Good news/bad news:
Bad news is that my camera lens refuses to leave the safety of its battered shell in an orderly manner any longer, so for all intents and purpose it is broken. The display even tells me: `lens error, restart camera` which is thoughtful of Canon to have included, but a little inaccurate in my case. `lens error, buy a new one` is more accurate but, I suppose, a little blunt.
The good news therefore I is that, by default, this means I'll be able to catch up on the backlog without further burdening myself with extravagant photographs of anything interesting or important 
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I did drop it twice, once in Goa, once in Hampi, and the month-long delay I can only attribute to... well I can't. Weird, but there are places here to get them fixed apparently.
Ho-hum.
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Return to Fort Kochi
Cochin, or Kochi, is a coastal harbour town largely comprised of mainland Ernakulam and Fort Kochi across the water, effectively an island of decent size that guards the harbour, and it became of most sizeable interest to the Portuguese when they arrived a bit more than 500 years ago, and there is also a scattering of other, smaller islands within the harbour.
One of these at first seemed to have been turned over entirely to the manufacture of greasy smoke, a commodity I had never thought viable on todays markets, but it cleared one day and I can see that instead they have just been turning the entire island into one big quarry, bless them.
In the spirit of national pride and empire building the Portuguese did what explorers of that age always did on exploring a brand new country, the tried to turn it into another version of their own, with all the same stuff they had always seen before. Travel was a different thing back then, it appears.
Misguided and silly as this was and remained misguided, silly and extremely popular with everyone for the next 400 years, it has at least left us with some nice things to have a look at, which I did, and thankfully I at least managed to get some pictures of the main draw in Fort Kochi, the oldest European-built church in India (arguably the earliest. It's a convenient lie until anyone comes up with another place, it seems) before my camera gave up the ghost in the church grounds.
I have to admit I looked around briefly for a tiny grave with `Canon A570 IS, October 2007 - March 2008, Abea Ambivalentia Memoriam` just in case this was a timely, thoughtful, deeply cynical and therefore thoroughly appropriate sign from God that he actually existed 
Alas, it appears I was right all along and so I lugged the corpse back to the hotel that day. As days go generally it was very pleasant, so I will start at the beginning:
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Sunday 16th March, a bloody stupid day for sightseeing being a Sunday, but still. That much didn't occur to me until I had scrambled down the stairways and off to the ferry jetty, queued, ferried, wandered through quiet streets until finding a place for breakfast and sat, after ordering some food and coffee, studying the map and planning a route, dilligently checking opening times (Pardesi Synagogue, 3pm - 6pm, must do that after other stuff etc.) and quietly emitted a resigned yet satisfyingly hearty "bollocks" (a great word, especially for use in public, I've always felt) when I looked at my watch properly and noted the treacherous little `SU` in the corner.
It is amazingly easy to lose track of the date, let alone the day of the week out here.
My utterance was quite heartfelt yet I wasn't exactly surprised, and was quite satisfied in a strange way at being able to say such a thing loudly and proudly in the calm knowledge that I was abroad and could swear pretty much indefinitely without causing offence. Happily enough a German family the table across from me was able to share in it, and evidently were quite able to translate, too.
I presume the next thing they said to their stroppy-looking young son was "Never speak like the English pig-dogs, Gunther" but unfortunately my German isn't as good as their English.
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The ferry was unremarkable to me now, having been in India since November, but I imagine if you compared it with native experience of ferries it would seem a bit strange. Nothing bizarre, but just picture the differences:
Once again I saw the seperate queuing for each destination therefore eliminating mental effort on anyone's part, either customers or employees but there were two queues for each destination, separating the women from the men.
Whether because of discrimination or to eliminate groping I can't say with authority (since I haven't gone and asked them), but I'm pretty sure it must be to keep the poor women safe because Indian queuing is a pretty intimate affair. This caused a slight problem for me.
