Traveling With a Toddler – Lessons Learned, Part I

Sort of halfways through our trip (not quite, thankfully) I thought I share some lessons learned about traveling with “the boy”. We didn’t do much of anything today that is noteworthy so it seems like a good time. Obviously every child is different and ours is, well, challenging, in some respects (food), normal in others (like not wanting to say “hello” and “thank you” to anybody) and sort of easy in others (he travels well and fairly easily adjusts to new environs).

So here are the lessons in no particular order, just as they come to this somewhat bubbly-clouded mind (Coastline.com is at it again and “Lady in Red” hasn’t played tonight so we are giddy with anticipation).

Having a “home-base” turned out to be a good idea. As routine is important to kids that age it is important to have a familiar surroundings, a place to call home for the time being, a place to go back to after an adventure. It has also has the advantage of taking all the uncertainty out of traveling such as frequent searching for a suitable hotel which has the parents anxious which inevitably means the child picks up on the emotion and starts acting up – when you least need it. Max got really used to the places we lived at, especially since we referred to them as somebody’s house like in Merida we were staying in “Arnie’s house”, in Ernakulam it was “Smita’s apartment” and now it’s “Alan’s house” . It gives him an – although tentative – grasp that this place belongs to somebody and needs to be treated with whatever care a three and a half year old is capable of.

Try and get daycare whenever humanly possible, especially when you are used to take your child to daycare at home. This has two important reasons, firstly, it is another way of adding some normalcy to your child’s live and secondly, you will desperately need the time away from your child to do “grown-up” things and recharge your batteries (after two weeks of Max non-stop I could do with a few hours of “me time”). Also, let’s face it, most of us are just not as good at teaching our kids reading, writing or fine motor skills as the professionals we pay to do it at home. In addition, just having playtime with other kids is important for a child, even if those kids speak Malayam and your kid speaks anything but. They still have a way to communicate that unfortunately we grown-ups have at least partially forgotten or unlearned.

Keep your routine – regardless of where you are: nap-time is still nap-time, lunch time is still lunch time and with the rare exception of red-eye flights chocolate is not an acceptable choice for breakfast. Max tries to negotiate these things :

“Mama, let’s make a deal. I get chocolate for lunch and do not need to take a nap.”

“Max, that isn’t called making a deal as a deal requires both sides to give something and you are only taking.”

“Okay, so I get chocolate for lunch and then I watch some TV.”

“MAX!!! – shut up and eat your broccoli!”

But normally a firm “you got to be kidding, off to bed you go.” Will satisfy him and he will actually comply. Most always, not always and there are exceptions as the above mentioned red-eye flight. After hopping time zones and spending untold hours cramped into tourist class seats most grown-ups don’t know what, when and why they want to eat or sleep so no reason to enforce overly strict rules on a child. His teeth won’t rot instantaneously nor will he have chocolate for lunch the next day (although he might try to “negotiate” it).

Let your child craft his/her universe to some extent. When Max get’s to a new “home” he immediately starts taking all the kitchen tools out and plays with them. He “makes coffee”, “cooks pasta”, “bakes cakes” and declares the salt his firecracker powder, he litters the content of the kitchen all over the living room. I could put it away but he will take it out again as soon as he wakes up and the whole thing starts over. It is his way to establish some normalcy to the whole traveling thing and I believe the price of stumbling over a potato-masher is a price worth paying for having a child that feels reasonably comfortable and secure in his environs. Mind you, I can’t count the times I was swearing at those darn potato-smashers, apple-slicers, carrot-peelers that are everywhere including the bed but in a quiet moment, like now, when I put it in perspective, it is really a small price to pay.

Don’t ever expect to get to see or do anything even if you have had your heart set on it for ages and simply forget about relaxed dinners. Travel like you live at home: if there is a sight to be seen you could see it today but if that doesn’t work you can see it tomorrow, the day after or …. never. Make peace with the fact that you will be spending four weeks at a place and see less of the “must do” sights then the dedicated traveler spending only 5 days there. The only tickets for the Alhambra to be had are at 2 pm and by 2 pm your child gets unbearable because of fatigue – guess what you won’t see the Alhambra. It might break your heart but you simple won’t see it because the price you’d pay for seeing it would be too high and honestly, all you would do is pay a high entry fee and not see anything anyway because your child would be laughing hysterically, throwing stones at passer-bys and roll around the floor in a pile of dog shit. Not worth it.

Relaxed dinner: only at home with the child at sleep or for the few occasions when you find somebody to baby-sit. Else bring books, pencils, coloring books, DVD players and an assortment of DVDs. Maybe then you’ll get to eat a bite or two without having to pretend to explode firecrackers, repair a broken chair or remind your child that is inappropriate to throw food at the guys at the next table.

Choose your location wisely. Merida was perfect, Ernakulam not so, Frigiliana is okay. By and large I’d say be somewhere where you won’t have to take a car, train, plane to get to any place of interest. Matter of fact is that a kid’s patience for transportation is limited and so it’s better to be somewhat in the middle of the action or at least reasonably close than being out there in the boonies where you have to schlep to every place you want to see and everything you want to do. This is obviously especially true for people like me who simple have to do something, anything. If you are and your child are happy to sit an apartment a whole day or two and watch TV, read books and relax this is less important. If you get cabin-fever by noon at the latest pick a location close to the center of a mid-sized town with lots going on (again, Merida as was perfect choice).

The most basic and obvious but maybe the hardest: be sure you and your spouse get along and your relationship won’t strain under different expectations and interests. This trip would be hell if Uli and I were fighting which we rarely do mainly due to the fact that Uli has the patience of a saint and I have learned to bite my tongue on occasion and kissed the notion of taking National Geographic worthy pictures good-bye once and for all. I can’t stress this enough: be sure you are prepared to spend 24/7 together for 6 months before doing this and that – in the end – nothing is more important than being together peacefully and enjoying it – not even taking pictures or hiking up mountains.

Okay, that should be enough to discourage even the boldest from traveling for an extended period of time with a toddler but really, it shouldn’t. It’s not always fun and easy but definitely worth it and the next time to will have the chance to do it is when your child is in college.

From Granada I bring you ….

… Graffiti. Because that is what I am going to remember most about the city – graffiti everywhere, some of it elaborate, amazing, however most, like always, ugly, annoying without any creativity. It is all over the city: on churches, houses, windows, pillars, fences, telephone booths, museums - nothing seems too old, sacred or important not to be defaced. Since there was no way of avoiding it I decide I might as well photograph some of the good examples.

