It wasn't even 3 O'clock in the morning. Before three AM they started, and unsurprisingly I wasn't sleeping after they had got their groove on. I could have almost murdered them, those bloody Christians.
Yes, the small cathedral around the corner (Kerala is such a place that you can have small cathedrals, and they can easily tuck themselves around corners) began their morning sing-song session sometime around 02:45 on Maundy Thursday, two days ago, all in celebration of the start of the Easter Egg Chocolate & Drinking Festival, and some old-time wallah allegedly getting himself nailed to some sticks.
Yes, my religious sensitivities are just soooo at the forefront of my mind today 
The super-super-fun time started a few minutes before 05:00AM though when we had full-on religious war being fought with soundwaves, as the call of the Muezzin came hailing down from the minaret of the local mosque.
The aural tapestry of this, if you will, was actually rather peaceful; roughly typical Christian hymn-work of the choral variety in constant flow from one window, and the intermittent yet persistently mournful wail of the Muslim call to prayer floating in from those on the other side, punctuating the choral drone and sounding not a little like the start of a potentially very good breakbeat track (I was thinking: DJ Shadow would freakin' love this).
Of course, I had been awake grinding my teeth for a little over 3 hours by that point, so any kind of change was welcome and in any case my nerves were numbed with pointless rage.
When I say "roughly typical" and "hymn-work" I'm not quite doing it full justice: the Syrian Christian community in Kerala may be devout, as proved by their early starts, but they are either tone-deaf or they like to try and compete on an equal playing field with the muezzin when his time comes to join in. Singing in a flat key works for the latter, it's part of the charm (not to mention the actual bloody melody) and they are very good at it.
I'm pretty sure the Christian lot are just going at it hammer-&-tongs in the hope that it's only really the trying that counts, and that God judges favourably those who simply give it everything they've got.
Take it from me, the trying, the piety, the inherrent heavenliness of singing with (far) more gusto than talent - it's not. Really. God may be pictured as the fair and equal judge of all people, but the Devil has the best tunes and, frankly, by this time I imagine the big G would rather like to catch up. Eat purgatory, bitches!!
The trying is impressive though as my second (and final) complaint on the matter explains; the hymn-work was just that; work, and pretty laborious it sounded; because they managed somehow to sing continuously fom their deeply unGodly hour of commencement until well gone 06:30, longer than your average shift at Tescos, and about the same amount of time a healthy person spends in the employ of any call centre.
I stuck at one for a month once, and I tell you, I've never felt compelled to have a shower after work every day either before or since.
I, being just a little bit pissed off with Holy Joe and the Joettes on one side and Moaning Myrtle on the other by this time, came downstairs while the staff were still sleeping.
They woke up shortly after to find me drinking multiple drinks from the fridges, and having powered up and started using the computers without their knowledge or consent, and a few handy guesses at the network options to get the things online.
My only concession to the proper decorum of things was a little note on the counter as to what I'd drunk by this point and when I'd began working. Good job they know me pretty well by now and weren't really surprised - twice in the past 2 weeks they have clocked me in at 10 hours internet usage per day! Time to buy that laptop, I feel.
Or I could keep on there just to piss the other guests off
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Actually I was simply going to wax inconsequential about what I had done one on those rare, rare occasions when I wasn't irritating the French peoples, and actually went out during the day. Today is not one of those days because the monsoon has started giving us a less infrequent and more cheerfully aggresivetaste of things to come
The showers, if such a word can apply to waterfalls that punish areas over five square miles, are keeping me more or less indoors. Doors of taxis, internet cafes, hotels and restaurants, whichever fits - it's just the dashing to and fro in between them that gets ya damp.
That, and the self-assured knowledge that being British a mere bit of rain wont bother you at all, ha, look at all these fools with their unbrellas, honestly, well it's just lovely to have the street to one's-self for once, isn't it gr - ah. Ah, ah, oh. Oh dear. It is rather heavier than it looks isn't it? Oh there seem to be no space under the hoardings either, no, excuse me, ah, sorry can I just, no, oh sorry excuse, do you mind if, ah, ah. Hmm.
Shit.
I'll be needing a taxi and a change of clothes, then.
