Noël à Varkala

Ça faisait deux semaines depuis que ma sœur et moi avons envoyé nos lettres par courriel au Père Noël pour lui donner nos listes de cadeaux. La Veille de Noël nos bas étaient accrochés sur une chaise pour attendre le Père Noël. Le lendemain nous avons eu hâte de voir nos bas remplis, et il y avait beaucoup, beaucoup de cadeaux que le Père Noël avait apportés.

La journée avant Noël, papa et moi avons coupé une branche de palmier, pour prendre la place du sapin de Noël. Nous avons rempli un sceau avec du sable pour tenir la branche debout. Nous l’avons placé dans le salon pour nous faire penser à Noël. Cette journée nous avons fait des décorations pour l’arbre que nous avons accroché avec les lumières. La soirée venue, au bas de l’arbre il y avait beaucoup de cadeaux pour notre famille. La journée de Noël, après que tous les cadeaux sont ouverts, papa a monté l’arbre pour qu’on le voie pendant notre souper de Noël sur le toit.

Achu, un de mes amis de soccer, a invité quatre amis à une fête le 25 décembre. Nous sommes réunis proche du terrain de jeu, sous un immense arbre. Achu a apporté des parothas pour manger avec une sauce . Après, nous sommes allés a un petit ruisseau pour pêcher des tout petits poissons.

C’était mon premier Noël avec une température de 30ºC, comme ça nous pouvons manger à la plein aire. Notre toit est tout plat et serve comme une terrasse où nous avons apportés une table à manger. Le souper de Noël était préparé par notre voisine qui a cuit un poulet au cari délicieux. Pour terminer la soirée notre famille a présenté des chants de Noël et joué les rôles des personnages.

J’ai eu un Noël excitant!

Par Robert Weary

Daily Life in Varkala

Many of you have asked questions about our daily life in Varkala. I will attempt to paint you a picture of a typical day spent at home.
We wake to the sounds of dogs barking, birds singing or crowing, the local carpenters already at work, pots and pans being washed, large bangs from the local temple (it sounds like a shotgun) and Indian music blaring from one house were they love the equivalent of MTV. It is already warm and sunny out as we roll out of bed around 7:15 am.
Everyone helps assemble breakfast. We start with fresh peeled oranges, which are more like tangerines, then prepare muesli, Kerala style. Rob likes to roast the raw cashew nuts and then the oat flakes. Kathleen loves to cut up the dried coconut (most of it ends up in her mouth and not in the dishes). We chop dates, slice bananas, cut pineapple, add a few Corn Flakes and smother with rich curd (yogurt), to make a delicious and hearty breakfast. Steve makes the coffee. (A heartfelt thank-you to Steve’s parents for giving us the 1-cup Bodum coffee maker.)

The path to the beach
After breakfast we head out for a swim. In the morning we like to go to Black Beach, where the water is calmer and there are fewer people. It is a leisurely 20-minute walk and a good way to get some exercise in the cooler part of the day.

We arrive back home around 10:30 am and tackle some household chores before getting into a bit of homework before lunch. All housework is done by hand: Steve does most of the laundry in a bucket; the floors constantly need sweeping because we walk inside in bare feet we feel the dirt on the floors! We sweep with a short broom made of palm fronds.
Lunch at home can be leftover Indian supper, scrambled eggs with tomatoes, cheese and toast or toasted tomato, cucumber and cheese sandwiches or macaroni with either cheese or tomato sauce. Obviously we were glad to finally find a place to buy cheese. A favorite is Grammy Maher’s French fries. The kids can’t believe we never have them at home!

In the afternoon, it is back to the books, math exercises on the computer, reading, writing letters, blogs, postcards and stories. As well, we are doing plenty of things we seem to never have time for at home -chess, checkers, scrabble in French (the kids are getting quite good) and English, painting, reading, crosswords, sudoku and charades. We are teaching ourselves to play recorders and harmonicas. Rob has learned some recorder in school, so he is lead teacher. Right now we are working on our Christmas tunes. Rob has learned how to play Silent Night and Good King Wenceslas and is teaching these to Steve as part of our family home Christmas pageant for Great Aunt Jane. Kathleen and Ann are working on the harmonica parts of these songs.

