A Rainy Farewell

This morning I went for a run at the Nehru Stadium and got caught in a torrential downpour on the walk back. Despite having a large umbrella, I returned to the house pretty soaked. India’s monsoons don’t joke around.  Apparently the monsoons systematically start pretty close to the same day every year. Everyone said we’d start getting rains on June 4^th and surely enough last Wednesday night the downpour began. Since then it’s been a solid week of the skies violently spilling their guts with only a few dry hours every day. The rain reminds me of when we went to school here. The classrooms in Vidyodaya had open windows and the administrators must have been a bunch of vampires cuz the lights were almost never turned on. As the skies darkened with the monsoon clouds, so did our classrooms and after a while the pattering water would seem as familiar and essential as the teacher’s voice. I rather like the rain and it was perfect during those long school days. Plus it brings the temperatures down a bit.

The fried chicken I told you about is called Trivandrum chicken. My run this morning definitely helped ease the lethargy and greasy food grossness out of my system following last night’s poor choices. Five of us went through 2.5 plates of chicken and 32 chapatis which is pretty damn disgusting. The chicken was dericious though, the spices and simple light frying were very different and a nice change from the breaded/flour-coated style of fried chicken I’m used to at home.

Aside from a few local excursions we’ve really just been relishing in the Cochin life. Remind me to tell you about Broadway the huge, old Cochin street market (had lots of cool spices) on Marine drive, and the new mall. The contrast was interesting as was riding the traditional red city busses to each place but the story’s better told than written. This is probably the last post before Europe and a goodbye to India 2014. It’s been a great few weeks seeing family, relaxing and going back to life in a city that was home for three years :) I’m excited, off to Zurich and new adventures!