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Back in the far-away time, in the long-long-ago before the rains i.e. Thursday morning, I went out to see a little more of this city which had been my home already for 2 weeks, to see what it compared to and how it differed from others, this being the last place in India I will be seeing in any meaningful way.
I'm flying out to Bangkok next Saturday from Chennai (Madras) international airport, over on the East coast, straight after an overnight train from this place so I wont see any of the intermediate scenery, and the flight times will allow me little or no time to see Chennai. Apparently it is no great loss being much like other cities only smellier, so I'm not much bothered.
I took a little walk from my hotel and discovered that the lumpy and partly-paved, partly cracked pavement lead quite efficiently to a good street for me, one with the cinema, a shopping mall with a place to fix my camera, and a swanky coffee shop.
Not just any swanky coffee shop, mind, but one where they take coffee rather seriously; the staff all seem to really care about you and your drink in that heartwarming way that only comes from an employer who pays fuck-all in basic wages, and you can have almost anything you want in there, except proper Irish coffee (half coffee, half anything with "40%" on the label)
They do interstingly still list `Irish coffee` on the smart, orange menus though. I bet it's just coffee made with heart-stoppingly large amounts of cream - I can't bear to find out either way as it would be disappointing not to find it laced with whisky and unhealthy to find out that it was.
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Most things about that place were either orange or brown in fact; the walls are half each, seperated only by a dado rail; the chairs are orange, the tables are brown; the soft padded chairs in the upstairs bit which looks very nice and posh are a deep leathered brown, and the carpet in there is a startling orange. The printed text on the orange menus is an unrevolutionary and less-than radical brown.
I came up wth a brief and slightly cynical theory about this the first time I came in, something to do with the orange complementing the stewed tea they probably serve and the brown reflecting the faecal scrapings that likely make their way into each and every cup, but this was before I actually tasted the stuff, and it is very good which alarmed me because I had such a neat line to write about the place if it was shit. I hope this isn't a sign that I have a fondness for rat-turd lattes or anything.
The other possible distraction that caused me to drop the cynicism for half a second was the decor; a hundred and one still life drawing of various kitchen and coffee-related articles all by someone calling themselves Naomi, and some larger, slightly abstract drawings including an almost life-size caricature of one Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin, bending almost double in an impossible pose just to serve coffee from his equally unlikely, gravity defyingly-poised tray.
It was very nice, all original works by someone who clearly had a fair bit of talent, more so than me by a long chalk. But something wasn't quite right and it lacked a little coherency. Why the bloody hell would Charlie Chaplin be serving me coffee? 
I guess I haven't seen enough (any, actually) of his films.
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Continuing along this pleasant and useful thoroughfare I realised what was missing from Cochin - dogs. I hadn't seen a single one either here in mainland Ernakulam, or in Fort Kochi across the water. Before my encounter with the skinned cattle heads I would have made some deeply suspicious commenst about where some places were getting the beef from, but alas now I can't because this place is, after all, mostly Christian, and as long as you don't eat meat on certain Tuesdays and Thursdays and at least pretend to have given up something during the 40 days beforehand then you can, aside from that, stuff anything down your cake-hole, be it cake, chicken, flesh of cloven beasties or just an overly-zealous quantity of the communion wine, which is I think the main, possibly only reason for going to Church 
Why the dogs re not present I can't say - the city makes up for this lack of four-legged life with a generous and, actually quite genuinely charming quantity of both rats and cats, all terrified of humans of course I mean we are rather large to them, but they are two things that you actually don't see so much of.
Cats I have seen, maybe... a dozen in all the other places I've been to? I saw that many in Kochi by the second or third day, most reassuring because cats are, after all, vastly superior to dogs
Rats as well I was strangely glad to see - they nip around and jump from holes in the pavement to gutters and vice versa all over the place as long as humans aren't too close and it isn't drowning weather in the street like today. I quite like rats - kept a couple as pets before and I love their inquisitiveness and, believe it or not, affection - although they can keep rabies and the Black Death to their bleedin' selves, so only `domesticated`, pet-shop rats for me in terms of conscious physical contact.