I do not like being pressed from behind in a queue - it is rude and very annoying and you get jabbed in the kidneys with elbows and bags and it's totally pointless, there was plenty of space behind us all - and this is the chief activity of the queuing Indian man, it seemed.
Clearly something had to be done, so to stop myself getting irritable and wound up with the tiny yet deeply annoying little stabs and pokes, I effected my version of the Gaijin Smash maneuvre previously documented and stopped and pushed backwards a little with my whole body, elbows and feet at more or less the same time, returning the minute blows to the git with the sharpened object behind me, and forcing the queue not just to stop shoving but also to move backwards a fraction, something that I imagine does not happen very often.
It seems to me a lot like the driving mentality all over the world that is more obvious here in Asia because of the very low speed of vehicles and rather small roads; everyone has just gotta get ahead, gotta keep pushing, gotta overtake one driver then another etc. - it seems in this society, at least, they are unused to exercising any restraint when it comes to other people's space.
So taking advantage of the fact most of these guys can't shout out "Oi! Keep moving!" in any language I can understand, and they know it, plus the fact I would have reminded them of their rudeness and they'd have felt mildly and typically abashed at this (which they looked), this happily worked very well.
It also works because Indian men are generally quite small in scale (it is rare to see Indian men over about 5'10" and many are much shorter) and almost always very thin and therefore very light, whereas I am a fraction over 6 feet tall in my boots and fairly expansive - and ever-improving in this respect 
In this country if I push, other people have to move - I have a perfect example to illustrate this later on in fact; no I wasn't being an arsehole to anyone, before you ask 
He shied away as hoped and took the queue with him, as it were, and I was left to quietly buy my ticket and be ripped off half a rupee for it - everyone has to make their little bit from the tourists, but I made sure I had exact change for the return trip partly to prove this point, and partly to prove that the cost actually was 250Paise, or Rs. 2.50, and that I therefore hadn't mis-remembered a hazy concersation with Manoj where he told me the price of the ferry to Fort Kochi, just over a week beforehand. I like to know my much-addled grey matter can perform now I'm not drugging it to oblivion every day.
I felt extremely petty-minded asking a stall-holder on the island for two 50-Paise coins I have to admit, but I was actually correct in my memory and disproportionately righteous about depriving the little ticket man of his half-rupee; the ferry was pleasant itself and the crossing only takes 20 minutes, and was, predictably enough, packed to the rafters and offered no views because I got on just about last.
That there were several dozen more passengers than legal limits dicate more or less goes without saying 
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Arriving on the island, I followed my map to the various places I had earmarked for food, coffee, etc. and on the way passed a Catholic church of St.'s Paul and Peter (very tacky, brightly coloured, definitely not 500 years old) and then around a few more streets the more impressive yet still not particularly ancient St. Enrico's Basilica - no I lie, that was another reference to a Discworld book - I mean of course the Santa Cruz Basilica which features a lovely pastel-coloured interior and, on this occasion, about 40 or 50 people with hoses inside the church, spraying water freely and extravagantly over the floors and right onto the wooden pews, laying waste to tiled floor, marble pillars and pastel painting alike in their Christian fervour to wash and scrub the entire building down.
Yes, hoses. Remarkable. All over the marble and lower paintings, too. The water was hot (I walked through the torrents coming out of the main door and was surprised at the heat) so God knows (ha ha) what happens to the pictures - maybe this is why they are pastel shades and not striking in colour like most churches; 103 years of pious work with the dishcloth.
Still, they all seemed happy enough, or, being Catholic, at least seemed occupied enough and had evidently done this all before.
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For breakfast (I'll just add that it was gone midday now because I had risen late) I found a place that was open for business on only the third attempt, it not occurring to me that there might be a reason lots of places were closed until a little later on.
I pored through the menu plumping in the end for a `steak sizzler` because if nothing else, it is always nice to see the Indians being inventive when it comes to beef. It is a brave thing to do, putting beef on your menu in a country that views cows as sacred animals, and again I was not diasappointed.