We took off Thursday morning and drove the approx. 90 km in no time to reach Granada in the late morning. The guide book wasn’t mistaken by saying that Granada’s charm and beauty isn’t obvious on first glance. Like with many other largish cities one drives through suburbs one rather never saw and by buildings that suggest that capital punishment for architects might not be such a bad idea after all. We finally reached the Centro, which like any centro in any old European city is a nightmare to drive through but that’s the fate of the motorized tourist: being stuck in a tiny, cobblestoned one-way street behind a delivery truck who tries to back into a side alley that is about 3 mm wider than the truck. Street parking was nonexistent in an absolute kind of sense. Uli’s speculation was that parking spots are passed down from generation to generation and no cars are ever moved unless in the event of death. After finding a parking garage (still cheap by San Francisco standards where these days a quarter buys you 6 minutes of parking time and probably less by the time we return) we took a little tour around by foot hitting some of the sights. To Max’s great dismay all of the Iglesias – and there are a lot of them, even by Spanish standards – were closed for good or at least for lunch.
Granada has an interesting history. It was the last bastion of the Moors that was finally re-conquered for the Holy Roman Church by Ferdinand and Isabella, who both are graced by the qualifier “the catholic” in the year 1491. The last Moorish king, Boabdil, which allegedly means something like “the not-so-attractive one”, turned over the key to the city on January, 2 1492 and then rode out of town with his followers weeping. His mother is credited with the somewhat cold-hearted remark:”Don’t cry like a woman for something you failed to defend like a man.” Such ended the reign of the Moors which began in 711. As to be expected, the good catholic king and queen and all the other good catholic kings and queens that followed didn’t make a name for themselves as tolerant and open-minded. The Jews and remaining Moors in the city were repressed - and that is probably putting it mildly - and then finally expelled. Then happened what always seems to happen in such situations: after the Jews and Moors, that means all the traders, bankers, and artists left town the whole place fell into disrepair and declined economically as well as culturally. In 1936, after Franco’s coup, the city lived up once more to its narrow-minded, intolerant reputation by unleashing a fascist blood-bath killing roughly 7000 of its liberals, artists and other unsympathetic people, including one of the more famous sons of the city, the poet Federico Garcia Lorca.
The 700 years of Arab influence is seem mainly in the Alhambra and a couple of old Barrios which still have the steep cobblestone streets and some of the ornate decorations on houses as well as the typical roundish windows. Some of the vistas are surprising and occasionally you turn a corner to find yourself on a charming little plaza with a few little cafes and tapas bars, a nice little fountain and a relaxed atmosphere. Otherwise to say the city is crawling with tourists would be an understatement. I don’t quite understand why but the city seems to be a major attraction to the typical Eurorail travelers – young people with dreadlocks (seems to be all the rage) and very little money who come up with the brilliant idea to hassle the rest of us. Poor beggars in India I gladly give to but I can be as cold-hearted as an arctic winter when it comes to young, healthy, able-bodied but unwashed young men and women who think it is my duty to share my money with them or – probably worse – think that their very questionable interpretation of “I can’t get no satisfaction” played sitting on the steps of the cathedral warrants any donation whatsoever. I am not quite sure why they all come to Granada, as the interest of the majority of them in medieval church history seems rather limited.
Another curious fact was the souvenir shops there: anything I forgot to buy in Varkala I could have gotten in Granada for more money. Why people feel inspired to buy and sell incents, those baggy pants, pillow covers with elephants ,and colorful lamps (like the ones I dismissed as not-Indian-enough-to-warrant-another-glance in Kochi) is beyond me, but sell and buy they do. There might be an underlying confusion at work as to where the Middle East ends and the Far East begins as a bunch of more typically “Arab” souvenirs sit amicably right next to the pseudo-Indian pants and little earthenware egg cups saying “huevos”. Having said all that, it’s kind of fun to walk along the steep streets and look in disbelieve at all the things for sale while trying to keep Max from bringing down a whole shelf of the darn egg cups.
We had scored a “triple room” in a hotel at the Gran Via Colon only to find out that triple meant a regular small double with an extra bed cramped into it. This also meant that Uli and I enjoyed or bottle of evening wine (a good one as it happened to be my birthday) in the bathroom, Uli sitting next to the toilet and me in the bath tub – the situation was absurd and bizarre enough to qualify as hilarious.
Being our usual optimistic/unrealistic selves we actually thought that getting up before 8 am, skipping breakfast and taking a taxi cab up to the Alhambra would be enough to score us a ticket for the Alhambra only to find out that about 800 people had gotten up earlier than us and that there were only 350 morning tickets left. So we looked at all the things we could look at without a ticket and are palnning to come back again, maybe next week, this time Internet-purchased ticket in hand mocking the stupid tourists who believe they can just show up and buy a ticket as if this was any old movie theater and not the Alhambra.
Live and learn that there is no way of beating busloads of Germans and Japanese to the ticket office.

Welcome back to Europe

After three days of visiting every single daycare, school, and kindergarten in Frigiliana and Nerja we have declared defeat and given up. Welcome back to Europe where rules reign supreme, exceptions are never made and flexibility is something that is attributed to stretch-pants, and stretch-pants only. The vicious cycle goes like this: “we don’t have room for one more child and even if we had we would a) not accept anybody for a few weeks only because that constitutes a major disruption to everybody involved and b) your child is too old anyway for our institution and should go to public school. Public schools, as we learned on Monday are the definition of inflexibility and short of petitioning local politicians, which might yield a result by the time Max is ready to go to university, the answer is and will always be “NO” (as in: no way who do you think you are showing up here and trying to disrupt this well-oiled machinery called public school with your completely and outrageously inappropriate and ridiculous demand). So no school for Max and no necessity to speak Spanish, which he still completely refuses to speak with us or kids on the street. I can just hope that Paco will get him to say a few words when we see him and Sabine next. Else we’ll go back to Sunnyvale with a child who has completely forgotten all his Spanish> The only comforting thought is that he learns as fast as he forgets, something I can’t claim for myself, I seem to forget about three times as fast as I learn with the rate of forgetting increasing with every year and the speed of learning slowing down. Since that really sucks I bought myself a Spanish grammar book the other day in Malaga – now I just have to open it because the times when I learned by osmosis are over as well (if they ever existed).

We took a trip to the surrounding villages up in the mountains today and I am not exactly sure how and why but the trip turned out to be profoundly depressing to me. The landscape is seriously affected by urban sprawl, or maybe rather village sprawl. Unlike Tuscany where building permits are hard to come by Andalucia seems to have (or have had) a free-for-all. There isn’t a hill, mountain, mountain-side, gopher-mount without a house on it, an access road to the house and whatever other conveniences of modern living seem to be necessary these days (garages, pools, huge fences, etc.). The little towns once where probably the forgotten backwaters but that was before the Brits came in force and in their wake the real estate developers, real estate agents, speculators, nouveau riche, and not so riche. Whatever little town we drove into the first and last thing we saw was a real estate agent’s office. The whole town, the whole state for that matter seems to be for sale. Unlike Merida, where this was true as well, this here is the tail end of a real estate boom with the smell of desperation typical for such situations (and as Californians by choice we know this smell all too well). Every village or town is home to several largish developments of 1 and 2 bedroom condos with communal piscina, phase 1 and 2 completed, phase 3 still under construction and the sale of the units not going as well as one has become used to. Whereas Merida still had the feel of opportunity and a new beginning to it here it feels like a lot of people are going to lose a lot of money and many are trying frantically to get out of a bad situation. It is one of the situations where, whatever property I might see I would think: If I was seriously interested I would just wait a few months and would get it much cheaper, but then, why would I be seriously interested?”

By and large I have to say the developments in the villages, here in Frigiliana as well, have been done sort of in style so they won’t stand out like eye-sores but still, they are late and somewhat foreign additions to the old villages with their steep roads and narrow, small stone houses. Every ground floor in every town center was turned into a restaurant, tapas bar, souvenir shop or real estate agency, the locals are predominantly old and venture out only during off-tourist-peak hours, in every town, wherever you look you’ll see “se vende” and “se alquila” signs. I needn’t have bothered with finding us a house before coming here, we could have just driven into town, any town, and could have rented something within hours. I am still glad I did find this old house in Frigiliana. It’s old and small, cooking is like cooking on a boat, everything has its place and it better be there else the place is seriously crowded, but its comfy nevertheless and is located on Calle Alta, which as the name suggests is high up in the village and so steep that it requires stairs to climb which also means no car traffic (and means that we have to haul every single purchase up 49 steep steps – a great work-out, really).

So every evening we are sitting in our small, internet-less living room in Calle Alta listening to “Coastline Radio” – a radio station for British expats which plays enough Neil Diamond and Chris deBurgh to qualify as serious torture – while Max sleeps in the big bed below, totally covered by a huge fluffy duvet and seriously exhausted from a day of climbing the 49 steep steps. By now I can probably recall half a dozen web addresses for Brits looking for love on the Costa del Sol by heart and sing “Lady in Black” without even thinking about it– but as long as we have a bottle of Faustino or Baron de Ley vino tinto go with it that’s just fine, though.

Tomorrow we’ll take a trip to Granada and are planning to stay a night, maybe we’ll get to see a few sights between lunch, playground, nap time and dinner.

