We have been knocking around Fort Kochi for around a month now and have started to get to know the people, the place and the bars a little better.  Well, I say bars, I mean the Kochi version of a speak easy.  The liquor licencing laws are insane.   The local government has plans for Fort Kochi to be the next carnival town, and get a reputation like Goa as a tourist destination, however, they seem to have neglected to understand that if you are going to attract Western tourists to any type of carnival atmosphere, you need freely available booze.  At present it costs a restaurant 2.5 million rupees which is a little over £30,000 for a licence.  Now bearing in mind the rent on a small restaurant is 6000 rupees, £85 a month, which is not an inconsiderable sum, it puts the licence in perspective.  This means that the places you can legally buy alcohol can charge at least as much as at home for a beer, which is about a 3^rd of our daily budget.  However, the capitalising Indian’s, that understand the lure of booze to a whities gullet, are not going to miss out on the opportunity to make some serious money by selling booze illegally.  They vastly undercut the posh hotels that do have a licence, and have come up with ingenious ways of getting beer and spirits to a thirsty tourist.  The best delivery of beer we have come across so far is in a teapot.  If you go and order a ‘special tea’ they bring out a teapot and mug for you to drink your Kingfisher from.  It doesn’t look at all suspicious with four people on a table, each with their own large pot of tea, although I must say, that drinking lager from ceramic cups is nicer than drinking from glass for some reason.  We have been frequenting a place, where they keep a bottle of rum behind a secret door in one of the walls for us, and it seems loyalty pays when it comes to choosing your drinking establishment as we now get a healthy rum and coke for half the price it was when we first went there, which at 100 rupees, £1.30 isn’t too bad, but is still a little pricey for our budget.  But there is one other option, the government alcohol shop.  

A seedy establishment if ever there was one.  It is a room which the purveyors of the chemically processed alcohol sit behind a large caged front window which has two holes in it.  The rooms are invariably tatty, worn, mildewed and miserable looking.  The people who work there are also invariably tatty, worn, mildewed and miserable looking.  The buyer has to queue in a grubby narrow corridor between a brick wall and an artificial one made of metal until he gets to the cage, where he orders his choice of headache inducing spirits.  He then has to shuffle along the front of the cage to the first hole where he passes his money over, and then onto the second hole where his bottle is passed out wrapped in newspaper.  The locals are very quick to hide their bottles about their person before walking off, and the rickshaw drivers refuse to take us anyway unless the alcohol is completely obscured from view.  They can get a 5000 rupee (£70) fine for carrying alcohol in their rickshaws. 

Luckily for Fort Kochi and its party seeking visitors there are the fun police who rigorously patrol the streets looking for anyone enjoying themselves and stopping it immediately.  We love the fun police.  And what’s really clever of them is that they sneak around in plain clothes so you don’t know who wants to ruin your fun.  One night in our local we were having a few rums and a bit of a dance, I must confess it was around 10.30 so I guess it was getting pretty late, for Fort Kochi, and some men walked up the stairs, stopped and watched what was going on looking very dour.  C, our friend that works there, told us he suspected they were police, who on hearing the music went to make sure no one was actually enjoying it.  But they found that we were, so we stopped the music and made a hasty exit.  The fun police then began to follow us.  As we passed another bar (also shut at 10.30 pm) Bron, our new Australian friend, called out hello to the guy clearing up who she had met previously.  At that point we lost our tail.  It wasn’t until the next day that we learnt that the man Bron said hello to was almost arrested for speaking to us.  Not only do the fun police definitely not like fun, but they also don’t like Indians and Whities conversing, and will threaten Indians with arrest if they are caught talking to a white person, regardless of whether the white person likes it or not.  

