It is a miracle!

So, my bum has healed! After a week or two of extreme difficulty wearing pants and any clothes infact without serious pain, my bum is back to normal minus the albino patch which now graces my left bum cheek. I ended up going to a doctor with niema to mainly get our stomaches checkd out- gastro again by the way- and took the oppertunity to get my behind out for the lovely lady doctor as well, who gave me some weird aryvedic oil she had made. Cost me 500rupees but TOTALLY worked so im not complaining.

Anyways, Heather and Wan have left now, so we are once again the three amigos which feels weird after having those two as well as beni, brett and jod around for a few days in Palolem. We took a train which was supposidly 9hours to Kerala on friday.... in fact scratch that, let me explain this train to you.

So we got to the train station, and were the ONLY white people there. We attempted and failed to find anyone who could really understand English, so we were having a little problem understanding which platform we needed to be on to get the train. Anyways, this train pulls up and we looked inside, lush. Cabins with white curtains and four beds in each, little resteraunt on board, looked like you could happily walk about and stuff so we were pretty excited to get onto our train UNTIL ......our REAL train pulled up....
this looked like a tin can on very badly attached wheels. We walked in with our huge rucksacks banging into everything in their paths, and it was like being in the bottom of the titanic. It looked like the inside of a ship, and bear in mind we got on this thing at 10 at night so it was pitch black, were using torches to find our bunks, and when we do there are people sleeping in them! So luckily this indian guy hears us talking and he can speak very good english so he wakes the people up and tells them that we have tickets so they need basically to get the shiz out of our beds! THEN we have to navigate up three bunk beds, without treding on anyone in the pitch darkness! it was a pretty extreme game! So we get used to it, get to sleep and wake up around an hour before we are meant to get off this train.... turns out the train is another 9hours long!!! so we were on the raging stinky indian train for an extra 9hours in the pumping heat, with no air con and only a stupid dusty fan to cool us. The toilet was a hole onto the train track which had clearly been boffed/diareahed and urinated upon during travel by people with bad aim. Basically it wasnt pretty. But we survived, and secretly im pretty sure we all thought it was a fun experience!! It was totally nuts and mental, and stinky and hot, but it was fun too.

So, now basically we are in Kerala. We arrived in Fort Kochi, where we didnt really find much to do apart from take a look at 'Jew Town', the temples and churches in the area, and i bought an amasing painting for my parents of Krishna. Oh, actually we did go to this amasing temple festival- it might have been in the news, there were something like 100deaths in the riot there?

Well basically, we went to this amasing resteraunt called the Tree House, and one of the staff (ricado) told us about the temple festival which was a 20min ferry ride away so we decided to go. He didnt tell us that the night before there was a huge riot and over 100people were killed! We didnt even know this until we met other travellers who told us about it. But the night we went everyting was amazing and ok.

Anyway, it was like a mini festival, there was a lady im guessing famous indian singer on stage, with all the crowd sitting crosslegged (im talking a stage like at jersey live but obv bigger, with the whole crowd just SITTING in silence, mostly holding heart shaped balloons (for what reason i dont know)) really weird. Then the actual temple itself was lit up with fairy lights, and on the road leading to it there was stall after stall of the kind of tack you find at a fairground. There was popcorn, ice cream, all the shebang. So we go into the temple, and copy all of the indian rituals, lighting a candle each and saying a prayer and then go over to the back of the temple where we can hear all this insane noise and drumming.
There is a massive crowd of people, surrounding a group of men who are drumming, behind these men are 6 huge elephants with massive gold jewelry adorning their trunks, and two men sat on their heads, one with what looks like a broom and the other with what looks like air traffic controller cones. In turn these men stand and wave the objects they are holding in time with the drumming, the elephants just stand there, good as gold, clearly bored as hell but the crowd are having a whale of a time! All of the women are slightly bobbing their heads to the music, but the men are dancing with one hand in the air like guys generally do when they like a song, bouncing and waving one arm about in the air. This includes men from 15 to men who can barely stand let alone jump. They are all doing this move! It was insane to watch. You cant help but smile if your there, its crazy.

This is the reason i love religion and temples in India, because there is such freedom in the way that they worship their Gods and pray. If you walk into a temple in India and just look at each person no two people will do the same thing. Some make a prayer possition with their hands, some close their eyes, others will lie face down on the floor, some chant loudly oblivious to all others surrounding them, some press their heads to the walls of the temple whilst silently asking something of their God. Sometimes they dance around, clapping and singing as loudly as they can, and at othertimes the chants from temples sound bone-chilling how eerie and sombre they seem. No one has a set way to worship, they just do what they feel.