Zipfelmuetzen and Bureaucracy

(Zipfelmuetzen translation: pointy hats – like the ones gnomes wear)
Finally on Easter Sunday I saw my share of hooded Semana Santa procession participants. We met up with Sabine, a friend of mine from high-school who has been living in Malaga for 10 years and for all practical purposes is a local, and her partner Paco, who is a local. They took us downtown where the final procession of Semana Santa 2008, in honor of the resurrection of Jesus, happend. By all accounts the Easter Sunday procession is the smallest and the only one happening during daytime which strikes me as a bit funny, they celebrate the death of Jesus and go to considerable length to do so and then sort of casually glance over resurrection with a minor early afternoon procession. The most famous participant, Antonio Banderas, who allegedly won’t miss Semana Santa in his native Malaga and who’s (hooded) face was depicted prominently on the SurDeutsche (a German language weekly newspaper for German expats and tourists in Andalucia, whos editor in chief is Sabine) wasn’t to be seen either. For everybody interested in seeing him live: rumor has it that he and Melanie Griffith stay at the Hotel Lario every year to participate and watch in the Semana Santa festivities. It was great anyway, Banderas or not, and the daylight made in considerably easier to take pictures and made the figures in the pointed hoods less eerie and scary and therefore more appropriate for watching with Max (no nightmares). We saw a long procession of people wearing long robes and extremely tall pointed hats in pretty much all colors with white, black and purple dominating. They were carrying banners or silver ornamental poles that, I am sure, have some fancy name that I don’t know, and the kids often had little bells that they were ringing energetically. The hoods have narrow slits for the eyes but otherwise cover people toe to head and beyond. Occasionally one could get a glance of a pair of glasses, some jewelry peeking out from under the sleeves that would give one an idea about the gender and age of the person underneath. Some, obviously, couldn’t resist sending a quick SMS or text message during the little breaks in the procession which made for an interesting contrast – medieval looking ropes and shiny new cell phone.
In between the hooded figures where bands playing the same solemn music we heard them playing on Good Friday in Ronda but only one of the large sized floats where carried around. Or at least we left after the first one came by to beat the crowd to a coveted spot in one of the local restaurants. My press pass came through for me again, I didn’t expect “the trick” to work but surprisingly it did and so soon enough I was running around between the hooded ones taking pictures with people commenting on the size of my lens and encouraging the participants of the procession “sonria para la prensa". For all I know they complied and smiled under their hoods. (the pictures show Semana santa during the night in Frigiliana and during the day in Malaga).

Today we went on what turned out to be mission impossible: to get Max into the local school for three weeks. The “guarderia” sent us away because he is like three months too old for that institution. They directed us towards the colegio which turned us away for now good reason the alleged reason having to do with insurance and liability. In fact, they just didn’t want what they consider an inconvenience – another child who will be here for just a short time. Since both the guarderia nd the colegio are municipal and a conversation with the responsible person in the administration didn’t yield any results, other than the name and phone number of the political representative to call and petition we decided to call it quits. There exists very little that would be more of an outrageous waste of time than to petition a political appointee in a foreign country in a language one doesn’t speak very well to bend the rules and make an exception for somebody they have nothing to expect from, not even a measly vote in the next election. In the next town over, Nerja, there seem to be four privately run guarderias and there is always hope that money is big enough an incentive to bend the rules and make an exception. We’ll find out tomorrow. Max was pretty heart-broken about the rejection. He had his mind set on going to school today and just didn’t understand why people wouldn’t let him in and play with the kids. The fact that we couldn’t explain the reasons behind it to him in very logical terms either didn’t help. We eventually settled on something like “the director is malo (bad)” which seemed to halfways satisfy him. To comfort him, Uli took him down to what is known as the “dangerous gorge” next to the village where he fought a bunch of imaginary mosquitoes with his “mosquito-lancet” – a piece of wood that he pretends to use to skewer said imaginary mosquitoes while I took Annette to Malaga from where she is leaving early tomorrow morning back to Zurich.
We are slowly getting the hang of Frigiliana. The trick is to be away or hiding between 11 am and 5 pm, that’s when the large busses dump the Brits, Germans, Austrians, Scandinavians, etc. Before and after these hours the village is peaceful and belongs to the locals (which includes a considerable number of expats, but okay, I like expats, I am one myself). With Semana Santa over things are bound to get a little less busy anyway – or so at least we hope.

Here are a couple of shots of Frigiliana and one of Max.

Girls’ Day Out

Annette and I took a “luxury trip” – sans kid and man – to Malaga today. We spent preciously little time there between the 1 hour drive one way and the grocery shopping and me wanting to be back in the afternoon so I can do something with Max and Uli can relax but was fun anyway - a reminder how life used to be before Max came along and made leisurely strolls through the city, with even more leisurely lunches in a little café and an undisturbed hour in an Internet Café to upload the blog and read the email impossible. I caught myself glancing around for kid-worthy activities only to remind myself that that little plaza there with all the pigeons can be blissfully ignored today because neither Annette nor I feel particularly like chasing pigeons, nor do I have to look out for little walls to climb and balance on or keep an eye out for dog-kaka on the ground which seems to magically attract Max and we could actually choose a café of our liking and the question whether they serve patatas frittas never even entered our minds.
I liked Malaga; it is much bigger than I thought it would be. I had anticipated something along the lines of Konstanz, 70,000 people or so a bunch of them in the burbs but Malaga is almost 10 times that big. It has suburbs alright and I sure wouldn’t want to live there in one of those high-rise buildings but the city itself is nice with lots of old houses with nice facades, narrow little streets (so narrow that one can’t get a decent shot of the nice facades), broad streets with stores and Cafes and – like any self-respecting European city - a church around every corner. I defy the stereotype of the typical German tourist who runs around hitting the cultural highlights with the scholarly Dumont travel guides in hand detailing every painting, carving, mural, fresco in every church, chapel, on every fountain or building of any historic value. Especially when visiting a place for the first time I’d much rather walk around, soak in the look and feel of the place, browse a book store, look at the shops and menus and how people are dressed. I also defy the stereotype of the American tourist who walks around – in Tevas and shorts -mind you it is sort of warm but the locals still wear boots and coats – with the “Rough Guide” or “Lonely Planet” in hand desperately trying to find that one restaurant, bar, hotel that some American travel guide writer praises because of its pancakes, authentic burgers or large cervezas. I guess I just sort of slipped into hyperbole again – can’t seem to help myself.
This might sound shallow but the most noteworthy place wasn’t the Picasso museum (too long a queue for us to bother) or the cathedral (where you have to pay to go in and so I decided to wait and see whether I could slip in tomorrow, Sunday, with the faithful) but a place called Sampaka, a chocolate store. I love chocolate, dark, light, filled, pure, for breakfast, lunch or dinner, with tea, wine, roast-beef, sushi, summer, winter, rain or shine and this was about the best damn chocolate I ever ate. I had a small piece of dark chocolate – crunchy on the outside with a soft fluffy yet substantial center – that tasted of lemon - more than a hint but not too much, and not acidy but nicely tart. The word revelation comes to mind – at least to mine – and I had to round the corner quickly to not give into the temptation to buy another piece or fifteen and sit down in the middle of the street and eat them all while entering a higher level of consciousness. I purchased a dark bergamotte flavored bar – and it took considerable strength to put it in my bag and take it home so it can serve as the dessert of our Easter dinner tomorrow. I protected it well, shielding it from the sun and such and it looks perfect and I can’t wait for that dinner to be over so I can open it. I’ll have to go back to Malaga and see the Picasso exhibit and the cathedral and – if luck has it – I might just happen upon Sampaka again.
Tomorrow is Easter Sunday which seems to be surprisingly low key here compared to all the hustle bustle of Semana Santa. There is some resurrection procession going on in Malaga which we will try and catch a glimpse of and I am sure everybody will head to church dressed in their Sunday best (but us) and everybody will eat fancy food but I don’t expected any more pointy-hooded figures walking the streets. Too bad, really, it added a lot of color, surprise and intrigue to our strolls. Anyway, we are going to go back to Malaga and meet up with Sabine who has been living there for, well, a number of years and so maybe, if I am lucky she not only knows a great place to watch whatever resurrection spectacle is going to be performed but knows of more places to buy spectacular chocolate.