At about 3:00 pm it’s teatime; we munch on cookies and pineapple with a spot of tea. We’ve been known to have a nap in the afternoon. There are visits with the neighbours or some surfing on the net if the power is on or reading the paper. We subscribe to The Hindu, a well-written newspaper that provides insight into the complex world of Indian politics and a refreshing point of view on international stories.

Then at about 3:45 p.m. three small boys with beautiful smiles appear in front of the kitchen window. They are standing on the 8-foot high, stone wall about 10 feet from the window. They call “Robert” in a way that sounds like “Rabbit” which immediately puts a smile on my face. “Robert” means: Is Robert there, can he come out and play football (soccer) with us, is Kathleen there and can she come too? Sometimes Steve and Rob are just finishing up a project and they say ten minutes more. The boys wait patiently on the wall for Rob to cry, “I’m done!” And then the war hoop goes out “Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit” as the news is relayed to the rest of the players in the soccer field just on the other side of the wall. Rob grabs his ball and he and Kathleen rush out to play, grinning ear to ear and in bare feet like all the other kids. They play in the paddy next door under a canopy of coconut branches. The ball ricocheting off the trees are just extra men on the field. The neighbourhood kids are wonderful, very polite and generous. They provide us with our coconut for our breakfasts (and have shown Rob and Kate how to spot a good one and open it using a rock and the stone wall). Besides the fresh coconut, our local kids have taught ours to weave rope and jewelry out of the banana leaves, run on this 8-foot high wall (I am not so sure about that) and improve their confidence on the soccer field. We are the chief suppliers of cold water, which our kids have learned to drink Keralan style (say’s Kathleen very proudly, which means drinking without touching the lip of the bottle) and Band-Aids. Our kids on the field have attracted more than a few onlookers, as they are the only white kids, and Kathleen the only girl on the field. Other tourists have seen them and have come to take pictures of the kids playing. They seem to be quite taken by how much fun the kids are having even if they don’t speak the same language. An Israeli film producer here on holidays has taken over 500 shots of the kids playing soccer, which he plans to make into a montage type movie. (He gave us a CD of the photos). He and his wife came for tea one day and we talked about making movies, living in a working Kibbutz, and how they try to ignore the constant fear of attack.

Sometimes we see the kids all sitting in the shade and so I asked Kathleen what they talk about. She said “everything and anything”; obviously, language is not an issue. Kathleen is our little emissary for information on what’s happening in the neighbourhood. Rob may be the center of attention on the soccer field with his new ball, but Kathleen is known just about everywhere else. She has her route to visit all the neighbours: Jasmine and her sister, Jismane with her 6 month baby boy Mahu, her new friend Kitty, Patma with her dog “Johnny”, etc. Anywhere we go we hear “Kathleen, Kathleen” from the shopkeepers and restaurant owners, the boys renting the parasols at the beach, and lots of other tourists on the beach or on the cliff. If we want to know what’s goin’ on, chances on Kathleen has heard it first!

After soccer we usually make a trip to the beach, which may include bringing along drinks and snacks for refreshments while we watch the sun set into the Arabian Sea. We have to remember to bring a flashlight because it will be dark by 6:30pm for the walk home. Time for a quick shower and then we eat supper. A couple of nights a week we have Kumari deliver Indian food, other nights Ann cooks pasta with veg, or we go out to a restaurant.

After supper, we might check the emails (keep ‘em coming, we love to hear from you), do the dishes and then have a game or two. The hottest game at the moment is “Euchre”. Steven taught the kids about a week ago and since then we have had to play every night! The kids learned so quickly that Steve and I are regularly getting euchred now. As well as teaching Kate and Rob this Ontario game, Steve is acquainting the kids with some of the Haliburton lore, including such gems as “John Ham never turned down a right bower”, Aunt Ellen would play it alone if at all possible and Unk hated to follow suit. Next on the program is the maritime game, 45’s.

The day ends with getting down the mosquito nets and reading a chapter to the kids (current book is Cheaper by the Dozen). Steve and I stay up a bit longer, reading our books and sending emails. By 11pm we are in bed and sleep until the dogs start barking!

A Weary Christmas In Kerala

Christmas really started on the afternoon on Dec 24th when we put up our tree. Pine trees are hard to find, but we have 6 coconut trees in our yard and we all agreed that a palm frond makes a good tropical Christmas tree. With a string of lights, plenty of home-made decorations and shiny paper the tree took on a festive look.

Aunt Jane arrived in the midst of decorating to complete our family gathering and we all headed off to the beach for an afternoon swim. Christmas eve was a beautiful warm evening with lots of tourists on the cliff, both Indian and foreign, some places offered music or dancers or special meals. We opted for the view and ate dinner at the Tibetan restaurant that has a balcony looking over the cliff where we watched the waves crash on the beach in the moonlight.

Everyone was very tired when we got home, but not too tired to hang stockings and write a note to Santa. Good thing Ann was prepared and the presents were all wrapped so we could turn in at a reasonable time.

Christmas morning, as always, comes early and luckily Santa, who managed to find us in Varkala this year, generously rewarded the kids’ good behaviour. After opening the stockings we went for our usual morning swim, but for once the kids were not pressing to stay longer as they knew of a mound of presents under the palm frond at home. Presents are important, but social life trumps all as we found when Rob and Kate abandoned us on the way home to join the gang of kids at the soccer field for their ‘Christmas party’ (see Rob’s blog post "Les Apres Midis en Inde" to learn about his soccer friends).

An hour later we were all back together and tackling the pile of gifts. Somehow, even with almost no extended family involved, we managed to have enough presents to take all afternoon. Indian clothing featured large on everyone’s list, and fortunately our tailor works on Christmas day so we pushed the concept of ‘last minute shopping’ to collect a pair of shorts at 3pm on Dec 25th.

We had invited two Canadians we met here to join us for Christmas dinner, so along with Aunt Jane, we would be seven at the table. They are from Toronto; she comes to India for 6 months every year for her business making clothes in India to export and sell in Toronto. Her brother has joined her this year in to explore India and discover himself. Given the predictable warm and clear weather and the smallness of our dining room, we decided to set up our Christmas party on the roof. Our roof is typical for buildings in the tropics, a flat concrete slab with a 70 cm wall all the way round, easily accessed by stairs. With the help of a neighbour we rigged up electrical connections (no one has an extension cord) to plug in the tree lights and the computer (which we tuned into an all Christmas music Internet radio station), swept off the sand and carried up tables and chairs. At 7pm when the guests arrived for hors d’ouevres and cocktails, the moonlight was just enough to add to the candles and Christmas lights for a mellow but festive atmosphere.

Turkey is not available in Varkala, but some form of poultry is required for Christmas dinner so we decided to get our first chicken. The modern supermarket with some products for foreigners offers exactly two formats of chicken: frozen tikka pieces and frozen nuggets. A neighbour suggested a place to buy a chicken, and not only was it whole, but also alive! Sorry but plucking and preparing our Christmas bird was not on my wish list! Luckily Kumari came to the rescue, as she was more than willing to deal with all the preparations and deliver a wonderful dish of curry chicken along with an assortment of delicious Indian dishes for our Christmas dinner. Ann says she is willing to host Christmas dinner anytime as long as it is catered.

After dinner we invited our Indian neighbours to join us for Christian entertainment featuring various members of the Weary family playing, singing and acting out King Wenceslas and Silent Night, and readings from Ramona and King John’s Christmas. Rob played the recorder particularly well.

After the children had gone to bed and the guests had gone home, Ann and I were cleaning up the last of the stuff from the roof, when we decide to check in with our families back home (as it was about 2 pm in Canada). The final treat for a marvelous Christmas day was a conference call with Mahers in Bathurst and Cayman.

Boxing day we went to the beach with a picnic lunch!

Be sure to see our flickr site for all the photos.

Happy New Year to all.

Les Apresmidi en Inde

Chaque belle journée, vers 4h, Kathleen et moi allons au terrain de jeux pour jouer avec nos amis. Le terrain est a côté de chez nous, mais l’entré est a l’autre bout. Pour y rendre, c’est plus court de marcher une petite distance sur un mur. Le mur a 6 pieds de hauteur et 1 pied de largeur.

