We got to Kochi alive!!! YAY! We took a rickshaw to a restaurant Tom had read about (my cousin Karolina gave us a great book about India for the month- all the info so far has no eluded us!). Ela restaurant in Kochi (Ernakulam) was beyond delicious! It was also a suggestion we decided to follow up from the book. It was a place not far from the bus stand and much needed after our crazy 4 hour bus ride! I can’t even describe what we ate! It was a typical Keralan restaurant, rice based, with lots of mixes of spices and flavours. Incredible is the best word to describle the meal we had. Appam, paratha bread + plenty of coconut based, curry based, chilli based, fish curry, oh my goodness we were overwhelmed with flavor! HEAVEN! Oh so good! The owner was the sweetest man ever! Every time some portion of the food came he would explain it to the last detail! Made the food that much amazing!
Our short time in Kochi (Cochin) was uneventful. Fort Cochin is an old Portuguese Port so it is supposed to be very nice and feel European. It wasn’t a bad place but it was uncomfortably touristy. More Europeans than Indians! I get it, we are tourists too, but I like to think we are the adventurous ‘step out of your box’ type that would prefer to do things a bit differently. So, overly touristy places just make me uncomfortable because I feel like everything around me is fake. This does not always hold true in very big cities, because those cities are just too big to make you feel comfortable. But a relatively small area like Fort Cochin, definitely felt fake, and everything was catered to tourists. We only spent a night there so it should not have been much of an issue, but we had yet another problem with our hotel. Funny, because all the DIRT CHEAP hostels we booked never caused us any trouble (other than crappy wifi), while the ‘nicer’ hotels were actually more of a stress (also sketchy wifi funny enough!). This time we got there and the guy demanded we have printouts of our hotel reservation. Tom had his phone and showed them the email with the reservation number and everything, but that was not enough. They claimed they needed the actual printout for account purposes and would not let us into our room until we went a block down the street, printed it out and returned with it!!! The BEST PART is that there was a working printer right in the hotel lobby that we were ‘not allowed’ to use to print it because it was for official hotel use only!!! I have nothing more to say….ughhhhhhh
We argued and fought because we were just so annoyed to be treated so ridiculously. The language barrier was a big problem, because although they seemed to understand our words, they just really didn’t understand the meaning of what we were trying to say. In the end, Tom spoke to the manager, but even that didn’t get us anywhere. He understood that was stupid what his workers did, but seemed more preoccupied with past accounts that caused him problems that did not in anyway relate to us! At that point, we realized there was no point and dropped it. Understandably, language barriers can get in the way. The place itself was really clean and nice, but ofcourse with unreliable internet. I am starting to learn that no matter where you stay in India, internet is always notoriously unreliable, and it really doesn’t matter how much you pay for your room, or how much they advertise that they have fast wifi!! Oh well, we are not here for that anyways…