From Temples to Churches

As luck or rather my immaculate planning, has it we got here right in time to witness the Easter festivities. Semana Santa, as the week leading up and culminating in Easter Sunday is called, is a highpoint of the year in this strictly catholic part of the world. Basically all week there are processions in every town, village, city, hamlet where mostly man clad in blck or purple robes carry around huge carved figurines of Jesus carrying the cross or nailed to the cross and always also a solemnly beautiful Virgin Mary in an outfit that seems completely unsuited to the climate in Palestine – or Andalucía for that matter. The robes are eerie, scary even as they hide the face completely only leaving small slits for the eyes. Here in Frigiliana they look like an opaque veil in front of the face but the ones we saw today in Ronda and are the most common have a pointed hood underneath which make them look like Kuklux-clan outfits only that they predate the clan by centuries. The whole tradition dates back to the 15th century when the Catholic Church was desperately looking for ways to keep their flock together and out of the reach of the heretic new movements within the church. Since most people were unable to read or write putting on a big spectacle during the week leading up to Easter seemed like a good idea and I guess it was as it is still done today and from the smallest kids to the old ones everybody participates. The reason for the hoods is that in the 14th century some pope had the – in my opinion entirely reasonable - idea (rare for a pope) to prohibit any public display of self-flagellation. Since the desire for self-flagellation seemed to have run deep they came up with the idea to put hide their faces and do it anyway. The hoods are still part of the tradition today, the self-flagellation, though, seems to have lost some of its appeal.
The processions happen during the day and night in total silence only with the occasional band playing solemn music. Even the little kids behave fairly well and are quite and concentrate real hard not to stumble over the long veils of the guys marching in front of them. During the night the participants carry candles and at least here in Frigiliana they turned off the lights in the entire town for a better effect. It was quite something to see a bunch of pretty untrained guys carry the heavy displays on their shoulders up steep Calle Alta, carefully bending down to avoid the low hanging wires and maneuvering tight corners. After Jesus carrying the cross came the 12 apostles and an assortment of other characters I didn’t identify right away like a couple of guys in a yellow top, baby-blue skirt and bright red stockings carrying a lancet - well on second thought those were probably evil Romans. Annette and I made our way down to the church and watched the procession as it left the church and started it’s way up Calle Alta, the cut across trying to outrun them on an alternate route to get home and on the balcony overlooking the Calle but where too slow. So tonight we are sitting tight waiting for the spectacle to come by our doorsteps.
This morning we piled in the car early and drove up to Ronda, an old city sitting high up in the Sierra about 50 km from Marbella. Its location is spectacular on two sides of a huge gorge which is connected by three bridges, the Roman, the Arabic and the “New” which itself is older than pretty much all of the buildings in the US. Max was particularly interested in the New Bridge as it is huge and spans the groge at its deepest part. The views are amazing, especially for a person like me, still plagued by vertigo after all these years of rock climbing. The town was bustling but for once it seemed to be mostly Spanish tourists up here in the rough climate of the mountains and not the Germans and Brits who seem to prefer to sit in huge hotel or apartment complexes and drive the short distance to Frigiliana and other towns like it for their fill of local flair and culture. We happened to come across yet another procession, this one with people wearing purple robes and pointy hoods. They seemed a little more professional than our guys I F., they marched in perfect lock-step with the huge display of Mary crying with the dead Jesus on her lap only slightly swaying. They had it easier, though, at least the part I saw as they roads they walked on were fairly flat. People were out in force and since we didn’t line up I didn’t get a good photo spot which had me desperate for a while. The badge-waving trick doesn’t work quite as well here as it did in Merida but I finally wiggled my way through to the front sitting on the ground and taking a few shots before heading out – it was way past lunchtime and even Max, who never complains of hunger unless he is wining for candy was expressing a desire to “eat something”. It would have been nice to have a little more time but after the late lunch we walked back to our car watching a bit more of the procession and soaking in a bit more of the white town against the dramatic dark clouds. Max fell asleep in the carbefore he had his chocolate cookie even halfway eaten – that should tell you something.
Now I am sitting by the fireplace waiting for the procession to come by, jumping up every few minutes and looking out onto the Calle – as the procession happens in utter silence there is no way of knowing when they will be coming by but I don’t want to miss it. The camera is loaded with a new compact flash, the fast lense is on, ISO 1600 set so I am ready and I won’t use my flash – another pet-peeve of mine: if one intrudes on people’s ceremonies at least one should do it in a respectful way and not flash some bright light into their faces. Oh, the church bell is chiming – gotta go!

Steep streets and German tourists

We don´t have Intenet access in our apartment in Frigiliana and the Internet cafe has the most inconvenient of opening hours. This one is being posted from an Internet Cafe in Malaga where Annette and I are today leaving "the boys" to their own devices. I am afraid the blogs will be less regular now unless Uli manages to find somebody´s unsecured wireless connection somewhere in the neighborhood. I´ll still write and probably batch upload whenever I get a chance.
This blog isn´t even finished but I run out of things to say and just stopped. Anyway, .....

I still feel like I landed in some alternate reality, somebody else’s dream of a vacation. Frigiliana just doesn’t seem real in all its proper whiteness after Mexico and India. The almost blinding whiteness, the lack of any dirt whatsoever, the cuties artisan shops selling “handmade” products (some look suspiciously Indian to me, could have been shipped right from Varkala) and the almost complete lack of an “indigenous population” for lack of a better term make it feel staged, like we are walking around a large film set for a love and romance chick-flick with a title like “Under the Andalucían Sun”. There seem to be tourist in this town and old people, who only venture out after nightfall or at least after most tourists have left. The afternoon today was overcast and coolish and therefore fewer tourists were out and abound and opportunity the locals seized to go grocery shopping and walk over to the church. It’s too bad, really, the place is beautiful – although I can’t keep but wonder what would happen if one morning somebody got up and decided to paint their house fire-engine red – and probably was a real treasure about 20 years ago. I am sure it was less clean, less proper, less flowery and handsome but more real with actual people living there. Of course I knew that Andalucia isn’t exactly uncharted territory and that the Brits and Germans venture here in force but I had – naively as it turns out – assumed that they would stay right by the beach, lying cheek-to-cheek on the sandy beaches and only dragging their butts over to the nearby restaurant for a bit of paella for lunch. that’s why I rented a place “inland” from the beach. I should have know those pesky Germans better, of course they a venturing around and of course the local population has adjusted and is providing pottery, leather wallets and whatever other souvenirs seem to be in high demand along with wine from Frigiliana and shirts, shawls, and pashminas from India.
So far I have barely had the opportunity to speak Spanish – there is simply no need. The preciously few locals we interact with speak either German or English or both better than I speak Spanish and so its all too easy to go the path of least resistance.

White and Clean

We reached Frigiliana in one piece – sort of. The car I rented wouldn’t even be considered a car in the US and would probably be called something like “one of those shoeboxes Europeans drive but American families don’t want” . That wouldn’t be a problem if not for the fact that we had 85 kg of luggage ourselves and also picked up my friend Annette at the airport with a largish backpack. The four of us basically vanished under piles of luggage, our backs were bent by the weight of the suitcase pushing the backrests of the seats over but we fitted it all in the little Peugeot – something not even the rental agent thought possible.

60 km later we reached Frigiliana: a small little pueblo backing up against the mountains – white and shiny, too cute and clean to be true and filled to the brim with tourists. This is Semana Santa, the holy Easter week and all of Europe seems to be on vacation and as luck would have it they all seem to be in Frigiliana. We found our cute little white house in the old section of Frigiliana. Compared to the places so far it is definitely pocket-sized: bedrooms barely big enough to fit the beds and a closet, kitchen like on a ship, tiny bathroom and all connected by a steep set of stairs. The bonus is a wonderful rooftop terrace complete with deck chairs and off-white panels of cloth to clip onto a trellis to protect yourself against the sun and the curious eyes of the neighbors having breakfast on their rooftop terrace. Although managing entropy will be a real challenge here I am very fond of our casita. It’s positioned on a little steep street with stairs and therefore no cars and it’s as neat and tidy as you could hope for. The pillows are soft and the blankets fluffy and there is a washing machine and the laundry that comes out is clean and smells fresh, the kitchen in all its tininess is well-equipped and the water that comes out of the faucet is potable. When describing Frigiliana it is hard to avoid clichés – photographing it will be pretty much impossible without falling prey to them. The whole town indeed is white, the doors and window frames are blue, green, red and any possible variation thereof. In front of every window and door there are flower pots, geranium growing everywhere (I have to mention here that growing up a rebel I always thought that geranium pots where one of the hallmarks of being hopelessly, helplessly bourgeois). The whole town smells intensely sweet because of the orange blooms on the trees, everything is so clean it’s hard to avoid thinking that they secretly power-wash the whole place nightly. Cute little bars and restaurant are at every corner, some featuring big terraces with a nice view of the Mediterranean not far away. Little old ladies and men shuffle up the steeps stairs with grocery bags and cats idly sit in the sun occasionally graceful posing for the eager photographer.

Before you book the next flight to Malaga and a car to take you here consider the following: you probably won’t hear much Spanish (the little old ladies don’t talk much) but you will hear every conceivable dialect of German and a lot of British English as well. This place is cramped with tourist at least from 11 am to around 6 pm when a lot of the day tourist vanish and make room for a little more local scene (part of which is the English couple owning the wine place and the Germans owning the house across the calle). It will be hard to feel like locals of sorts here, when we are surrounded by tourists and expats. In Merida we sort of naturally fit in, established a certain routine and never looked back, in Kerala I remember Uli yelling at a rickshaw driver who asked an ridiculously high amount for taking us to the Main Jetty “I do this trip every day, I know how much it costs, I am not a tourist so don’t try and screw me!” and although hyperbole this was true in a certain sense, we weren’t just another bunch of tourists spending the afternoon – but here we are among all the Germans and Brits who spend the winter and all the tourists who spend their lavishly long Easter vacation here. This will be an interesting challenge: will we start feeling like a part of us belongs here? Will be looking at houses for sale thinking out loud how we could make living here work? Will we feel at home in some sense or will we leave after 4 weeks feeling we were just another bunch of tourist who just took a somewhat more extensive vacation then all the rest? I don’t know but will soon enough.

