The Blog of Gord

Hot!  It’s been creeping up since I got here.  When I arrived a month ago, the high was 31 C and sunny, low of 18.  Now it’s a high of 35 C and sunny, low of 20.  I’ve even had to start using the AC in my room in the evening.  I am not looking forward to -20 C when I return to Ottawa!  I hope I don’t get frostbite on my sunburn.

I thought I’d show you around my hotel room.  It’s pretty comfortable, with AC, a fridge, microwave, electric kettle, TV with 102 channels in various languages (Hindi, Kannada, English, etc), internet.  The internet connection (wired, not wireless) is limited to 200 kbps, which is problematic for streaming video, and it goes down every couple of hours.  In fact, it behaves a lot like my old Linksys wired router did when it started to die.

To turn the suite’s power on, I have to insert my room key into a receptacle in the wall.  That’s fine, but it means there’s no way to charge electronic gear while I’m out.  I have to leave the key with the front desk when I leave the building, and ask for it again when I return.

The bathroom has a proper shower, along with the standard Indian bucket arrangement.  The hot water tank for the shower, controlled by a switch on the wall outside the bathroom, where you’d least expect it, takes about 15-20 minutes to heat up.  The tank’s good for about 5 minutes or so of hot water, and the pressure’s good.  One of my less-favourite things about my last visit was my inability to get a decent shower; that hasn’t been a problem this time.

The switch for the air conditioning is also in a strange place, hidden amongst a group of light switches on the other side of the room that mostly aren’t hooked up to anything.  After turning the AC switch on (assuming you can figure out which one it is), it takes a few minutes before the AC unit itself comes to life.

The bed is comfortable, very hard the way I like it, and there is a ceiling fan directly above it.  The window looks out over a construction site, which usually isn’t a problem at night, except once when a cement truck made a suspicious-looking delivery at 1am, and last night, when a truck with a crane and boom poured the floor slabs for all of the floors that have been built so far.  It was a night of diesel-powered pumps, yelling, pneumatic packers, and hammering.  It didn’t bother me much, though, because I’ve been sleeping with earplugs anyway to block the muezzin who starts calling the morning prayers at 5:30 every morning.  The traffic noise, non-stop honking and squealing of brakes, starts about 6am and ends around 11pm.

I send my laundry out once a week.  It comes back a day or two later, nicely folded and mostly dry, so I know they have a proper dryer.  At the guest house for my 2006 visit, the laundry was air-dried outside, a process that took several days in the humid air.  Nothing ever really dried out, and I sure didn’t enjoy the smell of mildew in my collars.  At the hotel, sometimes my clothes come back with twine tied to them for identification, but still this week I received an extra shirt, and last week one pair of my underwear took an extra day to find its way home.

The cupboard locks.  The hotel recommends not leaving anything laying around, so everything gets locked up while I’m out.

There are insects.  Welcome to the tropics.  Although the hotel is fumigated once a month, I still kill a roach every couple of days (three the night I arrived).  They’re relatively slow and easy to catch, and of the ones I’ve seen, I haven’t missed one yet.  I’ll have to make sure I don’t inadvertently bring back any for my cats to chase.

The hotel has a restaurant attached, where I have breakfast every morning.  I usually have the place to myself.  I eat, read the paper, drink a pot of coffee.  The restaurant is open until 11pm I think, but I still haven’t eaten dinner there.  That’s partly because I’m still full from the enormous breakfasts and lunches, but also because hot weather erases my appetite.  Room service is available all night though, and sometimes I get a call from room service after I get home, asking if they can bring me anything.  After the house-boating trip, I hadn’t been around for several days, and when I got back the restaurant manager called to say, “I miss you, sir.”  Apparently I have a reputation as the westerner that eats only Indian food.  Here’s the goldfish that lives on a ledge outside the restaurant.

Home, sweet home!