A steak sizzler was, in fact a satisfyling over-large beef burger; and a damn nice one too! I was fairly sure it would be non-threatening to my poor weakling excuse for an immune system because it cost so much, and the place was very clean, even despite my language.
Besides, it was 8 flights of stairs up and down to the actual restaurant and if there was any trouble on the way I'd still be within striking distance, not to use too colourful a phrase, of a toilet.
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Anyway I wandered out and along and found the Oldest European Church In India (Honest) around the corner as promised, it was understandably in a bit of a state and not that impressive (nowhere nearly as ornate as the 350-odd-years younger establishment, but I was pleased to note that it had retained a commendable feature in any eclesiastical establishment: siege defences.
The walls still had the unmistakable angled arrow-slots that afforded a good field of fire to the defenders, while offering a very poor target for the seething hoards below who would, of course, have made the church a key target in the 16th Century because there was a 80%-odd chance of them being Hindu or Muslim.
It's nice to see the old ways kept up.
Then my camera died and, well, I wasn't too pissed off actually. I was expecting it a lot sooner, and I had at least just taken 3 or 4 shots of the church, and nowhere else of interest (apart from the Chinese fishing nets, about which we are to learn shortly..) actually allowed photography, so hey, screw it. Job done.
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I missed a turning and avoided the Bishop's House because that was the one place that did allow photography and all they have is a collection of 17th Century vestments and altar-ware, and while that would have fascinated two people I know to me they really are not much interest, and I was rendered photographically inert so couldn't do them the favour of vicarious perusal anyway. So, meh.
So I came across the Chinese fishing nets.... you can see them here, better pictures than I could take: http://images.google.co.uk/images?hl=en&q=chinese+fishing+nets&btnG=Search+Images&gbv=2
They are the most intriguing looking contraptions, these pictures mostly wont do their scale justice I'm sure, and I can be very sure of their scale (large, impressive) because I helped operate one of them!
Yes, they let little old me assist them in hauling in a couple of catches, I think they thought it would be slightly funny to watch some pasty-faced Westerner struggle with the heavy work, but all those years at the brickyard and a steady diet of pies & pizza paid off in the end: I could easily just lean my weight down and appear to be doing my share of the work
The system the nets use is always called cantilevered, but I like to think of them just as big see-saws 
; but even for that they are most amazingly balanced things - maybe 35 feet long and extending around 15 feet over the jetty, a square net is suspended at the far corners from two widely-angled beams, and the near corners just under the main platform, more or less on the tide-line.
By lifting the dozen or so rocks of increasing size, the weight is gradually, precisely and magnificently tipped in favour of the other end of the cantilever; see-saw; and the net is lowered into the sea.
A few minutes of idle chatting later, and 4 guys can pull on the thick ropes to bring 'er back shorewards, lifting the far edges of the net out of the water first and trapping any foolish marine life in the devices.
And what marine life - first thing I saw, I identified it in my head straight away but didn't say outright for fear of being not properly understood/looking like a twat, was a barracuda.
Well, I never knew they came this far inshore, nor even that they were native to the Arabian sea, but there you go. Not huge, only 15" or so, but still, my first real life barracuda with fins.
Also silverfish and red snappers and kingfish were among the catches, and a couple of others I forget. Not really fond of catching and killing things unless I have to any more, I left them to it and was just damn pleased to have been able to help - pretty darned cool, I thought.
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After that, I thought I had better do some proper touristy sightseeing and stop messing about with the locals, so I went off in search of the two remaining famous things that are genuinely interesting to look at in their own right (rather than just being old) namely the Mattancherry Palace, and the Pardesi Synagogue which is to be found in a part of town rather unsubtly named Jewtown, although only one or two people genuinely not actually anti-semetic will find that funny, viz. myself and the guys I used to live with in Hull.
