As I prepared to board for the flight to Calicut airport I said goodbye to Linda on the wifi enabled phone I got for the trip. I have since found that India's wifi is different so we haven't talked for 3 days. I'll be trying a sim card swap today as I ran out of wifi option(bunmmer), I'm determined to make this work and I'd like that to happen before Monday when I start FT school.
I'd said that I knew that anything I did wouldn't prepare me for all I was about to encounter....and I was right. It started on the ground in Dubai when it was announced that they would be spraying the cabin and 2 flight attendants walked through w/a spray can in each hand spraying I don't what. When I landed in Kozhikode (Calicut airport) a driver was supposed to have been arranged but after 2hrs. of being stared at and playing with groups of children in the heat of the night it was time for a taxi, we negotiated a price of Rs300 ($6) for about a 40min. thrill ride. The trip was not for the faint of heart as the lane was about 1 1/4 lanes wide with people walking on both sides and motorcycles, scooters, taxis, motorized rickshaws, cars and huge trucks and buses coming for both sides horns a blaz'in in the dark of the night. Honking means I'm coming thru NOW and is used in a top down food chain with the packed, speeding, huge, cazeally named buses being the dominant species ( I'm compilling a list of names). The smell of the jungle around me is totally unfamiliar but I like it, especially on walks away from the busy areas early before the sun comes up and it gets really hot. There are banana, papaya coconut, clove and rubber growing everywhere along with many thing I haven't identified. I've seen a couple lizards, bats and lots of strange birds but I'm in the burbs. My fellow student Emma from New Zealand spent time in the foothills of the Ghats (Mountains) and said there were monkeys watching her swim by a waterfall!! Hope to get upthere. The people of Calicut are very friendly but some seem quite puzzled by me, once I get a mile from the hotel whole families come out to see me walk by and wave, this town of 500,000 is not a tourist destination. Many have no electricity (which goes out so often no one seems to notice anyway) and they have wells next to there homes usually with a homemade bucket on a rope to let down for water. At about 8:00am the school/work rush starts and by 8:30 there are so may vehicles and school children around here its amazing, and super fun to watch. The children are all dressed in the uniform of their school or grade, everyone of them neat as a pin with every hair in place, the girls mostly in braids some in pig tails (if the women wear their hair down that shows their trying to catch a man). The hotel staff have been quite sweet but I find the random English words peppered within the Malayalam they speak has fooled more than once. For instance: they answer the phone "HELLO" and if you ask any one if they speak English they say "YES", trying to be helpful of course but "yes" might be the only English word they know! One of the most curious things I've observed is that 99% of the street & store signage and billboards are in English. There is close to a 100% literacy rate in Kerala reading English and Malayalam but the English they speak is evolving w/o native English speakers and is mixed w/Malayalam, so communication is a fun challenge! Then again my classmates are from New Zealand, U.K., S. Africa and the Maldives so our "Engish", written and spoken, has also made it interesting to work with each other. As I explore my immediate surroundings the guys who sell fruit, tea, food and household goods from carts, stalls and even bikes (tea & lotto!) are getting to know me and want me to hang with them. It's supernice at night when it cools off and and the carts open, lots of guys are out eating, drinking tea and chill'in.