On Friday last week after work, Venky, an old friend/colleague from Ottawa who now lives in Bangalore, picked me up at the office with the idea that we would go for a few beers somewhere.  I was still somewhat feverish from the food-poisoning attack the night before, so I was a bit dubious, but it’s been difficult for us to get together due to our respective travel schedules, and I didn’t want to miss the chance.

We went back to his place first since it was too early to go out, and I was able to see where he lived and meet his family.  He lives in the south end of the city, so I experienced first-hand the commute that most of the people I work with have to endure.  It took over an hour for a trip that really should have taken about 15 minutes, but at least we could visit in the car; Venky has a driver.

He’s got a very nice place, in a gated community, way nicer than my place in Ottawa.  His kids were out, so he, his wife, and I just relaxed for a while, then we played some table tennis in the rec centre.

After that, we got back in the car for another 1+ hour drive back downtown.  Even at 9pm, the traffic is bumper-to-bumper.  Our destination was The 13th Floor, an upscale restaurant and bar in a highrise on MG Road.  We sat in the bar side, where the view is spectacular.  We were outside on the terrace, on the edge of the building, our beers and snacks prevented from falling into the abyss by a short plexiglas rail.  Surprisingly, my very queasy stomach didn’t have any trouble with the beer, but it drew the line at the aloo gobi.

It’s about time I finished the Kochi trip… my blog topics are starting to accumulate!

By 9:30 Sunday morning (February 15), my driver Anish and I were back on the highway heading north to Cochin (aka Kochi) / Ernakulam.  As we left Alleppey, I missed what would have been a great picture: a fellow herding a flock of around a hundred fuzzy yellow chicks along the side of the road, using a stick with a plastic bag tied to the end.  I did, however, get this picture of large number of tigers sitting together beside the road.

First stop was Mattancherry Palace, built by the Portuguese in the mid-16th century for the Raja and subsequently appropriated by the Dutch.  Some interesting murals from the Mahabharata and Ramayana, a few artifacts from the Rajas, but not too exciting.  Only Rs 2 to get in, and as usual, I had to insist that a Rs 10 note was the smallest I had.  Getting change can be painful.

One street over is Jew Town, an area settled by Jews quite a long time before the Portuguese arrived in the 15th or 16th century.  The Paradesi Synogogue dates back to the 16th century, and for another Rs 2 I was able to have a look around inside before they closed their doors for the afternoon.  Photos weren’t allowed here either, but there are some good ones at this link.

 
Walking down Jew Street, I found the home of the World’s Biggest Varpu.  “Oh boy, the biggest varpu!” I thought, “…Uh, what’s a varpu?”  Not knowing what a varpu was, I thought it could be something exotic and went in for a look.  After all, I had once taken a detour a hundred kilometres out of my way to see the world’s biggest perogy in Glendon, Alberta.  Turns out a varpu is just a cooking pan, and this one wouldn’t have been big enough to fry the giant perogy.

It was a really hot day.  While I wandered around Cochin, Anish napped in the car waiting for me to come back and ask for a ride to the next place.  I eventually realized everything in Cochin is within easy walking distance, at least if you find it easy to walk in blazing 35 C sun.  Luckily, there is no shortage of places to buy a bottle of water, and it’s only Rs 26 per litre (about 65 cents).

My next stop was the oldest European church in India, St. Francis Church, from the early 16th century.  Vasco de Gama was buried there in 1524 until his body was returned to Portugal.

Santa Cruz Basilica is a much bigger church, built in the early 1900’s on the site of some older churches.  Inside it’s quite colourful; I almost expected the figures to be animatronic.

Finally, one of the most famous sights from Cochin, the Chinese Fishing Nets.  These are huge, cantilevered, framed nets that are lowered into the water from the shore, left for a period of time, then raised back up with whatever fish happened to be swimming over them.  It was fun watching them; each one takes several people to operate.  The resulting catch was for sale out in the sun.