You had to be there.
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Mattancherry palace took some finding - I wandered in a direction I knew to be correct, but along some very narrow streets obviously never traversed by tourists and over a truly horrible pollutant-grey river. Along the way I dodged and jinked my way around the local movements, avoiding traffic and negotiating people in a happy if slightly lost state, then I casually glanced down at one point mid-avoidance-skitter to find myself being stared back at by a very large basket of freshly-skinned cow skulls, I kid you not. Real bef it is then, for once.
They were very cleary cow skulls complete with horns, but thickly smeared with blood and, I told you I was being stared at, still contained the overly-large and grossly staring eyeballs.
Yummy.
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So after I left my lunch by the wayside (only joking, but it was a bit of a shock for a second) I walked on to the palace, originally built in 1555. It is also called the Dutch palace because they got in on the colonial act in the same period, and came along to trash the place, including the palace, only to rebuild it in its entirety a few years later around the 1660s.
I hardly need point out the missing step in the logic here, but hey (actually it was rebuilt as the Dutch were leaving as a military force because they had come to pretty friendly terms with Kerala, and the palace was rebuilt by way of a reconciliation gesture and to secure those friendly trading links. Shame really, because my way of presenting it was much better, but hey, we can't have everything).
Inside, the murals are nothing short of astonishing, for their detail and sheer scope - the paintwork covers the walls entirely, showing scenes from the Mahabharata and the Ramayan featuring all the gods we know and love, and the whole of them, quite impressively, cover over 300 square metres and that is just in the relatively small section of the palace available for public viewing, although elsewhere they are not particularly well preserved nor quite as detailed, apparently.
Krishna gets the best deal here because there is famous mural of him downstair doing quite rude things with some milkmaids. At this point in the myth, Krishna was living the life of a goatherd somehow managing to fool all the locals despite being bright blue and having six arms.
Amazing what you an get away with as a god - those six arms and, inventively both feet as well are being put to an extremely un-shepherdly use in the famous mural, but there are 8 highly contented milkmaids down there. That's all I'm committing myself to.
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I trundled a few more streets through Jewtown, noting the hoards of `antique` shops and sellers of curios of all kinds, of which there were possibly several hundred.
They tended to sell very similar things without actually selling the same crap like the market stalls in Goa do - among the more arresting pieces was a large boat, a very large boat, made int he same surprising way a boats are still made today where the wooden boatrds are actually stitched together, which looks unlikely as it sounds but works amazingly well.
The large boat was so large, in fact, that it almost projected into the street and spanned the length of 3 open-plan rooms inside - I can't guess at its size because of my acute perspective, but it was very impressive.
I avoided most of these and their greeting, open question of strangers-asking, highly tourist-ready owners, but went into a couple near the end of the winding route in search of weapons.
Well, you never know.
I found a place where, at the back of the store, an ancient and rusted sword blade hung up and was shown to me; it was a simple blade and handle (that's called the `tang`, the continuous bit of metal extending from the blade that goes into the handle) with a curved handguard that was extremely rusted and looked not especially convincing.
I know the trick - it's the same trick used to make everything look like an antique - where stuff was manufactured carefully and by hand maybe 5 or 10 years ago, and has spent the entire time since then buried in the ground to give it the right appearance, or, in the case of some metals, is left in wet ground and periodically aerated then returned to wet ground, nicely rusting up and achieving almost instant antiquity.
This place wanted 1000 rupees for the `sword` and I noted this happily in the knowledge that I couldn't if I wanted to, so I wasn't even halfway tempted.
Sensing that maybe I was a little unbelieving, he fetched another piece of more interest; what could, possibly, have been a genuine kukri.
This was more like it: the kukri is the traditional and iconic weapon of the Gurkhas, that fierce and famously brave North Indian and Nepalese people that served in the British army since colonial occupation, and have one of the most impressive reputation outside of it still today.