For the time being I am stuck with the challenge of photographing Frigiliana without hopeless falling prey to the cliché. I certainly don’t want to take another crack at the “Doors of Frigiliana” concept. That was fun and fresh when I was in my early teens, now it’s stale, old, boring and almost irresistible. Who could look at these colors, the blueness of it against the whiteness without feeling that shutter finger twitch? In the back of my mind in a constant loop there is that voice telling me that there must be a new fresh creative way of looking at it, photographing it and if I just think about it long and hard enough I’ll find it but - honestly - that’s naïve, there are only so many ways to photograph a blue door in a white house and they have all been done before. But there must be something else, a new take on it …

While obsessing over that I will try to use the terrace with the off-white sun sails as a photo studio. It’s as close to darn perfect as you can get without studio light and I have visions of photographs of skin against stark white – I just need Annette to agree to be my model ….

Back in Europe

we made it to Vienna in one piece, or rather three, which is even better. On our last day in India one of the many gods there decided to make our farewell easier by sending dark rain clouds and monsoon-like showers.I got a first glimpse of the difficulties faced by Keralites when trying to dry their laundry during monsoon - stuff just doesn't try, laundry, hair after washing, faces - anything.

Anyway we left Kochi with a bit of a delay at 8:30 pm and got into Mumbai about 2 hours later. There we had to transfer from the domestic to the international terminal which sounds much more harmelss than it is because the "international terminal" is actually a different airport about 10 km or so away. The traffic even after 11 pm was horrific and I can see that it could easily take more than an hour for the distance if you were unlucky enough to have to make the trip during peak hours. We covered it in about 20 minutes to find us in the longest line in sight: the check-in line for Austrian Airlines. We got in line and didn´t move for 10 minutes and in my mind's eye I already saw us during it over the next night. Max was amazingly well behaved given the fact that it was about midnight now and so about 4 hours after his regular bedtime. He was sitting on the ground eating his "Griessbrei" (a sort of semolina porridge) drinking "jugo" and talking without a break between bites of Griessbrei. We finally got waved to a different check-in counter, somebody must have had pity with us and handselected us to join the short line a little further down. Flying to Mumbai had been easy, the plane had been half empty but this time every last seat was taken - literally. With the exception of one, bulkhead right next to an Indian woman with her crying toddler girl. I snatched it so Max could lay down spread across both our seats and sleep which he did only minutes after taking off. He made a show of protesting "I want to watch a DVD", "I am not tiered, I want to write and solve puzzles" but soon he was sound asleep (and thankfully so was the toddler girl) and so the whole trip turned out surprisingly benign - if you can call a flight that leaves someplace at 1:30 am to get to another place at 5:30 am benign at all.
To continue or good luck streak: all our five pieces of lagguage were already on the conveyor belt by the time we cleared cutoms and the streets of Vienna were empty so we were at our friends' house very soon.
Compared with last time we spend a night here in Vienna when we had minus 12 Celsius it is downright warm now with about 7 Celsius and a bit of sun. All in all a very good start to the "European leg" of our trip. At the moment Max is over at the neighbor's apartment baking a cake. This adventure will - no doubt - be told and retold many times over and I can already picture myself sitting in yet another plane and having the following conversation:
"Mama, tell me a story"
"Max, how does one say when one wants something from Mama?"
"Mama, tell me a story --- please!"
"Okay, which story do you want to hear?"
"the one how I baked a cake with Romana!"
"but Max, I wasn't there. You have to tell me that story"
"No, Mama - whimper - you tell me, I don't want to tell, you do!" (big quiver, sobbing about to erupt)
Okay, so, you and Romana made an apple cake"
"No, it wasn't an apple cake, it was a marble cake and we didn't make it we baked it." .....

Anyway, we are hear now, already had some sausage and rumor has it that we will be treated to an Austrian specialty called Tafelspitz tonight. Whatever it is, I know for a fact that it consists of a huge hunking piece of red meat.

And now it's time for a nap, if I can get my son away from the bowl with the unbaked dough, that is.

Phantasies of Wiener Schnitzel

Today over Masala crab and Tandoori platter Uli fessed up: he is craving a Wiener Schnitzel. Seldom before have I heard such a desire uttered by my Austrian husband who likes spicy food and international cuisine but I guess almost four weeks of (good) vegetarian plus fish and a few pieces of chicken, mostly processed and unrecognizable, will do this to the most open-minded of eaters. In his mind he is scheming a quick trip to a famous old Viennese restaurant during our 24 hour lay-over where they serve the best Wiener Schnitzel or the best whatever-is-typically-Austrian. He is- no doubt - already putting together a menu in his mind. I have to admit that the idea of sinking my teeth into a piece of red meat doesn't sound half bad to me bad either right now, well maybe not right now as I am still full from the Masala crab and Tandoori platter.
We took a last farewell trip to Old Kochi today, giving Max the opportunity to have two more rickshaw and two more ferry rides. Kochi was uncharacteristically quite and we haven't found out why yet - many stalls were closed and the traffic was light. Maybe another strike? Indians seem to be just as fond of a good strike as the French and Italians. On our last evening here I finally got the sunset I had been hoping for all along and so in the end I came away with the "Chinese fishernet at sunset" pictures that every good tourist is supposed to take. I even got a bit of a rainbow showing over the fishernets -what more can I ask for?

The bags are packed, sort off, lots of stuff still lying around and I fight the building hope that we can get it all in 4 pieces of luggage instead of five. It's always the bulky stuff that remains unpacked until the very end, the toiletries, shoes, etc. while Max's tiny little underpants are mostly stowed away but really not taking up all that much room. We'll see how it goes, I am mentally preparing for a bit of a treck between the domestic terminal in Mumbai - where our plane from Kochi lands - and the international terminal, where our flight to Vienna departs.

We said our good-byes to Kerala. It was an exciting experience and both Uli and I are very glad we came. It wasn't exactly a lot of R&R but for that I need only drive to Santa Cruz and not fly halfway around the globe. Having been here has made us aware of India in a very different dimension. Living In silicon Valley having Indian friends, eating Indian food and celebrating Diwali are normal parts of live but it was fascinating to get a first glimpse at and hopefully better understanding for Indian culture in all its richness. Going forward we'll be following news from India with a keener interest and hopefully a better understanding. With every day being even hotter than the last and the mosquitoes getting more plentiful and aggressive we are ready to leave and both feel that we are ready to come back some time in the future.

We will be on the road starting tomorrow afternoon until Monday evening European time and blogging opportunities will be scare. In Frigiliana we won't have Internet access at home (oh horror) and I am hoping there will be a nice convenient non-smoking Internet cafe near by, ideally next door. It's back to the Spanish-speaking world, plenty of alcohol and meals that scream "coronary heart disease" . It will be fun.