I was all done with sight-seeing by about 2:30pm, so Anish suggested going to see some martial arts demonstrations.  What I really wanted to see was some Kathikali, a traditional Keralan dance I’d read about in a guide book.  I wasn’t too keen on the martial art demo at first, but then he showed me a brochure about it.  It turns out Kerala has a traditional martial art called kalaripayattu that is supposedly a combination of other martial arts in other parts of Asia, which according to Keralans, are all just derivations and specializations of theirs.  Maybe, but in any case, places that put on the kalaripayattu shows also have Katikali dancing.  The place I went is Greenix Village, and the show was split into two parts, an hour of kalaripayattu, then a break, then the kathikali.  There were a number of options, but I also had to juggle the fact that I had to get to the other side of Ernakulum by 9pm to catch my bus, and also leave some time for dinner.  I bought my tickets, Rs 450 for the two shows, plus Rs 25 for camera privileges.

I had about ten minutes before the kalaripayattu demo, so I wandered around their cultural museum.  It was completely empty (again, this is the off season here) except for me and two guys demonstrating traditional crafts, one operating a loom, and the other weaving bamboo, in the museum’s hot, still air.

When I went up to the kalaripayattu theatre, I found there was one other spectator.  The two of us had a ring-side seat for the next hour while one of the staff, Muthu, explained to us what was going on in the ring, going through various rituals, use of different weapons (sticks of different lengths, swords, metal flails, etc), holds, and defensive techniques.  One of the guys, who is a trainer for the Kerala police force, demonstrated a hold on each of us on our little fingers that I can tell you is quite effective; very painful.  At the end, the police instructor asked for a volunteer to try some of the weapon techniques.  The older fellow and I looked at each other.  I was game, so I gave my camera to Muthu and took my shoes off.  I avoided getting my fingers smashed, and it was a lot of fun!

After that I took a break for dinner.  There was a nice restaurant across the road from the cultural center, so I tried there (Anish still sleeping in the car).  Unfortunately, getting dinner at 4:30pm is not possible in Kochi (or in Bangalore, for that matter).  Dinner usually doesn’t start until 7:30pm or later.  The view was nice, though, so I asked the waiter to just bring me everything on the snack menu except the sweets:  a salad, a vegetable stew, different kinds of bread, a pot of masala chai, and a banana lassi.  While I ate, I watch the cruise ship “Tippu Sultan” (you can read about him in other blog posts) sail past.

Then, back to the theatre for the kathikali.  There was an hour of makeup application first, which wasn’t too exciting, but the performance certainly was.  I had a front row seat again (there were about 20 of us, all western tourists).  They started with a primer on the basics of kathikali, the meaning of the eye movements and the hand movements.  Then they got started on the actual dancing, which is a stylized performance of stories from the Hindu classics.  I don’t remember what the particular story was that I saw, but it was quite entertaining.  If I remember correctly, it was a god and a woman trying to convince him not to kill a bunch of people, accompanied by a man and a boy on drums while a singer chanted.  I have movies, but you’ll have to use your imagination.

The kathikali demonstration ended at 7:30pm, and it was time to get to my bus.  Anish and I figured we had plenty of time, since my bus wasn’t until 9pm and it would only take half an hour or so to get to the station over in Ernakulam.  Anish had been given orders to make sure I got on the right bus, though, and almost had a heart attack when we drove up to the KSRTC (Kerala State Road Transportation Company) bus stand and watched the Bangalore bus roar out of the station.  My ticket clearly said “21h”, so I was sure that must be another bus.  We went to the bus depot ticket window to make sure, though, and showed them my ticket.  “No, this is Kerala State Road Transportation Company buses only.  Karnataka State Road Transportation Company is over there,” he waved vaguely, and handed back my ticket.  “Over there,” we found a KSRTC office with the steel shutter rolled down for the night.  Now Anish was really concerned, thinking he’d have to chase down the bus with the car.

He walked around trying to find someone who knew something about the “other” KSRTC while I sat in the car enjoying the AC.  Luckily, I had a printout of the bus schedule with me.  There’s only one bus that leaves from Ernakulam to Bangalore, and that’s at 8pm, but it turns out there’s another from the state capital, Thiruvananthapuram, to Bangalore which happens to pass through Ernakulam on the way, at 9pm.  Anish relaxed a little at that point, and we waited.  Sure enough, the bus showed up at about 8:50, collected the ten of us who were waiting there in the dark, and we were on the road by 8:55.