On Chirstmas eve the fun police really came into their own.  We went back to a homestay (guest house) with a few of our new Indian and Australian friends for a bit of a party, a few drinks, and bit of dancing on the rooftop.  Alex thought he would introduce the Indians to a bit of DubStep, which for the record, they loved, and got the whole party moving.  It also got the fun police interested too, who stalked around outside of the homestay for a while, even after we turned the music off, and everyone had to leave the roof to avoid being seen.  That meant going into one of the rooms.  All 10 of us, and hope the police didn’t come in or the owner would have been in trouble for cavorting with Westerners.  So there we were on Chirstmas eve, three people under the bed, two sat on top, two in the wardrobe and two hiding behind the bathroom door, in the dark, listening intently to the crackle of a police radio and the voices of our friends and the police having a heated discussion in Malayalam (the local language in Kerala).  Eventually we got let out the room, once the police had gone, and were asked to leave.  However, it turned out the guy running the homestay was arrested, had to spend the night in the cells and now has to pay a 3000 rupee (£45) fine.  Luckily the police didn’t find their alcohol or us.  Having alcohol on unlicensed premises is apparently up to 42 days in jail.

Despite the best efforts of the fun police, we have been having a good time here.  We have experienced the bizarre, life threatening and genuine kindness since being here.  The bizarre has come in a couple of forms, the first being a week old kitten stood pertrified in the middle of the road with buses, rickshaws and motorbikes tearing past it.  It was only a matter of time before the little thing was hit, so I went and rescued it from its peril.  Which then somehow managed to burden me with its life seeing as I had saved it.  The mother was nowhere to be seen and the poor little thing was all bones, so I concluded that it had been abandoned.   What does one do with a blue eyed kitten that has just been rescued from certain death?  Well I knew exactly what to do with it, and I am not sure if I had been in the same situation anywhere else on the planet this solution would have presented itself.  I took it to the BM café.  I am sure there are many BM cafés around the world, but this one is home to a number of very stoned, but very sweet natured young lads, who take in stray animals.  I had been there a few days previously and P, one of the most stoned and happy of the bunch, showed me four kittens they had rescued from a Chinese fishing net.  He gathered them all up and then chucked them at a lazing dog.   

Then to my amazement the little kittens started suckling on the dog, the dog was their new mother!  The dog was incredibly obliging, even lifting its leg to let them have better access to her nipples.  So my rescued kitten had a safe home with food.  I have been back and they said that it took her a day before she would suckle from the dog, but is now happily feeding. 

The second bizarre incident was being asked by an eyebrow-less, effeminate, manicured, wavy haired, massive Indian if we wanted to be in a Chicken Chicken commercial.  I tried to explain that I was a vegetarian, so wasn’t that up for it.  They kindly told me that I could pretend to eat the chicken and they would make it look right digitally.  Even after I told them that being a vegetarian I didn’t really want to endorse the practise of eating meat, but this was something that they understood as words, but not as a concept, which was strange.   They kept trying to find ways around me not eating chicken.

The life threatening came in the form of a swinging pirate ship at a fair ground.  After being sworn at, and irritated by a group of grubby looking urchins who kept pushing each other into us and then demanding 10 rupees, a forceful little angel stormed through them all and told them what for, taking my hand and leading us away from the oiks.   

They followed, but the 12 year old Evie kept them at bay with a presence so commanding I completely surrendered to her will.  Her will was that I go on the swinging pirate ship with her.  So I did.  Alex, very sensibly, did not.  He stayed to get hassled on the ground by the youths, while I went and risked my life for a 12 year old girl.  She insisted on sitting right at the end of the ship, the bit that goes the highest, and passes through the vertical.  Without any bars to hold you in.  The only thing to hold you in your seat, was yourself.  As the pirate ship swung further and further up, and I held onto the rusty handrail a foot in front of me, I realised the foolhardiness of my folly.  It was genuinely petrifying to know that if I let go of the bar, my body would tumble out of this faded rust bucket and I would plummet, most probably to my death.  I loved it!  There is nothing like a bit of real life or death fear to enliven the heart.  It was exhilarating!