Seven new deadly sins

I couldn't resist this one although it is not strictly speaking travel and/or India related and ventures very close to the forbidden topic of religion but I read about it in the Indian Express so I decided that counts. It seems it is the time of the new "sevens" - seven new wonders of the world and now seven new deadly sins, compiled and released by the Vatican itself. The old sloth-envy-gluttony-greed-lust-wrath-pride line-up was apparently considered a tad out of date even by the Pope, formerly known as Cardinal Ratzinger of Germany and so now we have a new line-up:
genetic modification (so its too late for me given all the bacteria and viruses I genetically modified back in my lab days)
experiments on humans (big blow to the pharma industry because what else is a phase I drug trial other than an experiment on a human?)
polluting the environment - now that I buy, that is good, I worry a bit about all the catholics in Kerala
causing social injustice - good one, too
causing poverty - likewise
becoming obscenely wealthy - ooohhoo that one won't go over well in Silicon Valley but who gives a damn there what the catholic church says anyway
taking drugs - that's just plain boring, the reason it made the list seems to be that drugs have a tendency to "leave many youth out of the reach of the church" - and here I am quoting the Indian Express which is quoting some Vatican official.
I am happy to see that nothing releating to sexual behaviour has made the list, that's real progress. I would have hoped to see something along the lines of "waging war for no good reason" (something that soon might be the one common denominator between Bush and Chavez of Venezuela) or telling blatant lies to the public to conceal personal stupidity but I am sliding right into the second forbidden topic: politics (I am trying to stay clear of politics and religion in this travel blog to avoid alienating 90% of my readers).
Back to travel: we msde it home from Varkala in one piece. We avoided the mad rush for the cheap seats and found our seats right away in the three tier sleeper coach. This was actually much better than the airplane-like arrangement on the way to Varkala as various ladders leading up to the unoccupied beds provided a play-ground on tracks for the Max-man. Between the ladders, the cheese cake we discovered in a so called German Bakery near the cliff and Diego, Animal Rescue the trip seemed much shorter. Coming home we found the Internet down and a major rain storm approaching. What followed gave us a good idea of the coming monsoon season and why it might be a splendid idea to catch a plane before it starts in earnest. The days are getting hotter - hard to believe - and, I swear, humidity must be well above 100% - although that might be even harder to believe. Now one starts sweating while taking a shower, not just a fraction of a second after turning the cold water off.
With two more days to go here in India I am desperately trying to stiuff sarees, tea, wooden elephants, anklets and cinnamon bark into the suitcases. We have already decided that it is time to expand and add just one more teeny-wheeny duffle-bag to the luggage which maxes out our luggage allowance (this just dawned on me while writing, that sucks) making me feel a little panicky. Tomorrow we want to do - one last time - Max's "India routine" and take the ferry to Old Kochi. With any luck I'll get a thunderstorm against the backdrop of the Chinese fishernets and am able to remember the rules for photographing thunderstorms and get an award winning picture that will open a career as a travel photographer - so the fairytale goes.
Today we went back to Jayalakshmi to give the sales girls there some of the pictures I took and had printed. I have never seen 100 pictures disappear so quickly but they were delighted and very happy to get the pictures. Before we could turn around and escape another dozen or more where lined up with the most gorgeous sarees draped over their shoulders to have more pictures taken. I saw a couple gorgeous blue-green and a few nice purple ones but I am proud to report that I resisted, didn't buy one, didn't even think of buying one. But now that greed is no longer a mortal sin I should maybe reconsider ..... Leaves the issue of the suitcases, though.
We have been prepp'ing Max for a couple of days now on the upcoming change. Travel and change of routine seems to work fairly well with him when he knows what is coming so that by the time it is actually happening it feels like old news to him. So three times a day or so we repeat the story of how we will drive to the airport, fly to Mumbai, ..... eventually end up in Frigiliana, Spain, our next destination.
Another traveling with kids to observation I wanted to share for quite a while but always forgot has to do with drugs (no, not the ones that keep the kids from the church but those that hopefully keep them out of the hospital). Pharmaceutical companies obviously can't be bothered to develop special formulations of luxury things like malaria drugs for kids. Why would they, there is so much more money to be made with a new remedy for "restless leg syndrom". So you are stuck with the pills for adults and the good advice to give your child a quarter pill every week. Ever tried to cut a white and hard pill into 4 exact quartes? Good luck, it aint possible. So you end up with a crumbly pile and the bad feeling that you are either under or overdosing and don't know what's worse. But that was just the start because now your picky toddler is supposed to eat that stuff, swallow, that is, because its bitter. Toddler, though, is used to colorful chewable fluorid tablets which taste yummy and chews - good-heartedly - the first malaria crumble you put into his mouth to spit it out fractions of a second later. I am sure those restless leg syndrom thingies come sugar-coated, with BBQ flavor and in a formulation that you can mix into your wine cooler but they can't sugar-coat those darn malaria pills? after two huge screaming fits and two weeks of worrying about what to do with a little boy with malaria we found the following remedy: buy two-tiered cookies with chocolate cream in the middle, open two, scrape chocolate filling from one, take malaria crumble and cut it up real finely (you do not need to cut it on a mirror, although the procees eerily resembles the cutting of cocain), mix cocain - eehm, malaria drug - in excess chocolate filling, smear on other cookie, close, put on table first thing in the morning, before breakfast with child good and hungry, watch satisfied as the malaria pill disappears in seconds AND child is happy (side remark: make sure to inform husband about the prep'ed cookie else repeat).
Good thing lying and cheating your child didn't make it on the list of the seven new deadly sins.

Yoga and a Smoke

This is the second of the Varkala blogs, also delayed for the same reasons as the first one.

We went from India to every Westerners idea of India. Or at least that is how I perceive Varkala – I guess nobody can ever accuse me of not having strong opinions. To do truth justice we have actually never been to Varkala proper, we have been hanging out here at the hotel by the pool or down at the beach with all the other tourists in the Tourist section (with the exception of a trip to the temple, where we were the only Western tourists). I am sure Varkala itself is just as “Indian” as every other Indian town but this here is touri-land and has all the makings of a Westerinzed imitation of India. Mind you, the cliff is very nice (if they just stopped tossing the trash down in the evening) and the sandy beach every toddlers dream. The sand comes in a very fine black and a coarser yellow which makes for an interesting marble effect and is actually perfect for building vulcanoes spewing different kinds of lava or – the latest obsession – to build “firecrackers” made of black and yellow gunpowder. The water of the Arabian Sea is warm, even at night and Max is having a blast with the waves which are high and challenging for him but not so high to be dangerous. The sky was overcast for the last couple of days which I actually welcomed because I am recovering from a major sunburn (in my haste to get Max all lathered with sunblock and taken care of properly the first day I completely forgot to put sunblock on myself and that has to happen to me, who hasn’t left the house in 5 years without wearing at least SBF 15 on my face – rain or shine). So now about 10% of my body surface are of a deep and unflattering pink and hurt like hell. Anyway, I was going to rant about the tourists. There is a disproportionate number of men with long hair and woman wearing these big bulky “Indian” pants that at least in Kerala I haven’t seen anybody else wearing – ever. Wherever you turn there is a “Ayurveda Beach Resort” most of them neither on the beach (nothing really is because of the cliff) nor looking remotely like a resort. There is an abundance of yoga classes, meditation classes, cosmic and crystal healing, naturopathy (what??), self-finding instructions, and a lot of other stuff I haven’t ever heard of and can’t remember. I have to admit to being the probably least “spiritual” person you’ll ever meet so this falls right into the category of major pet peeves for me. All these mainly European (Americans are scarce but do exist) accountants, students, office managers or whatever sitting around in baggy pants, playing the drum at sunset by the beach and thinking they are grasping the meaning of several thousand years of Indian history and philosophy right there with Heinz from Guethersloh and Frits from Antwerpen sitting next to them humming and Anke and Rosie hopping around in circles. The guys seem to think it is cool to walk around with no shirt but some length of cloth wrapped loosely around their heads and the woman seem to think that wearing skimpy see-through dresses regardless of their body size somehow makes the whole experience even more “spiritual”. We seem to be the only people neither sporting a tattoo nor a piercing and not juggling on the beach, making some show of meditating, playing the saxophone, or hula-hooping (another grand old Indian tradition, as it seems) and having a smoke while doing so. To me, who feels like I had a glimpse at “real India”, talked to real people and been to temples with no other western tourist this seems as fake as Disneyland when I first went there in 1991 and discovered to my horror that everything was fake, from the smiles to the goldfish. This is how Western people idealize India and the Indian experience, it’s as fake as the Lederhosen-and-Dirndl numbers they pull on tourists in Bavaria or whatever “indigenous tribe” shows, dances and rituals one sees on booked tours to Africa only that this time the tourist seem to create their own reality with the locals as willing suppliers rather than the other way around. It seems to me that the tourist arrive with a preconceived notion of how proper India ought to look like which they probably derive from their local “India Store” and then came to Varkala (and I am sure Varkala isn’t alone) and began to create that “reality” complete with outfits no Indian wears, food that is neither Western nor Indian (I couldn’t get a real raita in this town, trust me, I know how real raita tastes, it’s basically all I lived on for the first semester of B-school, that and nan) and a whole subculture around “releasing the true male/female in yourself or some such BS.
Okay, I am overdoing it; I love hyperbole, but really I am not oversimplifying all that much (at least I don’t think so). Every personality profile I ever took attested me – if nothing else to write home about – a very fine sense for authenticity and good intuition. It took me but a minute to intuitively know that this was anything but authentic. I hardly took any pictures here, they few I took where of Max and the sunset (something I normally completely abstain from, the sunset, not Max) because I felt there was really nothing these pictures would add to my Kerala portfolio.
Having raved and ranted now I have to admit that it was a worthwhile experience for more than one reason. First, I simply love to have something to rant about, really, how boring would life be without a good rant once in a while. Secondly, Max loved the beach, he is so happy and satisfied there, it’s a pleasure to watch him dig around the sand for hours not ever getting tired of it, completely engrossed in whatever little fantasy-world of exploding firecrackers he is building himself, and thirdly it gave me an even deeper sense of appreciation for the “real” India we were lucky enough to experience when hiking the Western Ghats or milling around the Children’s Amusement Park in Ernakulam.
With just a few more days to go I am ready to leave India, I am ready to leave the house without breaking a sweat (or getting out of the shower without breaking a sweat for that matter), I am ready for a steak and less chaotic transportation but I haven’t regretted a second that we came here, I am glad what we did, how we did it and when we did it. And I am sure one day in the not so terribly distant future we’ll be back here exploring other parts of India.

My India Funk

This blog is much delayed because there was not Internet in Varkala and when we got back last night to Ernakulam a huge thunderstorm had wiped out our Internet there. It's still down and so I am sitting in a tiny cube in some Internet Cafe with somebody smoking what Mcalls an Ewee-cigarette right next to me. Oh well.

Anyway here goes the "we-arrive-in Varkala" blog:

I knew it would happen and I expected it to happen earlier but here it is – the India funk. I am sure I am not the only one to get the occasional funk when traveling in countries where everything is unfamiliar and nothing ever easy or straightforward. I know it happened in China – just not sure whether it was in Szechuan where we basically couldn’t eat any of the food – German country-pumpkins that we were and unused to more than a hint of pepper - or when I was sick as a dog in Beijing. I remember it happening in Hanoi the day I took a blouse I wanted to wear out of my suitcase to find it had gotten moldy over night and in Laos where we had more than 40 Celsius and the “best hotel” in Vientiane was a dump. Anyway, this is the India funk. The day started with Uli not feeling well and so I had Mister Max chatting my ear off all morning while trying to pack for our trip to Varkala, prepare some food for the train ride and wash (by hand, the washing machine never got resurrected) the sheets of Max’s bed after last night’s “accident” (they do happen). The driver picked us up 45 minutes late for the trip to the train station which is unheard off, they normally show up early. We made the train no problem but the tone for the whole train ride was set . Our reserved tickets said Coach 1 seats 22 and 23 three so we did what good rule-following Europeans do, we position ourselves near the sign that said “Coach 1”. I should have gotten suspicious by the scene that unfolded as the train was driving into the station: forgotten were all good manners, any form of politeness and dignity: as soon as the train halfways stopped – with a hundred people trying to disembark – the crowd started pushing and kicking its way into the coach. Elbows were used, feet and whatever tools were handy to gain an advantage and not the slightest consideration was given to little old ladies or mothers carrying their baby boys (that would be me) on their backs. We sort o f made it in the train, not into the actual compartment but the front portion – mind you, no doors. No sooner had we gotten in did Max start to whine that he wanted to have is lunch now, as in this second, and I was yelling at Uli that under no circumstances would I be traveling crouched on the floor of a filthy compartment with no doors for almost 5 hours. People were everywhere, like you have seen in movies or documentaries only I didn’t ever think for a second that these documentaries had anything to do with the reality of the India we had seen so far. But here we were, in the middle of it.
It turned out that Coach 1 wasn’t really Coach 1 or at least not that Coach 1 and that our Coach 1 was a reserved A/C coach somewhere halfway down the train. With 1 minute left we ran, me pulling Max along and cheering him on – which was hard because he was asking me questions the entire time:
“why do we have to go to another coach, Mama?”, “Did somebody take our seats?” , “Why did they take our seats, Mama???”
“No , honeybums, we just got into the wrong coach, we thought it was Coach 1 but it wasn’t”
“Yes it was, I saw it myself, it said ‘Coach1’ - “Mama, where are we going?”
“Max, don’t talk, run, else we are going to miss the train!”
“Mama, why do we have to go to another coach?” - put this on an endless loop – at least that’s how it felt.
Uli was huffing behind us with a huge backpack and one of these wheely-duffles that always decided to start gyrating when you least expect and least need it. We made it to our Coach and our seats with seconds to spare but at this point in time the day was lost for me and “the funk” was about to build. Needless to say that I found the fancy reserved A/C coach not quite up to German standards, I think “in need of a really thorough scrubbing” might begin to give an impression.
When I am alone I actually enjoy train rides, occasionally, one looks out the window, sleeps a bit, looks some more, eats a sandwich, reads a girly-magazine (otherwise only permitted when waiting for a dentist appointment) and idles away the time. This time I was watching “Thomas the tank engine” and “Diego, Animal Rescue” for four hours with an increasingly tired and ill-behaved toddler. I can sort of tolerate Diego and his silly puzzles but abhor Thomas and his idiotic stilted- speaking tank engine friends. It’s hard to argue with a toddler wanting to watch Thomas during a train ride, though.
We were supposed to reach Varkala at 5:50 pm and as the train left Ernakulam about 10 minutes late I didn’t expect to get there until 6 ish. By about 5:30 the train slowed down and we were just wondering how many more stations there where before Varkala when I saw a tiny sign saying “Varkala” passing right before my very eye. We tore down the luggage, screamed at Max to get up and start moving – now, get going, come on now or we’ll miss our station.
Pick-up was flawless and the guy recognized us before we recognized that he was holding a (folded) sheet saying “Mr. and Mrs. Tina”. We got treated to our first and hopefully last ride in an “Indian Ambassador” those iconic white cars of days gone by that are about as comfortable as the Russian jeep I once rode for 10 hours in northern Vietnam.
The rest is just me being in a funk. The room at the fancy resort that has but one light high up – so either both sleep or both don’t . The pizza at the Italian Café that the Kerala guide describes as authentic was anything but, the pool with water that is too warm even for me – and I refuse to enter our pool until the temperature reaches at least the mid-70s – the room with the ever so slight smell of pee-pee, the tourists wearing ultra-short miniskirts and backless t-shirts in a country where the women go swimming fully dressed, the “ayurveda clinic”, meditation this, yoga that, Tibetan whatever (Tibetan?? We are about as far away from Tibet as Sweden is from Sicily) at every corner wouldn’t normally bother me- amuse me, puzzle me, maybe - but today it bothered me. I wanted a decent pizza, a US/European style (whatever) bungalow and a bottle office-cold Prosecco. That wasn’t to be had so I am sitting here, typing away while finishing the second large bottle of Kingfisher beer – fortunately readily available here – and starting to feel a little better, or at least tired enough to fall asleep and try again tomorrow. Fortunately, I now know its only me having “the funk” and that comes and goes and one never quite knows why and how but at least now I know it will go again – hopefully over night.

Such is the nature of the travel funk.

Shrines and Small Explosions

Thanks to the information from some guy Uli talked to on the street (the usual thing for a self-declared intorvert) and of "our" new rickshaw driver we ended up visiting two temple festivales/ceremonies over the last couple of days. The first took place in Ernakulam a short ride away and we went there in the late afternoon with Max. Unfortunately we missed the elephant - although we could still see his "left-overs" - but it was an interesting experience. We were the only Westerners and non-believers and as such ourselves a minor attraction. The rules of conduct inside the temples seem to be the same everywhere: as non-Hindus we can't go inside the shrine and if we can (occassionally) I can't take any pictures there. Outside the shrine the message was: knock yourself out with your camera. Other than that, everybody has to take their shoes off, that's obvious, but nothing else we did or didn't do seemed to have raised any eyebrows. I guess we get some slack for being non-Hindus and Westerners.