The bus was nice, a big air-conditioned Volvo with reclining seats and an attendant to hand out water bottles, blankets (this was an overnight trip), and garbage bags. The only thing this bus is missing, and bear in mind it’s an overnight ten-hour non-stop express, is a washroom!  Well, it turns out it’s not entirely non-stop.  About an hour out of Ernakulam, the bus stopped at a roadside restaurant where everyone got off, had a bio break, bought snacks, etc.  You just have to make sure you don’t miss the bus, and get back on the right bus.  I assume there must have been other stops, but I didn’t notice them.  I put in my earplugs, reclined my seat, snuggled under the blanket (the driver had the AC at 22 C; it was still in the 30’s outside), and slept until 6:30am when we were well-inside Bangalore.

We arrived at the bus depot about 20 minutes late.  My next task was to find the company driver, Saif, who was waiting for me.  The bus had stopped in the middle of the parking lot, surrounded by other buses parked haphazardly everywhere.  I asked someone where the exit was.  That way.  I asked another person.  The opposite direction.  A third person pointed in the perpendicular direction.  Good thing I had a mobile phone, because I was able to call Saif and find out where he was.  We ended up meeting at the train station, a ten-minute walk away, where the whole journey had started three days earlier.

Back at the hotel I had a shower and breakfast, and I was in the office by 9:30, as usual.

Today’s minor adventure: getting trapped in the elevator.  OK, it was less than ten minutes, but still.  I’d left the office late, around 10pm, after the building had emptied.  Fortunately, the guard who answered the intercom spoke English and was able to pry the doors open to locate me, then get the car down to the basement.

…for some food poisoning.

I was hoping to finish the blog entries for last weekend last night, but my stomach had other plans.  Everything was fine when I left the office at 19:30 (an early day, but the last couple had been very successful), but by 21:00, I was feeling so ill I couldn’t sit up.  By 23:30, everything had been purged… everything.  Something at lunch had disagreed with me, explosively so. Maybe the curd?  It was a nice enough restaurant, an outdoor place with a reputation for excellent food and cleanliness.  It was very tasty, served south-Indian style in stainless steel bowls on a stainless steel tray.

Anyway, by this morning I feel a little shaky, but much better, at least able to drink water, and no more conversations with Ralph.  These things happen…

Update after the weekend:

Seems my two Indian colleagues were affected as well, though not as badly as I was.  They had mild fever and stomach upset, while I had… the works.  We’re blaming the banana milkshakes.  They tasted great. 
Although things were better Friday morning, I still had to go back to the hotel for a nap at lunchtime.  Not that missing lunch was a problem, as I wasn’t able to touch food again, besides the occasional dish of fruit or ice cream, until Monday.  That didn’t stop me from going for a long drive out to the Western Ghats for the weekend, but that story will have to wait til I’ve finished the Kerala trip story.

The plan for Saturday was to go straight from the train station to Alleppey, where I was going for an overnight houseboat trip, and save the Cochin sight-seeing for Sunday.

My driver for the weekend, Anish, told me we had to go about 60 km south, and that it would take about two hours to get there normally, but less at this time of day.  Saturday morning at 6:30am in Ernakulam, there isn’t much traffic yet, so we got out of town easily.

We stopped at a roadside restaurant outside the city, where I had my usual breakfast: masala dosa, sambar, and coconut/chili chutney, with black coffee and, for variety, a bottle of fizzy sour lime juice.  The bill came to about $1.  I’d ordered more stuff, but the waiter, a young boy, came back every couple of minutes with more bad news.  “I’m sorry sir, there is no idli today.”  “I’m sorry sir, there is no vada today.”  “I’m sorry sir, there is no fruit juice today.”  That was for the best, because the dosa was huge!

 
We got to Alleppey around 8:30, too early to checkin at the houseboat, which was expecting me at noon.  Anish suggested going to the beach for a while.  That was a great idea: Alleppey is a resort destination, and the beach was fantastic, several kilometers of clean sand along the Arabian Sea.  Even though it was early, the day was already quite warm, not surprising considering that it’s only 9 degrees north of the equator, roughly level with the northern tip of Sri Lanka.  At this time of year, the nightly lows are about 25 C, the highs in the mid-30’s, and the Arabian Sea is very warm.

 
I rolled up my pant legs and went for a long walk through the surf, then relaxed on a rock under the shade of a coconut tree for a while, watching small fishing boats slowly pass on the water.  A friendly dog curled up on a nearby rock, and an old fellow out for his morning walk stopped by to chat for a while.  The conversation always follows the same pattern…  “Your good name, sir?”  “Which country?”  “Your family is where?”  “How do you like India?”  The beach wasn’t busy at this time of day, a few walkers, a few families out to enjoy it before it gets too hot, and the beach cleaning crews.

 
Back at the car, Anish had called the houseboat to see if they were ready yet, so I got there about 10am.  There wasn’t a dock, just houseboats tied up beside each other at the shore, one after another, hundreds of them.  They were also tied up several deep: to get to my houseboat, I had to walk through half a dozen others.

The houseboat was intended for two people but I was going to have it to myself: just me, the cook, and the skipper.  The busy season is December-January, so now the boats are idle a lot of the time.  At the boat, they showed me my room, which had it’s own bathroom, gave me a coconut with the top hacked off and a straw pushed into it, and told me we’d leave when we could.  Before a boat can leave, all the boats behind it have to be untied and move out of the way.

We were moving by about 11:30… cue the theme to Gilligan’s Island… slowly meandering down the river to Vembanad Lake.  The lake is India’s longest: it runs all the way back to Kochi, a six hour ride at 10 km/h.  We weren’t going that far, though.

After some time on the lake, we turned off into some narrow canals, the backwaters this area is famous for.  It’s called “India’s Venice” and also “The Hundred Thousand Islands”.  The shore is lined with huts and small houses, churches, schools, and businesses.  In behind are rice fields, and everything moves by boat: cement, food, animals, people, whatever.  Everyone has a canoe, some motorized, and there are regular water buses.

Plenty of hammer and sickle flags on display.  Kerala’s government is communist.  That’s supposed to account for Kerala being the only state with 100% literacy, but also not much industry.

 
Some people fish; for lunch we stopped beside a rice field and I had a flat fish called “Black Spot” that comes from the river.  “Black Spot” doesn’t sound very appetizing, but that’s the English translation of the Malayalam name for it.  Lots of bones, not much flesh, but very tasty.

After lunch, we meandered away again, up and down canals, while I sat in my deck chair on the roof, getting a sunburn on my feet.  A lazy cruise in a houseboat for two on Valentines Day… sounds very romantic except my girlfriend is back shoveling snow in Canada.  Bummer.

At 5pm we pulled over to the shore, tied the boat to a coconut tree for the night, and relaxed.  I went for a short walk along the shore: it was short because you can’t walk very far without running into a canal.  I was a little uncomfortable, because I felt like I was walking through people’s front yards, which I was: past their tethered goats, women doing their laundry in the canal, kids playing etc.  I guess they’re used to it, because It’s a popular spot for boats to spend the night.  By dark (sun goes down a little after 6pm), there were quite a few moored there.

Anyway, as I walked along, every couple of minutes I had another conversation.  “Your good name, sir?”  “Which country?”  “Your family is where?”  “How do you like India?”  That is, until I passed a houseboat full of young guys, including one entertainingly drunk fellow named Ranjit who insisted on having a deep and incoherent conversation with me about cultural differences between east and west, Christians and Hindus, somehow all related to the Himalayas.  We sat on his boat for a while as he tugged on a large bottle of Kingfisher (I didn’t join him) and he expounded on his topic.  Eventually the driver of their boat decided to move the boat: I think he realized this group was going to disturb everyone else, and he was right: later their boat was anchored way out on the lake, and I could hear the sounds of singing long into the night.  Before he could pull away, though, everyone got out their camera phones so they could get their picture with me, arms around each other’s shoulders (Ranjit’s were very hairy).  After their hangovers wore off the next day, I’ll bet they were wondering who the heck that sunburned guy was in their mobiles!

