hello!
gosh, what a lot has happened in just one week. it has been a blessedly soft landing into india as i have been extremely well looked after by jaise and the kuriakose family, and i feel somewhat superior to the other white western tourists on the street, who might not know where to go or what to do ..! we have visited, and been visited by, about a million relatives and neighbours and friends, who come to stare at me and try and pursuade jaise to get married. lots and lots of 'very tasty' food - everyone wants to feed us, and if we're visiting say six homes in a day, it becomes hard to please everyone! such vast quantities of rice are consumed at every sitting!!!! there seem to be two types of people in india: the very thin and the very fat. i'm staying with the sareed bellies at the moment - lots of material and curves everywhere!!!
apparently, i am the best person to be driving the family around (!!!) which means that i've been braving the absoulutely insane roads, into the city of Cochin, and up into the Western Ghat mountains. there are pot holes everywhere, sometimes cunningly disguised, it seems, and no-one adheres to the signs that everywhere say 'live and let live; obey traffic rules'. there are goats, cows, people bikes, auto rick shaws, "super fast" buses (as they proudly name themselves), trucks with bamboo piled metres high, leaning precariously round sharp bends.... in fact precarious is a very good word for india. cars hurtle at you from every direction, without ever indicating, and it's a wonder that the death toll isn't higher than it is.
i'm never quite sure what's happening until it happens. i was awoken one morning to be told that that i was expected at the local school to play violin to the kids at their sports' day and talk to them about global warming, oh and we're leaving now. ok, i guess i'm awake! so a whole field of young innocent faces attentively listened to me, nodding furiously in agreement. i've also played for the local Fine Arts Society and been interview by the local paper about CAT and carbon and india. this afternoon we're presenting to the local college, before heading east over the mountains into Tamil Nadu, starting the journey towards Auroville. 5am bus tomorrow morning. at least this time i'll be inside the super speedy bus, and not trying to avoid it.
kerala is very green, with coconut and banana trees everywhere. there are many different types of each: small bananas, fat bananas, green bananas, white bananas, and they have a thousands different ways of preparing dishes withrice, cococut, chillies!!!! and spices. tasty tasty.
i've seen a couple of elephants - not wild, although they do exist around here up in the hills - but am more afraid of being squashed by a super speedy bus than an elephant!
don't know when i'll next get near a working computer with working internet. nothing is as straight forward as in the uk, but it's great!