Still, they'd probably not come anywhere near even if you tried - unless there were millions of them of course, swarming all over the poor hapless fool who falls into the sewers, eaten alive by a hundred thousand nibbles a minute... I seem to have drifted into other peoples nightmares, sorry. Mine usually involve the French these days (Okay okay I'll drop it!)
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I am going to buy a laptop. Actually am, watch me, don't say I wont that's not fair.
Bit disgruntled at taking a fair chunk (£300 - £350 
) out of my travel fund of course because that is the kind of money that gives you up to two months more time on the road, but honestly there is one thing I actually miss in the extreme, and one thing I actually need that these cafe and hotel computers cannot supply:
I need to be able to type when I am comfortable and when I have the inspiration; I have somehow trained myself to feel excited and inspired on entering any internet cafe just so long as the seats and tables have been cleaned at least once since the trees were felled, and my feet don't stick to the floor with each step, but as you can tell this isn't always a pleasant experience, even while wrapped in the warm glow of a tasty paragraph.
Also I have worries about my long-term mental health if I feel so happy entering such scabrous and filthsome environments.
I really miss watching films, would you believe, my immense geekery on the subject has been revealed to me at last in fact through sheer deprivation.
All those years waiting uncountable years for films to arrive on British television; edited senseless and always shown at the worst times; have finally paid off, and all that useless knowledge about actors, directors and suchlike at least gives me motivation now to go get the computer of my dreams (pretty shoddy dreams of course, perhaps something like those you might get just before being woken by a bunch of religious nutters 
).
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So in lieu of any of my favourite films being around - such as The Good the Bad and the Ugly, Resident Evil 1 & 2, For a Few Dollars More, Henry V, Hudson Hawk, Die Hard (unedited for TV version , Amazing Grace (yes I rather liked that although I may have been blisteringly drunk, sue me ), Time Bandits, the Lord of the Rings super-extended over-reached wonderfully-glorious unedited 16-hours-per-movie Trilogy, Planet Terror, Hard Boiled, A Better Tomorrow 1 & 2, Bullet in the Head, Amelie, Delamorte Delamore, Revenge of the Sith, Kind Hearts & Coronets - I went to see something that won't ever make onto my top twenty or even my top 300, but at least it was there: 10,000BC.
If you have seen the Me Gibson I'm-sorry-I'm-such-a-raging-Chistian-nutjob-these-days film Apocalypto; that doens't concern the brutal slaughter of a chappy from the Roman days but DOES concern the slaughter of dozens, implied thousands, even tens of thousands of South American tribesmen and women; then this film may seem a little bit familiar.
It is, it's really so familiar that the words "rip-off" spring quite quickly to mind and amazingly this is mildly off-putting at first because Apocalypto is actually a fairly good film, artistically or whatever you call it. The dialogue particularly is good, and the pacing and gradual exposition through action and suggestion rather than just having your characters conveniently tell their close companions things they would all obviously know already
It is really quite original in visual style and character development, and the story is at least new in the overall sense (meaning, possibly 'no-one's used this plot for 20 years so we can nick it, no-one'll notice').
10,000BC lacks this basic idea of creating your own story and borrows more heavily than is comfortable from Apocalypto in visual style, plot devices and characters, not so much dialogue though because it is all just senseless exposition, but still it is very different in conclusion and it borrows heavily from many other films too; Stargate, Jurassic Park 2: The Lost World, 300, all spring instantly to mind; which at least makes it an accomplished thief 
It is quite enjoyable despite my attempt to say otherwise; I lost a lot of it, though, due to two quirks of the Indian film experience:
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i] The editors havy itchy fingers.
Films shown on TV and in cinemas too, apparently, in this country are prey to the Indian censorship board (the CBFC) and they don't like you to have any fun. Nonononono...
If you watch a film you have seen before - I saw Die Hard in a hotel in Mangalore or Madikeri, and it's a brave censorship authority who screens that film to this man because I must have seen it somewhere approaching a 80 or 90 times - at some wee small hour of the morning. Your children are not going to be watching, or if they are and you care so much, you should be watching them better. It's called `responsibility` (apparently!) and is why I will never spawn any younglings myself
From memory, the full unedited version of Die hard contains about 20 - 25 instances of the word `fuck` or other variants being used, two instances of brief nudity, and about a hundred and seventy-five instances of extremely enjoyable violence and/or graphic depictions of personal wounding.