While I was out socializing, the cook was busy preparing another feast for me:

After dinner, I sat on the upper deck and watched a few fireworks displays out across the lake, and listened to the Malayalam music coming from some of the distant boats.  It was a mild evening; once the sun went down, it quickly cooled off to about 25 C.  There were mosquitos out, as I discovered when I went downstairs and saw them all gathered around a light shining on a picture of Jesus.  They were being picked off one by one by a gecko that was hiding behind Jesus.  The mosquitos didn’t seem to be biting, fortunately for me since I didn’t bother getting malaria tablets for this trip.  It’s the dry season; who knew I’d be vacationing in a wetland?

About 10pm, thoroughly relaxed, I went to bed for a great night’s sleep which lasted until 5am when the morning chants and music started from a temple/church/mosque somewhere across the lake.  Once the sun was up, I went out to the deck and tried to get a picture of one of fishing birds (a kingfisher, maybe?) that were going after the jumping fish, and watched the water buses going from stop to stop (the bus barely stops– people jump on and off while it’s moving).  I had a cup of tea while the cook prepared a western-style breakfast: omelette, ten (!) slices of toast with pineapple jam, fresh pineapple slices, and coffee.

While I was eating, we pulled away and got back on the river, on our way back to Alleppey.  Everyone was out along the river, brushing their teeth, bathing, washing clothes (the air was full of the sound of wet clothes slapping on rocks), washing the breakfast dishes…

We got back to Alleppey around 9:30am, I said goodbye to the cook and the skipper, and walked back through the string of houseboats to meet my driver, Anish, again.  He’d spent the last 24 hours waiting in the car.

I left the office a bit early on Friday to catch an overnight train from Bangalore to Ernakulam / Cochin, on the Kerala coast.  Bangalore City Rail station is quite a busy place, co-located with both the long distance bus terminal and the city bus terminal, in an area known as Majestic.  The train station itself seems vast, and not well marked, but lucky for me my friends from the office came along to see me off, and make sure I didn’t get lost in the station.

If you can find the right platform (there are 10), the train itself is well marked with which car, or “bogie” as they’re called here, is which.  I was traveling in the “air-conditioned sleeper” car.  For this class, the name and age of everyone booked for the car is posted on a printout at the door, and you can’t get into the car from the adjacent cars.  I was a few minutes early, so while we were waiting, my buddies made sure I was well-laden with bananas and potato chips for the trip.

The train left about 20 minutes late, shortly after 7pm.  I’d been looking forward to a train ride since my last visit in 2006, and now I was finally doing it!  My seat-mates were three young guys, recent MBA graduates, who all work for the same bank chain in Mysore and Bangalore, off to a “relationship banking” conference in Cochin (Kochi), which is adjacent to Ernakulam.

There wasn’t much to see out the window, as the sun goes down at 6:30pm, and the windows were heavily tinted.  So, I just enjoyed the trip.  Check out the amenities.

The trip is 624 km and 11.5 hours according to Indian Rail, with 16 stops.  This is referred to as the Express train.  The train actually started out in the opposite direction you’d expect, heading east to Kuppam in Andhra Pradesh before cutting south through Tamil Nadu and then southwest to Thrisur on the Kerala coast, and south to Ernakulam.   There’s a detailed map on Indian Railway’s site.  I didn’t realize how circuitous the route was until the next morning when I noticed my mobile phone company had sent me SMSes welcoming me to Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu.

An attendant distributed a sheet, blanket, and a pillow shortly after we had left Bangalore.  The unofficial meal service is a guy who comes around selling boxes of spiced rice with a hard-boiled egg in the middle, which I declined in favour of my chips and bananas.