Le terrain est un grand champ qui était le jardin du temple de Nagar, un dieu Indien. Nous jouons au football dans un coin couvert de palmiers. Quand nous fessons un grand coup de pied, parfois la balle frappe un arbre! Aussi le terrain est penché. Comme ça il fait plus dur pour l’équipe qui monte.

Le plupart du temps nous jouons au soccer. Ici nous jouons sans chandails, sans pads et sans souliers. Il y a des roches sur le terrain et, sans souliers, ça faisait vraiment mal les premières semaines mais maintenant il ne fait plus mal

Quand nous avons plus rien a faire des fois nous marchons sur le mur pour trouver une noix de coco. La noix de coco qui tombe d’un palmier a la grandeur d’un ballon de soccer. Pour casser la noix il faut trouver une grande roche pointue. Nous prenons des tours a frapper la noix pour essayer de l’ouvrier. L’ami qui casse la noix a la chance de boire le jus a l’intérieur. Après avoir enlever le peluche, on peut ouvrir la noix, et enfin manger l’intérieur. La peluche est a peu près 5cm d’épaisseur. Sans peluche, une noix n’est que 15 cm de long et pèse moins qu’un kilo.

J’aime jouer au soccer avec mes amis ici par ce que ils n’ont pas tous le même âge; le plus jeune est Apoo qui a 9 ans, grand Achoo a 14, petit Achoo a 12 ans, Elias a 11 ans et Tasim est le plus grand a 16 ans. Aussi, les joueurs ont tous un bon esprit de jeu qui fait le jeu plus amusant. Tout le monde veut compter un but, mais pas trop, comme ça personne se fait mal.
Par Robert

Our neighbour, Kumari

I have yet to share with you the tales of someone I will call our “Indian Angel”: Kumari. She and her family live right next door to us. Kumari and her husband Predeep live with their two children Prijin (16 years old) and Kitty (12 years old) in the Predeep family’s ancestral home. The Predeep extended family includes Dr. Meena, our landlord, and her family, their sister Patma and her family and another sister and they all live on the family’s land. We are living in an extended family-community with everyone looking out for the other. Kumari speaks English quite well, having gone to an English School here in Varkala before she got married. Her children and husband speak only a little English (as the children go to school in Malaylam).

Predeep is in poor health and no longer works outside the home, so in order to bring in some income Kumari has opened her home to foreigners to cook traditional, vegetarian South Keralan meals. As well as cooking the most delicious meals, she has given us a window into the life of a modest Keralan family. For these reasons and many more, we will be forever indebted to her and her family. I will speak more of that later, but I would now like to share with you the experience of our first meal in the Predeep home.

We arrived at 6:30 p.m. by which time it was already pitch black outside and, as there are no streetlights, we walked next door to their house with the aide of our torch (flashlight in India). The family greeted and ushered us into their simple dining room. They all have gorgeous smiles and perfect white teeth! Kumari wore a beautiful sari and Predeep had on a lungi (sort of like a wrap around skirt that goes to the knees). As we sat at the plain wooden table Kumari laid out huge, freshly-washed banana leaves that were our plates and then started bring in the food. First was Kerala red rice, which has larger grains and is nuttier than the basmati we are used to when we eat Indian at home. As Kumari placed the many vegetable curries on the table she told us what each was: Kerala green beans, lady fingers (okra), a potato curry, a vegetable curry, a lentil Dahl, beetroot, carrots grated with coconut, eggplant, channa (chickpeas), sambhar (a very spicy Dahl), Soya balls in a tomato sauce, banana curry, chapattis and papadoms. Wow!!! She explained how we should put the rice on the front half of the banana leaf and then all the other dishes in a half circle around the rice on the top half of the leaf. The presentation was extraordinary with the colours of all the different dishes of red, green, yellow, orange and white showing up beautifully against the green leaf background. Almost every vegetable had been cut into very tiny pieces or shredded by a hand held shredder (very time consuming). Now for the taste…out of this world! Although one might call all the dishes ‘curry’ every dish had a different texture and flavour. Having cooked for foreigners, she had omitted the chillies in most of the dishes which left them bursting with flavour without burning the inside of your mouth! They were spicy without being hot! Delicious! Steven, Rob and Kathleen loved the hotter channa and the Soya ball dishes. I am still working on ratcheting up the chilli pepper intensity level I can handle. Having eaten at a few restaurants in India, I know that Kumari is not the norm in most Southern Indian cooking! We staggered home from our first meal at Kumari’s with full tummies and totally impressed by the feast that we had just eaten.

