Ernakulam Blunders

My vacations are drawing to a close and the start of college life is creeping closer with each passing day. Since I will be attending college in Chennai, my friends and I came up with the idea to make the most of our remaining jobless days and decided to go on a trip to Ernakulam, where my friend Arjun’s dad works and their flat is empty most of the time……….perfect right?
And so it was that I set off on a dark Monday morning (early morning I might add!), with my pals Vivek and Jairam, our host Arjun supposed to pick us up at the railway station. And this was the start of two days of mayhem including roundabout boat rides, getting lost, destroying the concepts of fine dining at certain reputed food chains, admiring local scenery (in more ways than one :P), breathalyzer tests, destroying more dining routines and getting shocked senseless by insane bills…….not to mention late night tv and gawking at an R&T modified Toyota Innova.



The first day included a morning coffee @ Indian Coffee House (hehe :) ) followed by a grand tour of the Marine Drive area by our expert guide Arjun. His plans further included taking a boat to Mattanchery and sightseeing before returning to mainland and lunch @ Subway. As luck would have it, the only available boat was to Fort Kochi, and upon reaching there we found a signboard to a landmark we had heard about (Dutch Palace-1.3km). So off we went in the thrill of doing some real sightseeing…
A lot more than 1.3 km and no Dutch Palace later, we found another signpost (Dutch Palace-0 km -->) with nothing but a dilapidated ruin in the area. Upon looking around we realized that all our eager walking had led us to Mattanchery bus stop, our original destination!
After promptly thanking our ‘guide’ for his vast knowledge of the locality, we headed back by boat, which incidentally stopped again at Fort Kochi and gave us a better look of the area, which showed that had we gone in the other direction for about half a km, we would have reached the sightseeing spots on the damn island………



The rest of the day was spent in horrifying everyone present at Subway with our vast knowledge of breads and sauces (Tip: I know Southwestern sounds like a delicious sauce, its actually just paste in a gay orange color), and roaming around the Oberon Mall, including making a mockery of their famous ‘Scary House’ (and giving the little man with the baseball bat at the end the surprise of his life in the process :)).



The next day was reasonably uneventful, except for missing potholes and bumps on the way to Veega Land and charging at tipper lorries in a Hyundai Santro (Who’s the man now?). Plus the wacky stuff we did in the wave pool, playing catch with a seed that eventually floated away into the ladies section of the pool and crowning the official winner of our privately judged wet t-shirt competition (God, she was hot!).



On the way back, given the nature of our trip so far, we were almost unsurprised when a few cops pulled us over and asked me to blow into a breathalyzer (suspicious because of our bleary red eyes from hours in the wave pool I suppose, or maybe they needed money for their evening tea) and then thankful when they let us go when I came clean, though my trusty friends attributed their lack of hassle to me having bad breath……
It is only fitting that this relatively ‘uneventful’ trip was winded up with a quiet dinner at Pizza Hut, where the normally civilized posh Singapore bred Vivek was reduced to debating whether he should lick the remains of his three scoops of ice cream off the platter while Arjun and I divided one slice of pizza neatly in half in a most gentlemanly manner.



Thankfully Jairam was content with his veggie pizza, compensating for his lunch of Pepsi and banana fries…….until the bill of Rs.1200 came that is.
And so, after narrowly escaping helping their elite cleaning crew with the crockery, we made our escape, and returned back to good ol’ boring Trivandrum the next day (by another darned early morning train!) and parted in high spirits, convinced that we had pushed the borders of wackiness just a bit further.