Around 10pm, we all went to bed.   The seat benches fold down to expose the sleeping pads for the lower berths (I had a lower berth), and a curtain closes off each group of two lowers and two uppers from the light of the corridor and the two berths on the other side of the corridor.  Sound carries pretty well, but overall it was a reasonably quiet ride, just the occasional train whistle, squealing brakes, or sleepless child.  I didn’t sleep much, probably more because I didn’t want to miss any of the trip than due to the hard sleeping surface or sounds.

Still, I did sleep for a while, awakened by the attendant coming around at 6am.  We then had about half an hour to freshen up before arriving in Ernakulam.  Ernakulam station isn’t nearly as big as Bangalore’s, so it wasn’t much trouble to find my way out and locate my ride.

I went to Bangalore City Railway Station today, hoping to get a last-minute train ticket to the coast.  I’m on a business visa, and while there’s an allotment of tickets to foreign tourists, and while I’m certainly foreign enough, a tourist is by definition someone with a tourist visa.  They wouldn’t book a ticket for me, so one of my colleagues and I took an auto-rickshaw over there in the afternoon so I could plead my case at the window in person.

There’s a wicket at the station for “Senior Citizens, Disabled, and Foreign Tourists”, so we stood there.  While we waited, the clerk (processing some complex ticket refund transaction) told us to go to the “Block booking” window, where we were second in line.  Turned out we were behind a couple of older fellows buying about 100 tickets for a group, and the clerk was typing each person’s particulars into the computer from a sheet.  Slowly.  Since we were there for a while, sweating in the 35 C heat of the station, one of the gents turned to me and said “You know this is for bulk tickets.”  “And I’m not very bulky?” I replied.  That got a good laugh.  After a while, we found out that we really should have been back at the other window after all.

By now there was quite a mob of Seniors, Disabled, and Tourists waiting.  I managed to get behind an Aussie who was obviously travelling on the cheap, because he was trying to get a ticket he’d bought from a travel agent in Goa changed to another ticket, and get the original one refunded.  (Based on what I saw today, the clerks spend more time refunding tickets than selling them.)  The negotiations were intense, but at the end, he was stuck buying another ticket.  The rules are the rules.  That’s a bad sign, I thought to myself, because I was next, with another unusual, regulation-defying request.  Another official seemed almost willing to do it, but then thought better of it.  “NRI?” he asked from out of view.  The clerk looked at me again, then said “Um, no.”  What I could do is get a ticket to the coast, then once I got there, apply for another ticket back to Bangalore.  And what were the chances of that happening, we asked.  “Good”.  That didn’t inspire a lot of confidence, so I declined that option.

While it wasn’t the most efficient operation, it was certainly a memorable way to spend a couple of hours.  Later, back at the office, the company’s travel agent found another option that ought to work instead.

…was vast!

There seem to be more guests in the hotel this week, at least I’m not alone in the restaurant, so they’ve started putting out a south-Indian breakfast buffet.  That hasn’t stopped the restaurant “captain” (to whom I’m giving French lessons ) from continuing to bring me more food though… he thinks I don’t eat enough.  Check out the pictures.  Round one was (going clockwise from the left) a couple of idlis (steamed rice cakes), kesari bath (a hot sweet that looks like mashed turnips), a spinach / meat (lamb?) / curd salad, a vada (deep-fried potato/lentil donut), and a chick-pea/green bean curry, with a dish of coconut/chili chutney with toasted chilis in the center.  A dish of sambar (hot vegetable stew) isn’t shown.

I thought that would be enough, but then the captain brought out a plate of dosas, one masala (stuffed with a big helping of potato curry), another dish of sambar, more chutney, another dish of kesari bath, and a glass of mango juice.  And a pot of black coffee.

Stuffed to the gills, I waddled over to the office.  It was just as well that I’d had such a big breakfast… I needed it to sustain me through the 2.5-hour whiteboard tutorial on cryptography and PKI that I gave to 30 people before lunch.