As for the kindness, that came from our lovely landlords over Christmas.  Greena, the wife of the landlord, offered to cook us breakfast and lunch for Christmas day.  All we had to do was awake at 9am with our hangovers, and she brought us a delicious breakfast with a little glass of sweet wine and cake.  Then at lunch her and her daughters came up again with pans full of spicy treats for us.  It was wonderful. 

On a side note, I feel I must mention the Christmas Santa masks that were everywhere, they were the scariest things I have ever seen used to celebrate the season of goodwill.  

New Year is coming up, and no doubt the fun police will make sure that things remain sober, but Fort Kochi is really gearing up for it.  There is to be a huge carnival, and the preparations have been slowly presenting themselves over the past week or so.  Sparkly fluttering bunting has been put up all along the KB Jacob Road and stretches as far as the eye can see, playgrounds have been decked out in blue fairy lights, which looks so magical at night, the roundabouts have been adorned with more bunting emanating from poles placed in the centre, and people have put lights and decorations outside their houses.   It looks truly wonderful, and to walk though is a journey into childhood wonder.

All in all we are enjoying our time here, and are even wondering if we should stay a second month……

NEW YEAR IN KOCHI

Well that was fun!  A night of new friends, fireworks, burning Santa’s and the occasional grope!  To which I returned death threats – which really freaks them out.  Which isn’t surprising given the nature of the police.  They would be pummelled for groping a tourist, but still they try.  We watched a man get set on by two police with sticks for not moving out of an area quickly enough for their liking.  Kochi, it seems, is a police state.  There were hundreds of them around over the past couple of days.  One couple we met got cordoned off from a crowd of a few thousand people so that the Indians weren’t too close to them.  I don’t know what they think is going to happen.  As a female you do get your arse pinched every now and again, but that is maybe one in every hundred people, and for the most part the Indians are excitable, friendly and just want to wish you a well.  No one has tried to take anything from us or have been violent towards us, and I am just as likely to get groped in a pub along Southampton high street.  And to be honest it is no wonder the men try it, men and women are so segregated here.  There is no physical contact between wives and husbands in public, there is certainly no sex before marriage, most marriages are arranged, and the women are taught not to look men in the eye, in fact the only women to look men in the eye are traditionally assumed to be prostitutes, who also smile as well.  So essentially all white women appear to be prostitutes to Indian men, because we look them in the eye and smile.  There are no frames of reference for men to go on, as the women they have sex with are either their wives or prostitutes.  There is no casual dating, or taking the time to figure out who you are and what it is you want from a partner, you just get married, by the age of 18 for a girl and 21 for a boy, usually to someone who your parents have chosen.  These attitudes are slowly changing, but when it comes to interactions between Indian men and Western women there are many cultural differences that mean that a lot of behaviours are misconstrued.  And oh my life do the Indian men sulk when a white girl spurns their advances, life is nothing without a healthy dose of melodrama out here.  And they seem to have a few problems understanding that white girls can make their own choices, and decisions, and don’t need a man to tell them what to do.  Luckily I have been only an observer to these antics, as they have a great deal of respect for the fact that I am with a man, even though he isn’t my husband.  On the flip side of this the Indian men are fiercely protective of the women and incredibly proud of where they come from.  They have kindly offered to stab anyone who gropes me, and when people say crude things in Malayalam about the white girls in their presence, if the antagonist sticks around too long, will find their mouths filled with another’s fist.  They say that even if we don’t mind, and people can say whatever, they feel that it is shame on them that their fellow countryman can be so offensive and see it as just as much an insult on themselves as us.

Anyhow New Years Eve.  We found some cute animals, got better aquainted with new friends, got groped in the crowds, watched Santa burn, were awed by fireworks, watched the police set upon a young man, went back to our second home, partied with some teenagers in a bus shelter, and for New Years day, went to watch the Kochi carnival, saw a LOT of men in drag, danced along with the music trucks, found a huge tree completely decked in fairy light, then wandered home for a well deserved rest.  I guess the photos will show better than my words, so here you are: