A Lecturer not a Teacher

This morning we had a lesson with Maria in the art of South Indian cooking.

Having found her place last night we arrived at the scheduled time only to be kept standing around for about 20 minutes before Maria appeared, made her introduction and took us through to the kitchen.

The wait suggested that we hadn’t found another Shashi and so it proved. There is no doubt that Maria knew her stuff but she lacked personality and took on the air of a lecturer rather than a teacher and rattled detail off without much thought of our ability to absorb it.

Nevertheless various dishes were made (by Sherry and I merely took some videos) and then dished up for our lunch. Whereas with Shashi the lesson was scheduled for 4 hours and we were there longer Maria’s was scheduled for 3 hours but she was done and dusted including the lunch in 2 hours such was the way she approached the lesson; very academic and no lightheartedness!

No real complaints as we did (or more correctly Sherry did) come away with some new recipes and greater knowledge of South Indian dishes.

As the lesson was in the heart of the retail area we then spent a couple of hours scrutinising many clothing shops getting hotter and hotter, stickier and stickier in the tropical heat.

Flagging somewhat we strolled back to the hotel and straight into the pool to try and refresh, afterwards spending an hour or so on the Singapore airlines website which is the slowest most frustrating website that I’ve encountered and really does nothing to enhance their already very good reputation as an airline to fly with.

The frustration was not helped by the heat and having finished online it was back into the pool again.

We then walked out to the broad walk where we were last night and again there were hundreds of folk, including families, waiting to see the sunset. 

We had read about the Chinese Fishing Nets and found them as we walked further around the broad walk. There were 4 “jury rigged” cantilevered nets that are lowered into the water and when raised later hopefully have some fish in them. They were introduced to Kochi by a Chinese person, Zheng He, between 1350 & 1450.

Having taken in the sights by the water (signs saying swimming is forbidden) we then made our way into the “main” area and found a nice café and found some forbidden fruit which we could not resist – every thing you read about staying healthy in India is don’t eat salads but it sure as hell is salad weather and we both fancied anything other than the Indian fare we have had for the last 30 or so days. Fingers are now crossed!

Received a message from Ashok this morning reminding me that India are playing NZ in the cricket final tomorrow and after a couple of messages back and forth we now have a 500 rupee bet on the result – last of the very big gamblers.