Amazingly they managed to keep out almost every one. And they didn't do this with creative voiceovers and swift, artistically-sensitive minimalist editing like ITV did back in Britain, no, they just either cut the scene off partway through, even if one side of a conversation just goes unanswered, or remove the scene from the film entirely.
Understandably this is easier for the man with the scissors, but it means the film doesn't actually mean anything anymore because as with most films, the best bits (i.e. the bits with swearing, violence and nudity) are at the tensest points in the plot where, usually, something of vital importance to said plot if revealed.
Chopping them out removes essential sections of the story from the film - if Die Hard were shown in cinemas here then I would have taken notes, done some maths, and gone up to the ticket booth afterwards and asked for six thirteenths of my ticket price back or whatever.
Anyway, with 10,000BC this wasn't dso noticeable of course becasue I had neevr seen it before, so I wasn't able to judge. Beyond realising that all the scenes of wounding and violence (and there are a fair few) magically cut short of any gore being seen (there are about 2 pints of blood seen spread across the entire cast, as it were, and about five hundred people die. Go figure) and that there is no kissing scene between the two bits of love interest until the final few seconds, you'd never be able to judge, anyway.
I managed to follow the plot because the characters are something approximating neanderthals and that's the level of dialogue I am most comfortable with, but even I, with my just-barely-Cromagnon brain and deeply protruding forehead could tell that vital scenes were missing because a) people in this film often did things for no explained reason and b) people in this film go from one place to another very very quickly as if something was missing in the middle, hmmm???
ii] The audience wants putting in a loony house.
The audience - woah, boy. Actually I rather liked it, apart from the guys sat right next to me, but still.
From the top:
*Deep breath* 1) You can't buy a ticket until about 15 minutes before the film starts. Imagine the queues? You cannot, repeat, cannot go to the booth at, say, 7pm and buy a ticket for the 9:15pm showing, as I tried to do. Can't be done. I asked everyone including the security staff and to customers: nope.
You can reserve but it has to be done at least a couple of days before apparently - the booked ticket area in the body of the screen-room was almost empty I'd just like to add.
Gotta cram up with everyone else who wants to see the film in the 15 minutes immediately preceeding the lifting of the curtain. Doubly annoying because;
2) They start the film when they feel like it, bugger the trailers, and bugger the time on the doors, the schedule, the display boards, the ticket, the front of the building, etc.
I got into the screen at 9:07 or so and the film had clearly started, was a good 5 or 10 minutes in in fact, I (had to) guess - they certainly do have such a thing as trailers because I've seen films before in cinemas in india, and my watch was defintely accurate as I double-checked with the clock in the ticket office. Hmmph. Oh well...
3) There are no seat numbers for those who want a little spontaneity in their lives and don't wanna book up days in advance or cram up with 200 sweaty men to get inside the cinema. The tickets were all `gallery` and it was a free-for-all on the seats. I took a nearby end of aisle seat and halfway through the first half - yes, they have intermissions here even on regular films. Kinda charming I think 
- some clown comes and sits next to me and tries to squeeze me off the armrest we regrettably shared for the next 74 minutes. What a bastard.
He also liked to share his Winter diseases with me because not only did he cough a lot, a lot, whenever he was swarming a limb over the armrest, but he coughed into his hand in such a way that was very obviously blasting his miniscule unwanted flecks of spittle an mucous right onto me. We were right next to a large fan as well which assisted him in his mission.
Now come one; has someone tattoed a nazi flag or some racist slogan onto the back of my nexk ro something? Why are people being so bloody petty-mindedly-vicious towards me all of a sudden? 
3) You can clap louder, the actors might hear you...
Now this is actually endearing. At first. It shows a deep empathy with the characters on-screen and a tenderness of heart and touching personality. However when the Main Thing Happens (I might as well tell you, it's amazingly predictable, but I'll let you watch it anyway) near the end then the first clap is shocking, you feel a little second-hand embarrassment on their behalf as they're clearly not getting any of that themselves, but then it continues in ragged spurts and you begin to wonder after 15 seconds whether the people in the main chamber below are wathcing the same film as you.