It was a great colorful scene: the women were wearing their Sunday-best sarees in all colors of the visible spectrum and the man showed up as usual in shirt and pants or lungis - basically a piece of fabric that is wrapped around the hips and secured by tucking one end in. There must have been hundreds of people patiently waiting in line to get through the door into the main court and then to the shrine where they quickly pray and burn oils, incences or offer what looks like candy (Shiva seems to have a sweet-tooth). Then they circle the shrine clockwise many stopping on either of the four walls to make donations, pray, burn more oil lamps and receive dots of color on their forehead (I should have looked up the proper name for these "dots" and will do so but its getting late here ...) All four outer walls of the shrine have little oil lamps and on regular days a good number of them are burning but during the festival every single one was burning and people keep pouring oil in. The outer edges of the roof were decorated with long strings of marigold and jasmine leis which nicely contrasted with the light of the burning oil lamps. I have to say that in my mind the bright fluorescent lights that were an obvious recent addition took away a bit of the flair and ambiente but they sure make it easier for the little old ladies in their sarees to negotiate the uneven pavement. The main attraction for our son was right outside the main gate: firecrackers were being burned for 10 rupees a pop in honor of Shiva. Firecarcker might not do the "explosion" justice, though, it was basically gunpowder that is set on a special container of stone and light by torch through a short length of more gunpowder. The ensuing explosions almost blew out my ear-drums but Max- hands tightly clutched over his ears - had a great time (in fact we had to go back today and check whether the firecrackers were still there - and they were - so we bought a few to entertain our son and in honor of Shiva, of course).

I took quite a few pictures feeling more intrusive than I probably was perceived to be as everybody was smiling at me and people would come up and pose. My original plan was as clever as useless: I was wearing my pink-and-grassgreen Salwar Kameej (pyjama-like pants and longish dress over them) thinking I could just "blend in" and stand in a quite corner and take some pictures with my long fast lense. Needless to say there was no quiet corner and the whole blending in thing didn't work terribly well either: most Indian woman aren't 5'10", haul around a big camera plus bag and are followed by a blond kid and a towering husband in a bright red t-shirt.

Encouraged by this experience Uli and I planned a secret mission to Alwaye, a town about 25 km north of Ernakulam. We dropped Max off at school and depriving our son of two 45 minute rickshaw rides which he will never forgive us should he ever learn about them - we had "our" rickshaw driver, Rajiv, take us to an ever bigger fetsival in honor of Shiva the next morning. The main event had happend the night before what what we did see gave us a good impression and a sense of relief that we didn't attempt to make it to Alwaye with Max the night before as briefly entertained. They must have had thousands, if not more people attending the night before, a special ponton was build over the river to provide better access and a huge area around the temple was filled with people selling everything from little devotional figurines, to spices, oils, pots, seeds, cheap plastic toys from China and handwoven baskets. And food of course, there is always a food stall somewhere close by in India. We did our round around the shrine and attracted a more than our far share of vendors trying to talk us into buying devotional figurines and glass bead bracelets. I ended up buying a brass ring that allegedly contains a couple of pieces of elephant hair - looks like black nylon to me and probably is - for a whooping 20 rupees. It was nice to have Rajiv along for most of the time as he help translating and so I got some excellent shots of people. I was quite amazed that people didn't mind in the slightest to be photographed while performing religious ceremonies (taking place outside in stalls or on the steeps leading down to the river) but quite happily agreed to be photographed and then just carried on.

The road back was long, hot and dusty and so we stopped at the supermarket and liquor store for some refreshments (liquor store products stricly evenings in apartment only) and something quite funny happend: Rajiv, who all morning didn't want any water or food or ice-cream and made do with 20 rupees worth of peanuts took the opportunity - after I had left to go to the supermarket - to sprint after Uli - on his way to the booze store - and asked whether maybe he could have a little bottle of Smirnoff as well. Uli bought him one instead of giving him a tip and by the time I got back to the rickshaw the booty was securely stowed away. I was wondering how this story played out with his wife in the evening: "Darling, you know how these Europeans are, he simply insisted. I would have offended him terribly by declining. You see, I really was in a bind - I just had to accept it graciously and make a brave face." Anyway, we now have a rickshaw driver who calls us twice daily to see whether we need to go somewhere, anywhere.

Puttering Around

Despite a few people who dismissed the whole backwater-houseboat experience we decided to give it a try and in my book it's well worth it. We rented a houseboat (which came with a staff of three for the 3 of us - captain, cook and waiter) which left Alappuzha - a city about an hours drive south of here - by 11:30 am and putters around the endless channels and canals of the surrounding area at a nice moderate speed leaving enough time to watch life by the river leisurely and even take non-blurry pictures. I was a little apprehenisve, I am not the sit-around kind of gal and being on a houseboat seemed the definition of sitting around. And then there was the Max-factor. How much fun is there on a boat for a little boy. Well,turns out I seem to be the sit-around kind of gal after all if the sitting is done in motion and is occassionally interrupted by walks (which it was) and the little engineer had plenty of interesting things to see and a captain who needed help steering the boat.
The boat was a two-story affair, well 1.5 stories - on the upper deck Uli and I could only walk bent forwards but it had comfy deck chairs and a few things to keep Max interested (plus a baby crip which was used for the teddybear to hold his nap). Downstaris was a dinning/sitting area right behind the captains stool the two small rooms with even smaller bathrooms and then the kitchen. Very comfortable, indeed, compared to many of the small poor houses we puttered by. It isn't without voyeuristic pleasure that one idles by people's houses and gardens and watches them - for a few seconds - in ther daily routines. Everything seems to revolve around the canals: people bath, wash their hair and brush their teeth there, they wash their laundry, pots and pans, irrigate their rice paddies, water their gardens, fish, drive or row around on them and kids play in them. There was a good number of houseboats out but on the vaste network of channels not enough to make them a pest. Kids would still excitedly wave at us most everywhere we went and the scenery wasn't clogged by them or by the tourist (mainly elderly Brits and French) they unload. After driving around a bit and taking a short walk (mainly used by Max to throw stones into the water, still a favorite of his) we had an excellent, freshly prepared lunch that was way too opulent for a normal day but I decided that this wasn't a normal day and that nothing would be gained by offending the cook right then by not eating properly. I also decided that I wasn't going to think about the fact that the plates where washed with river water and the rice probably cooked with it - in fact I prefer not to think about it now.
Afterwards there was more puttering around, Uli was reading, Max was busying himself with the generator, the accelerator, the big broom and other such things occassionally yeling things like "Mama look, I have a very dangerous knive that can be used to cut ants" while I was sitting upfront by the captain with my camera clutched in my sweaty palms. I don't think I put the camera down for more than 10 minutes at a time during the day with the exception of the lunch break. There was too much intriguing to see and to many pictures to be taken! The afternoon just flew by - kind of unexpected for me as beforehand I had visions of boredom, drumming my fingers on surfaces and rummaging around the boat desperately to find something to read a former guest had left - and ending up with a French version of Cosmopolitan - which is just about the worst of all worlds when it comes to reads. Instead I took another 300 pictures between end of Chai break and the visit of the "famous church" in one of the small villages we passed by. The churches are really something here, they are Christian (mainly some old-fashioned orthodox catholic version) alright but of a distinct Indian flavor and architecture, decorated with colorful umbrellas and big silver tinsel, a strict "shoes off" policy applies and Mary is dressed in saree-like robes. Max got a little confused about the whole church/temple business and wasn't quite prepared to accept what he saw as a proper "iglesia" (in which he knows to behave, as grandma told him: "be quiet because people pray"). In fact he thought it was a temple and asked whether this was one of those where only Indians could go in. The charm of this little utterance is lost in translation as he didn't use the word "Inder" (Indians from India) but the word "Indianer" which is the German term for Native Americans.

Anyway, we did the usual tour through the one-100-percent-handmade-souvenir-only-obtainable-here routine (I bought a laddle, can't ever say "no") before settling in on the boat for another hour or so before we took our position for the night, had another opulent meal and a couple of cool beers -I am starting to behave like the German I am. It is still hard for me to have so much staff - I am simply not used to it and probably would never quite be. My impulse is to jump up after dinner and take out the dishes, wipe the table, make my own bed, carry my own luggage, switch on the light myself when I enter a room, and pour my own beer (actually here in our apartment we drink it straight from the bottle - the way it is suppoesd to be). I am not saying it isn't pleasant to have things done but it doesn't feel quite right to have other people do basically everything while I sit around and take pictures.
The night was hot and blissfully mosquito-free and over when somebody in the nearby village started playing music at 6:15 am. The sun was rising anyway and more pictures needed to be taken. By 9:30 we've had breakfast - American/European with eggs and after we were stuffed he brought "Kerala breakfast" looking very happy and expecting us to eat again - and had puttered back to Alappuzha. Especially in the case of this cruise a picture says more than 1000 words and so I will upload a few pictures.

To round out the day in Ernakulam (where the apartment is) we visited a temple where a big celebration in honor of Shiva was going on and took a rickshaw back. The guy was driving very fast and "sporty" and Max's comment was "He is driving super-fast. That's what I like." Good thing we did the backwater tour before our little guy was old enough to demand a speedboat.