Eating a Kumari dinner at our house.


When we talked about coming to India, Steven often dangled the allure of perhaps hiring our own cook. I wasn’t sure if I was totally sold on this idea. The thought of someone else being responsible for the meals was appealing but tied in with that meant that we would have someone else in the house during the day. We cherish our family privacy and I wasn’t sure about having someone in our kitchen most of the day. Kumari next door has solved these concerns. Our routine is for Kumari to cook in her kitchen and then bring the food over so that we can eat at home. We have agreed that she will make us two suppers a week. Each supper provides us with leftovers for a lighter supper the next night, so in essence she is supplying us with four suppers besides a lunch once a week. We eat supper in a restaurant on the cliff at least once a week and we always eat lunch once or twice a week in town when we go for groceries. So you can see, apart from breakfast, we are not doing much meal preparation in our house. It is the best of both worlds. We feel very fortunate indeed.

Happy hour on our rooftop while dinner is being prepared!

Kumari’s cooking has led to much discussion about which is the best dish. Rob’s favourite dish is the potato curry; Steve’s favourite is the beetroot dish as he has never had anything like it before, Kathleen’s favourite is Soya balls and mine is lady fingers. Everyone loves her chipatties and the papadoms! Kumari’s specialty is her South Indian banana curry dish, which people always want the recipe for (us too!).

Besides the delicious meals Kumari’s family also provide us with a personal insight on life in small town Kerala. The Predeep family lives off the land. They have a cow and a calf, which provide milk for the family and milk to sell to the extended family and neighbours. They have a coconut grove that they use the coconuts for themselves and sell the rest for income. Nothing is wasted. The coconut tree provides the family with the coconuts (both fresh and dried), coconut oil for cooking and making soaps, the wood from the tree is used for firewood for cooking, the fibre from the coconut husk is used to make rope, the leaves are used for food for the cow, the stem of the leaves is used to make brooms and the branches are woven to make walls and roofs for houses.

An important part of our experience in India is meeting people and learning more about their way of life. For the insight they provide and the kind way they have befriended us, we are indeed grateful to have Kumari and her family for neighbours.

42 ELEPHANTS in Kollom

Yesterday, as we were going down to the beach with Great Aunt Jane, we met a taxi driver who asked us if we wanted to go to a celebration with 50 elephants for 800 rupees!

So the next day on the way to the beach my Dad went to the Helipad but he didn’t find the same taxi driver. He found another taxi driver that would take us for a better price of 700 rupees. By that time we were all home from the beach, so my Dad told him to bring his taxi to the end of our laneway at 2 p.m.

When we got to the celebration, there were only 42 elephants but we forgot all about that because we were so excited. There were dancers and very loud drummers that you would have to scream to talk to someone else.

Big and small elephants were at the celebration. The baby elephant was the only one not to have any tusks and he was my favourite one! It was amazing! I have never been so close to such different and big animals. Did you know that ELEPHANTS have toe-nails? In fact they have three toe nails each as big as my fist,
And their skin is so rumpled.