Then there comes the free for all which has been started by that first person who you found so touching and charming, and then every fucking clown in the gallery is whistling - not a gentle whistle but one so loud it actually hurts - and catcalling and clapping erratically and screaming and shouting, and you realise with a definite sinking feeling that you know Western cinema far better than anyone else in the room and that there's at least 4 minutes of wrapping up, thread-tidying film to be watched, and you are going to sit through it because you always see the whole film to the very end (bar the bits you'll never know about thanks to Big Brother the CBFC) because that's part of what watching films is all about.
The other key part is being to watch them on your own. This is more important than most people realise, probably up until they come to watch films in Cochin, anyway.
When, in the last minute of the picture the male lead and the emale love interest finally kiss, there is more coherency because underneath the now steady and enthusiastic round of aplause from above and velow there is a constant stream of wolf-whistles.
Basically, it is a lot like watching a film along with 300 or more 13-year-old children, and no teachers.
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Right, so anyway, before I got distracetd by the films I was idling through the other idle pleasure this city has to offer, or at least the boring places I visited in my times of need, namely, the camera repair shop.
It was just nice to find a place that can repair it, althouh as we were coming up to the 3-day holiday I was a little wary leaving my lovely camera with some strangers without any fomr of receipt for the item. Happily enough they gave me a receipt without prompting, looked pretty business-like overall, and before I came in I spied the technician that I spoke to through the partition to the back rooom, and he was working on an actual digital camera with proper screwdrivers and everything, so they probably aren't just another Arm of the Goa Tourist Police and Tourism Scamming Bureau(cracy) Office of India (okay I'm sorry, I'm sorry: Cynicism Disengage!)
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I went out on Thursday evening to find a restaurant and managed to stumble into one that served food just like, as in, literally identical in taste, to Chinese food in the UK. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, I leave that up to each of you, but it means at least that they have actual Chinese chefs, not Indian chefs cooking Chinese food which, take it from a guy who's had about 250 of these nationality-crossover/experience-loss dishes, is one hell of an improvement if you fancy some chicken with bambooshoot & waerchustnut, noodle of any variety, or pork balls with tomato, as I believe I had that night.
They were superb.
I was reminded of the benefits of an adequate attention span though, when halfway through my meal I realised that the reason everything was hard to cut was because I was attempting to eat dinner holding the knife by the blade and cutting with the, quite understandably, rather blunt handle.
This has happened before. A few times. I guess if the cutley is made from pressed steel so thin that the handle has no noticeable differnce to the blade for a course and a half then these things are just going to happen.
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Apart from all that nonsense, and a brief detour to one of the two train stations here; only to find that, yes, trains here are as busy as a dead dog on a hot day and, yes, the system is often pedantic and inscrutable to the foreigner; I have no further wonderful insights. Except that this was Maundy Thursday, a holy day named after something to do with a foot-washing ceremony, and this seemed somehow appropriate what with all the obsessiveness about feet around here.
They are unclean, apparently, to which I say: fucking wash them then you filthy buggers; but the strange thing is that they are so unclean, yet you walk barefoot into all holy places, up to and including most internet cafes
Now of course the road is dirty and the dirt is on your shoes, so it makes perfect sense to not tread that all over the shop just as many people insist that you remove shoes upon entering their house in any country, but the stigma is so strong here that in Hindu temples at least you are not supposed to even point your feet at anyone else or anything sacred i.e. altars, icons, paintings or those little super-sacred mini temples-within-the-temple where the God apparently actually resides.
This is actually impossibe because everything is sacred and the place is usually packed to bursting, so I guess all devout Hindus play a little game called `Priorities of Offence` whenever they go to Temple, and work out which person or God they can most afford to piss off.
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So in a country where they are hardly afraid to take a hosepipe to a 100-year-old church and all its paintings, and where feet are so filthy that you shouldn't even point them barefoot at strangers, and where the time spent inside a worshipping one God or another directly relates to how crappy or magnificent your next incarnation is supposed to be:
Why does no-one bloody well buy doormats??!?
