proud Enlglish style that allowed me to sit ramrod straight and pedal in a very dignified way, with my hands nearly at my knees, as if I was the village veterenarian in some obscure shire of Wales.
Anyway, these bikes were perfect, and allowed us to cruise through the back alleys of Kochi in comfort. These were the non-tourist areas of Kochi. Spent a lot of time taking more photos -- road works, a giant K-12 school that unleashed a million kids at 4pm, and lots of busy market-place action. The big 100-400mm lens I bought was well worth the money -- I am optimistic that I got some excellent photographs.
Yesterday we moved into the next hotel in our queue -- the Malabar Residency Inn -- regarded as the nicest hotel in Kochi. The Brunton Boat Yard was also excellent, and in a Dutch Colonial Style -- the Malabar Residency is an old Dutch Residency, but decorated with an eye for more contemporary look. Most amusing to us is that the walls are painted with sponges in bright primary colours in the same way our home in California was done. It's all quite tasteful. The hotel is smaller and quite close company. Our suite is on the first floor, with a porch that spills out onto the courtyard. Last night was one of the most pleasant nights I've had here -- sitting under the ceiling fan, outside, reading a book, drinking a pot of coffee, while some musicians sat in the courtyard playing Sitar and Tabla.
Ling continues to be confused for a Japanese by everyone -- she is continually being greeted with 'Konishiwa!' by both locals and Japanese tourists alike. Not really sure why -- perhaps Chinese women are enormously rare in India.
Someone is setting off blasts very near by. India sounds like Chinese New Year with all the fireworks going off. And they're not the delicate blue 4th of July ones, either -- they're the big, no-light sonic blasts. I'm not sure if there is some sort of religious signifance to it or what. It drives Ling mad. After serving seven years in the Naval Special Warfare Community, it takes a lot more than that to alarm me, however.
Speaking of things Naval -- tomorrow we go off for a day-long cruise through the back-country canals of Kerala in a renovated rice barge. These canals should be something like a cross between the everlglades and Venice, so should be some interesting photography to shoot.
Regards
Damn, unfortunately I only hastily set up this blog before we left for India. I forgot to patch the template that generates this blog and for some of you guys, you'll find that the bottom of the screen is truncated, etc. Until I get back to Singapore and fix it, you may need to repeatedly hit (Ctrl-Refresh) until you can see the end of the text. This most often occurs on IE.
Alternatively, you can goto the right sidebar and under 'Recent Entries' go directly to single entries which you can read in their entirety and scroll back and forth.
Hiding out from the frightful sun. The mornings and evenings are better, but the afternoon sun is perhaps even more poisonous than Singapore. (Granted I'm rarely toting 30 pounds of camera gear around Singapore)
This morning we took a long hike through the bazaar-quarters area of Kochi while the morning sun was still warm and good for photography. The two mile stretch was full of wholesale trader shops opening for business between nine and ten AM. I misread the sun and it was in our face most of the time, so I had to keep turning around for shots. Later in the week we'll take the same route from the reverse direction.
Eventually reached the area of Kochi referred to as 'Jew Town' (there is genuinely ancient Jewish synagogue and cemetery there). That's the center for all the spice trading in Kerala.
It's also home to the Kochi International Pepper Exchange. I bought a ticket to go onto the 'trading floor' for ten Rupees. Ten rupees is about $0.21USD. I went upstairs of the modest building and heard the open outcry commotion. Imagine a dismal office room built in the style of Sardis Elemtary School -- low, acoustic tile-panel ceilings, faitgued flourescent lights, and 1'x1' asbestos tiles. It wasn't exactly the NYMEX or the IPE. It looked more like a Glengarry Glen Ross set, except no desks, just an empty floor and some hemi-semi-demi cubicles along the walls that served as the floor brokers' phone booths. The brokers were the same easygoing, simple folks that fill Kerala -- dressed casually in their muhtis (I think this is the term for the half-sarong-skirts they wear) and other Keralan styles.
Superficially , it seemed woeful that this is the international center for Pepper Price Discovery, but as far as I could make out by observation and conversations w/ the brokers, it had all the necessary fundamentals of an efficient futures exchange. There looked to be about twenty(?) floor brokers. I don't know if there is a role for 'Locals.' It was generally quiet, just guys sitting milling around, but then orders were called in, there would be an eruption of haggling between brokers in some Indian dialect, and a deal(s) would be concluded. I didn't make out that they used hand signals (it was almost too small, quiet to require them). I also didn't notice any sort of referees. At the very far end of the room was a cmall CRT displaying current markets.
To me and my ego's significant dismay the traders were far more interested in my tiny exilim digital camera (which I was using to be inconspicuous) than the fact that there was a Wall Street commodities trader observing their floor.
I'm afraid I temporarily interupted World Pepper Price Discovery. Half the brokers were milling around looking at the photos with a suprising degree of amazement. As good traders they quickly were trying to figure out its price in rupees. Trading came to a standstill.