{And we where very happy that aunt Jane suggested going to the celebration}

42 elephants on parade

“50 Elephants at a Temple Festival” said the sign. Aunt Jane said this was a great chance to see so many elephants in one place. The next day we went an hour and a half in a taxi to see the Annual Full-Moon celebration at a temple near Kollam. We followed 2 elephants to the temple grounds to see 26 more elephants standing in a crescent moon shape waiting for on other 14 elephants to come. I could see that elephants are huge because we were standing right beside them in the field. We were so close my sister and I could almost touch the elephants, but their keepers didn’t let us. Daddy was taking pictures like a photographer from National Geographic.
The elephants were wearing colourful masks decorated with colours of gold, green, white, red and yellow. Young Brahmin priests carried parasols and held the elephant’s crowns while riding on top of their elephants. One elephant pooped on its way in. The poops were the size of soccer balls!
After the elephants were in their places the fun began. Dancers wearing costumes played Shiva and other Gods from Indian stories. They danced to the sound of loud drums. After the dancers finished, there were other drummers, flutists and cymbal players that led the whole troupe of elephants through the temple doors and out onto the street to start the parade. Near the end, the priests opened the doors that showed the god Shiva, the elephants that went through afterwards turned their heads to make a trumpeting noise to greet the god. The noise was so loud that the people in the temple jumped 4 feet in the air.
After the elephants were gone, we went to the train station to drop off Great Aunt Jane and say good-bye. Then we went shopping. We had to cross a busy highway on foot. Mom almost had a heart attack! On the way home it was dark and countless little flickering candles lit up the front of shops and houses to celebrate the day. We got home late but I was so excited I never fell asleep in the taxi. It was a great day!

by Robert

More photos of this event have been put on our Flickr site as a set named "42 elephants". It can be viewed as a slideshow.

Hi Tech in India

When we decided to bring the laptop to India one of the questions in my mind was the feasibility of getting an Internet connection at our house. The “deluxe, all modern” houses in the Bangalore of Thomas Friedan include high speed Internet, but we were going to live in small town. I am finding that India in 2006 is sometimes very modern yet in other ways still very traditional. Getting our Internet service hooked up is a good example.

In the high tech India of 2006, even Varkala has posters advertising “unlimited broadband, starting at Rs 399 (about $11) per month” but actually getting connected was not that easy. There are no phone lines in our neighbourhood, but one house has cable TV so the landlord suggested we should look into a cable connection. At the Asianet Cable office in town a pleasant woman in a gorgeous sari explained what “schemes” were available. After a lengthy interchange in very broken English she recommended the “Mach 4” scheme, which included a free modem for the Onam special, and 9 GB of use for about $140, which is a fortune in India, but a bit less than 3 months of high speed in Lennoxville. “When can this connection be installed?” I asked, and almost fell off my seat when she said “tomorrow”. I was then given a pen and a long application form, the only part of which I could complete was my name. As for the address, our house is down a dirt track, near an intersection that some rickshaw drivers seem to have never heard of. Luckily I had our landlord’s cell number, and he explained the address. The clerk accepted my very empty application form with a typical “No problem”.

The next day, as promised, the Asianet crew arrived in a cute 3 wheeled vehicle, but after exploring the area, the foreman announced that they did not have enough wire to connect to the nearest pole, and besides, it was on private property. I went back to the landlord, who assured me that the wire would travel on his aunt’s land and she would not object, and then tried to communicate this to my friends at Asianet. Almost a week of daily phone calls to Asianet later, and listening to excuses about the rain and technical difficulties I was beginning to despair, but Ann said to persist, so one day we called four times and the crew finally showed.

To install a cable is a very low tech operation that requires a team of 5 men: the hardest worker was the guy in his bare feet who climbed the coconut trees they used as poles to string the 200 m or more of wire, another man cut piece of wire and threw them to the man in the tree to use as ties, another attached the cable plug and connected to the box back at the pole, the fourth man took the money and made out a receipt, and the boss spoke English and supervised. The operation took two hours, and we were on-line. The crew did not have a drill, so they fed the wire through an open window! But that’s OK because it’s so hot we never close the windows!

The connection is pretty good, when it is working, and although advertised as 1 Mbps it’s rarely faster than 40 Kbps. Unfortunately, high tech revolution doesn’t include electricity, so we are down when the power is out, which it is every day for at least a few hours. Still it’s way more convenient than going to an Internet café, and so we are able to work on our blog, and the flickr site, and most importantly, for the kids to make use of the abundance of material available on the Internet for school work.
We are the only household in the neighbourhood with the Internet and although the 12 year old girl next door says they have a computer at school, I doubt if she has ever used it as she is fascinated to watch Kathleen use ours, and too afraid to touch it.

Addendum: Minutes after posting this entry our Internet connection went down, but this time it took TWELVE days of phone calls to get re-connected!! The folks at Asianet promise that all problems have been repaired and that we will have good service. Makes me think how much I appreciate Luc Grandchamp and the efficient tech crew at ETSB.