We have been in India for two days now (few Internet options so I'm writing this all up at once and am posting it when in Goa). We started out very early morning in Sri Lanka (4:30am I believe). Our flight brought us into Trivandrum India on the southern most tip of the country. We didn't have very long in Trivandrum because we were catching a train for Kochi later that afternoon. With that being the case we hopped on my favorite form of transportation, the Tuk Tuk, and raced off to the train station to check in our train's status. From there we walked across the street to this really cool coffee shop that dad had read about in a guide book...think the leaning tower of pisa, bot smaller and made of brick. As you enter you walk upwards in a spiral with booths along the outside wall. It seemed to be the rush hour in there so we ended up spiraling upwards for what seemed to be much of the tower! Finally finding an open booth we tossed our bags in and ordered two cold coffees and two bottles of water. I also scoured the menu for anything familiar because we had not eaten breakfast and it was getting close to noon! (normally I'd only eat this late because I just woke up then O.o ) after finding nothing besides omelets and toast that I was familiar with I decided to be brave and order something called Bombay toast!!! You know what they call Bombay toast in America?? French toast!! Oh dear, and here I was worried I get some strange curry or something :p it was very tasty though, so my hat's off to the cooks in Bombay know what they are doing!!
After food and drinks we had killed enough time so we headed back to the train station and prepped for our train to Kochi. The rail system in India (from what I've seen so far at least) is farm more extensive then anything we have in the US, maybe because most people in the US fly now, but still! They have about seven different classes of train cars on e rail line that we are using mostly. First class, second class AC, second-class three tier (sleepers), sleeper class (which I don't think the is really room for sleeping, baggage...and a few more on down the line. So far we've had two second class AC sleeper cars. Our train from Trivandrum to Kochi we had two of the side sleeper seats. They are on the side of the train by a window in a sort of bunk bed style. The top bed we piled up with our luggage and the bottom bed can fold up into two chairs facing each other. We kept it on this set up because we didn't need to sleep (it was mid day after all! Plus our train ride was only 4 hours!). The train ride was nice, getting to see the country side and small villages on our way north.
When we arrived in Kochi we hopped into a jumbo Tuk Tuk (much larger then others I'd been in so far...and faster too!) and speed off to our hotel to drop off our gear. We explored around town a bit on foot, but it was late, so many of the shops were already closed. We found a neat looking chines restaurant and decided to give it a try (dad is really trying to stay away from the Indian food as long as he can...good luck with that one!). The food was great though! Fresh prawns, hot and sour soup and pork fried rice...nom nom! After dinner we headed back to the hotel for some sleep, the next day we would be leaving town, but later on so we were going to check out some forts and try to get a sim card for our wireless Internet card.
The next day I felt right at home...yup it was raining!! This basically spoiled any plans to see some of the forts in the area because we were going to have to take the fairy over to some near by islands where the forts were located...so we spent much of the day, in vain, trying to get a sim card for the internets! Pretty much every place that we went to for a sim told us some other place that we needed to go to to get what we needed. After mot too long it seemed that were on a wild goose chase! We finally found a smaller office for BSNL the large government run cell carrier which we wanted to get a sim from, but they informed us that we needed to go to the main office which happened to be much closer to our hotel then we currently were...great! So back track we did to the main office only to find out that they wanted a reference from India...cause I know sooooo many people from India! Grah! No luck there, the though now is to try when we are up in Goa...
The other exciting note for the day was our train tickets from Kochi to Goa...we were both wait listed! Oh yes, we were waiting for an over night train to Foa that we didn't even really have tickets for!! We had to keep checking back at the train station to see if we had cleared for our tickets...finally about three hours before our train was to leave we cleared!!! Wait...actually only one ticket cleared (something dad had joked about earlier...not so funny now!! :( ). The train people told us that the best thing to do was just get on the train and see if we could share one berth (seat). Great! While on the ride up to Kochi, only 4 hours, we had sat in the same berth with the bed up and two chairs facing each other...we had our bags stored up in the other berth! Now for the over nigh we might be stuck with all of our bags AND both of us stuck in one berth...fun :p.
So at the railways advice we hopped on the train, managed to push and pack most of our baggage under the seats and at our feet (and on our laps!) and settled in for what might be a really long ride! Finally when the conductor came around he looked at his book, flipped through some pages and got be a seat in the compartment over on the top! Providence! While not together at least we would have a bit more room! So I moved some stuff over to my bed and then we set up my ipad against the window, closed off our sleeping curtain and watched the new Star Trek movie on the ol' iPad-aroo! Quite a good movie screening and a nice time killer before bed time! After the movie finished I popped over to my top bunk and settled in for a "good" nights sleep :p (could have been worse, least I could lay down!).
So our train arrived at our station and we piled out...nice to be off a train for a while! We hopped into a pre-paid taxi that looked like a mini double slug bug and zipped off towards our hotel. When we arrived we started to notice that the busy season here in Goa is far from started. Our hotel, and most of everything else around here, seems to be in a state of renovation. It seems that November to the new year is their busier season here so much of every thing is either being repaired and spruced up, or is just trapped over and waiting for the season to begin again! This did have a positive effect however for our rooms because, even though my dad and I have individual rooms for this week here, they upgraded us both to rooms with large beds and more space!!! Wooo, living it large for the next week! Next we decided to head down to the beach...check out the waves and such (more surfing for Bradley Fish??). When on the beach we discovered some weird black lines of crud washing up on the shore...not know what this was we walked along the water for a bit before we noticed that it was depositing some weird oily substance on our feet :( from here on out we tried to avoid this area! We explored two different beach front areas, and while one of them seemed to have a few bars/restaurants open for the most part much of the beach front areas were also trapped up! Bummer...did I mention the two squalls of driving rain that hit us while on our journey up the beach?? Good thing we had just come from the pool and were wearing dirty shirts and swim suits :p. After our beach adventure we rested up a bit before heading into town for some din din! We found a nice Italian place, mainly because we were going to walk farther, but another rain squall hot with out us wearing swim suits, so we ducked inside for dinner. One really interesting sight I caught a bit of video of on my phone was a herd of cows walking down the street with sheets of rain pouring down...silly holy cows! After dinner we headed back to the hotel for a nice sleep in beds! Yay!
Our second day so far in Goa has been about as eventful as walking into town and finally working out a way to get a wireless Internet card for dad's laptop. Which is actually a bit harder then you would think, but after bouncing back and forth from shop to shop we finally came to one place that told us that they couldn't sell us the sim we needed in India and that we needed to buy on here...great! While this might have been a ploy to get us to buy the hardware too we decided to cut out losses and just go with it! And now we have the internets! Sure we only have a 3gb per month card, but that should do for email and blog posts and the like...guess I'll just have to catch up on all my web omits when I get a free wireless connection :p. Any how...here we are now...Internets again and ready to explore!! More to come...stay tuned :)
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