I didn't learn everything I wanted to there. It was a bit hard conversing w/ the guys. It did sound like there was both hedging and speculating going on. That the speculators came from Kerala state, not very international. One fellow I was talking to had been trading physical pepper since 1978. As well, recognized me trying to ask if they traded timespreads and whatever the equivalent of a pepper 'crack' was, and said indeed they did. Like all brokers, he complained that volumes were down.
I'd like to go back and talk more to these guys, and perhaps I will later this week. The biggest mystery so far is the fact that posted on the notice board downstairs is a listing of all the traders' net positions by contract!?!?! Why this is public information is beyond me, and I have to think it goes a long way to squelching trading volume.
The connection I'm using here is pretty slow {I understand that there is some sort of internet 'worm' plaguing cyberspace right now. To what degree to blame the worm as opposed to Indian telecomms and this ancient NT box (with the brand name, 'Remnant' [no shit...]) I am not sure} It is preventing me from supplementing this entry with some exciting AV materials I've collected, including an audio track of the open outcry pepper exchange! May have to wait until we return to Singapore on Sunday.
Anyhow, life is quite mellow and pleasant... Photography, coffees, books, walking, and frequent changes of clothes is my day here.
Regards
So we've been for our first full day in Fort Kochi (aka 'Cochin'), India, in Kerala State. Friday night I hustled out of work early and grabbed a four-hour Silk-Air flight from Singapore to Cochin airport in Kerala State, India.
Kerala is in the southwest tip of India, along the coast with the Indian Ocean. It has been a significant trading hub since Vasco de Gama landed here long ago (1500s? 1600s? I forget my Mr. Georgovich history) Anyway, it is a historically significant place, as it connected Arab, Indian, and European traders in a vibrant market of spices and other things of value. It's steeped with genuine historical character... ancient Syrian Christian communities, an equally ancient Jewish community, as well as a surpisingly huge, although more recent, Roman Catholic community. (the number of cathedrals here has been a surpise). As well, there is a Muslim community which seems tolerated.
So we arrived around 1030pm Friday night. It was too late to get a ferry to our proper hotel on Ft. Kochin (there is a small archipelago, Ft. Kochi being the interesting one.) Consequently we had arranged to stay one night in Ernakulam, a more conventional city on the coast. It was the typical mangy business hotel and we left almost immediately the next morning, after enduring the typical awful hotel breakfast. [as an aside, I truly don't know why we ever, ever, ever take these hotel breakfasts. I find them universally awful and grim. In fact, the awful food is only 49% of the reason I hate them. I find the depressing, sullen atmosphere of random people coming from their rooms to go pick over a nasty buffet in silent endurance to just be awwwwwful. If I never had another hotel breakfast I wouldn't mind].
We took a taxi to Fort Kochi and experienced the stereotypical Indian drive -- terrible amounts of road bedlam and honking and near-misses. The driving is actually a bit more chaotic than Malaysia. (I would comment that Ernakulam reminds me of any of the secondary cities of Malaysia... Muar, Ipoh, etc)
The first three days of our stay are at the Brunton Boat Yard. A three-year old hotel that is at the north of the island in one of the two culturally-interesting areas here. Built in the style of the old Dutch houses around here, it's quite tasteful and quiet and comfortable. Ling is quite fond of it. In two days we'll be moving to the Malabar Residency Inn, which is the finest hotel in the area and should have even more character.
We didn't do an awful lot yesterday aside from reconnaisance of the area. I wasn't shocked by the power outage we had during dinner because earlier in the day, while enjoying a lime soda, an explosion occured 50 feet from us, raining burning debris onto the street. Ling was startled, and I at first thought it might be an attack by ISI Islamic terrorists from Pakistan. But the cool nerves I have developed after seven years serving in the Naval Special Warfare Community kept me cool and collected. It turned out to just be an exploding line transformer. But I was ready if there was going to be a need from some bare chested, hand-to-hand melee.
One of the other things Kerala is famous for is Ayurvedic massage. This is the fruity-loopy mystical medicine you might imagine -- lots of odd 'essential oils' applied in strange ways. One of the treatments is something like wearing a very tightly-fitting chef's hat with an open top. Then the chef's hat is filled with strange oils and balms, soaking into your brain and releasing toxins. Shit like that. Anyway, we went for the basic Ayurvedic massage. Massages can be quite nice, but this pushed my limits. Laying flat on a large wooden plank, naked, except for a miniscule loincloth the width of a sheet of toilet paper, being rubbed with oil by some Indian dude.... I suspect this is not something my mother will be bragging about to the other mothers at the Murrysville Library. I think Ling enjoyed it a bit more than me. And of course she has delighted in asking me questions since then like, "did you 'pop a boner'?" and "was your man gentle?" etc. etc. etc.
The rest of the day was typical first-day tourist details. We did find a nice cafe, "Yashi Arts Cafe" nearby that serves very, very good Masala Chai -- perhaps the best I've tasted. It's a pretty pleasant place to hang out, especially if you sit in the back, away from the flies. The mosquitos are everywhere, but they seem to be polite mosquitos -- neither Ling and I have any bites to complain of.
Today (Sunday) we'll be going south a bit to some of the other market areas of Kochi.
Regards