Seeing as the Gurkhas have continually served in the Empire and Commonwealth armed forces for well over a hundred years it is possible that this was the real thing. Would have been nice - it seemed certainly to be the right weight and dimensions (I have seen quite a lot of Kukris, have owned a few and that were not genuine but have seen the real things, in archive pictures and film, and in live use by one of the present-day regiments) and was made in the proper style and proportions, with a very front-heavy blade which was also definitely the right kind of steel, whether it had been falsely aged or not.
The handle was the interesting bit though (to me anyway ), it looked to be the real thing which was perhaps more important, although a new blade could eaily have been aged for a few years and fixed to a genuine handle by a good armourer.
See, the thing you have to always bear in mind, looking at the millions of pieces of craftwork all around this part of the world, is that not only is this big business and has been done on a very large scale, in order to supply all Asia with fake antiques, but that it has been going on for 20 years or more already, more than enough time to weather and wear down newly made reproductions for sale to the tourist market.
The thing here was that at least part of it - the handle - was very hard to fake with real ivory 
inlaid into buffalo horn, all genuine and genuinely inlaid that I could tell, and faking that is not really worth the effort much because the genuine things really do exist, so it is a pretty good bet that I had in my hands something at least in part truly from the 1920s or well before.
Well, it was nice, but even if I had wanted it I couldn't have sent it to England with the ridiculous (well okay, probably quite justifiable) laws regarding weapons, but it's always good to have a poke about in your favourite field and make a nice find
Strange how it's perfectly legal in the UK - and very easy - to buy new pointy things that are far bigger, stronger, sharper and more lethal, but hey
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I found the Synagogue at length (after putting all the weaponry down and explaining that I was English, and we just didn't allow that sort of thing any more *cough* I did thank him profusely, though, because I was genuinely grateful) and it was a little odd, a little disappointing but still had some commendable features. It cost 2 rupees to enter, and the Mattanmcherry palace had cost 2 rupees to enter as well. Cleary they were not going out on the beer with profits here, which was very nice and reassuring and somewhat refreshing.
The inside of the synagogue was much as I had expected, even never having been inside any synagogue before, but basically it is a church with even more dangly shiny bits. Like how I imagine a Greek Orthodox church in a richer town would be, sort of thing: chandeliers coming down to head height all over, gilt overhangs and screens and platework everywhere that threaten to cut pieces of your head off, and those weird and tacky coloured lights from about the 1950's that only a religious building could leave in use for so long without getting embarrassed.
The chandeliers were from around the '50s as well, possibly even more recent, and hadn't been taken good care of; whoever had been taking them down for cleaning had not been very careful at all and the crystals were chipped to hell, all over.
I've seen a few crystal (and `crystal`) chandeliers too, believe it or not, and either these were bought on the cheap or the maintainers had practically dropped them - Del Boy and Rodney chandelier cleaners made it over here, I see
Still. The whole place was novel and impressive in one unexpected way, in that the entire floor was covered with willow pattern tiles, that blue-painted artwork favoured by the Chinese myth & lies department and English potteries for the past 200 years or so
Again, nothing too spectacularly ancient about them but still, they were all hand painted in that style, and lent a little peaceful blue & white sanity to the god and gaudy lightung everywhere else!
The building was suitably ancient and you had, once again, to remove your shoes to enter, somthing I didn't know was a feature of Jewish worship, and may not be. I shall have to find out.
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I trundled back in a rickshaw having walked a few miles in the glaring heat of the middle day, and struggled onto the ferry early enough to get a window seat one row from the very front - and you never take the very front-most seat here on any kind of public transport, because the very front row has a slightly larger gap than normal, so is guaranteed to be crowded hugely by the hoardes.
It was. I was smug.
Just before I left, I thought it wise to not put myself through unnecessary hardship on the return crossing so I duly followed a sign near the main tourist attractions to a toilet enclave. The enclave was more accurately the world outside this fetid shithole, but still.
