Ernakulam - 12/18

Delicious fish snack.

View of Ernakulam from manly bar.

We wanted to leave Kochi after a day since we visited most of what is here, but were unable to book any train tickets to our next destination! The trains seem to be booked months ahead of time and most of the good seats can only be booked on waitlists. So we spent a good portion of the evening before and the following morning making travel arrangements at the internet station in the lobby when the hotel guy barked at us that we were spending too much time at the computers and that he was going to charge us. Apparently there was an hourly charge, which was minimal, but he did not inform us of it beforehand. All he said was “you have to ask me”! I never thought to ask him about the internet since I was unaware of this strange arrangement. This made me mad and since we were staying another night in Ernakulam, we changed hotels. This one was much more upscale so we were pretty excited, but turns out the beds were even harder!

We spent the day walking the streets in Ernakulam, there was no way I was getting on a scooter here and Peter didn't even make the suggestion so apparently he was thinking the same thing. Ernakulam was nothing like the tourist ridden, quaint village we visited the day before. It is a large city full of traffic and shopping. Nothing but shops everywhere. Shops on top of shops. And all shops are segregated into their own particular section. There is an entire mall just of cell phone stores. We purchased some reading material on the book street which is also where you would go to find aluminum. We also searched for internet access. They have roaming mobile service which you can use on your laptop through a jump drive which would have been awesome because we would be able to use it on trains and could avoid the internet usage hassle, but they didn't want to sell it to us because we needed to be Indian residents. So we roamed some more, had some delicious tiny fried fish at a bar full of men. I was the only woman there and we got some curious stares. We spent the evening hanging out on the hard bed in our hotel.