As I was leaving I heard that msot annoying noise: the "Tsss!!" or "Tcchh!!" that Indians use to scare of dogs and attract the attention of people they aren't actually happy with - it is a bit of an offense to hailed in such a way so I almost always ignore it. It's only used when someone is pissed off with you, or is just plain rude - on this occasion the offender had a nice person with them, who called out "hello!" or something; the thing is, you had to pay 2 rupees to use the place.
It wasn't worth 2 rupees - it wan't worth 2 Paise - and that is doing it a favour by not mentioning that it was truly filthy, smelled as terrible as only an open-sewered toilet can, the doors were literally hanging off their hinges (I pretty much removed mine entirely when I tried to exit) and there were no washing facilities at all! Oh, I seem to have mentioned it after all, whoops.
It was a dreadful operation, and the question of course is; Why does it cost as much to have a piss as it does to visit a 16th Century Palace?
There were no signs on the way in that it cost anything and this, I suppose, was my obvious mistake. The most important single cultural difference to tourists here, if anything, and the most irritating at times, is that they do not like giving you the price of anything until you have already started using it, because then you are obliged to pay, and they can often charge oxorbitant fees (see: Taxi men).
If you saw the price up-front you'd never go there. I find this hugely dishonest but, to be totally truthful, what I've been involved with a ion a low-key way for years because it's exactly the same business practice that my former employer used, for decades in his case.
I tried my own brand of winning charm and actual sales techniques as much as I could while working there myself, of course
Anyway I paid up - obviously more pleased that one can view a 16th Century palace for the same price as a mere piss in a pigsty than annpyed at the reverse - and boarded the ferry.
In doing so I witnessed another perfect example of the struggle to always get aheah, and the curious segregation of society.
On buying a ticket (2 queues, men and women) the men are herded into a holding pen, I kid you not, with shut gates and the women are all allowed to board first. When they opened the gate you can see why.
It was a rush as if of schoolchildren careening madly for the back oft he bus - these were grown men, but they were pushing each other - not with arms or legs but their whole bodies - while running, literally running, the short distance to the ferry. I could hardly believe it and avoided the rush for the back of the boat (could have guessed) and went to the front where, unaccountably, almost no-one wanted to go at first.
I found it amusing, but really, what the hell? Why does it matter so much to these men that they get onto the ferry first; a clue is that the women are already there, perhaps.
There is a strange tendency of Indian ment o go to extraordinary lengths to sit next to women in public places, trebly so to Western women. There seems to be a belief that by sitting next to them (Western girls) there is every chance that they, being little more than whores of course, will turn around and offer themselves to the lucky male who manages to secure the closest seat.
I cannot even begin to appreciate this but I understand it, and hate it, and pity anyone who believes it. Strange, but true.
I shall expand on this theme shortly...
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I thought I might just add a final note; I rather liked Fort Kochi, it's even better in the daylight when you're not arguing with the inhabitants and the first immediately noticeable thing was: even on a Sunday, on all the parts of that part of town marked in the Lonely Planet, white people outnumbered the locals.
I suppose it fair to assume that the cluster of hotels, combined with the disinclination of the locals to do much on a Sunday explains this, but it it is kinda weird playing `spot the Indian guy` in a country so densely populated when you know you're actually not in Goa
Anyway, for now, adieu
which is probably par for the course in desktops these days or possibly even old hat (it is so hard to keep up to date with the advances in computers, isn't it?) but for me, being a cheapskate, and for a laptop, being essentially a compromise by very definition, this makes me very very smiley 
First dedicated travelling album finished! That's one and a bit albums down, one more to go. many duplications so hopefully I'll be able to clear through them in the 3 days I have left in this country not dedicated to transport and running away (booked my flight to Thailand this afternoon, see).
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I guess I haven't seen enough (any, actually) of his films.
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