Cafe Jew Town

Getting right to the point

After 7 days as sea, we made the passage from Mombasa, Kenya to India and this morning, at 7am local time, made landfall in Cochin, India.

Needless to say, after 7 days at sea, we were anxious to get off the boat and as soon as our feet touched land (after clearing customs of course), we were surrounded by an army of people selling everything that was not nailed down.

Wooden elephants, postcards, shirts, beads, sandwiches, you name it, all thrust in our faces.  “Mister… one rupee… mister.. one dollar.. mister… just try…. no sell, just look”.

It was unrelenting.

And we had only been in town for, oh, 30 seconds.

We jumped into the nearest Tuk Tuk. These are unique (I think) to India (on second thought we had Tuk Tuk races in Chiang Mai, Thailand), OK, unique to Asia, and soon we were racing off (if you can call it racing) toward the Old Town.

There are no seatbelts in a Tuk Tuk, so the next best thing you can do is close your eyes, or simply not pay attention as the driver dodges between fuel trucks and semi tractor trailors and buses, passing some of them, others simply coming dead on at us.

The Tuk Tuks generally have a sign on the front that says Inshallah or, if God so wills it. On the backs they have a sign that says Mashallah, or God has so willed it. In other words, if we make it past you, God has willed that we will survive, at least this pass.

Meanwhile, the streets are choked with bicycles and mopeds.  Most of the moped hold a minimum of three or more people,and Lisa was quick to observe that the man driving generally wore the helmet while the woman and child crammed behind him had little but her sari for protection.

We soon arrived in Jew Town (that’s what it’s called). It’s the remnant of what was once a thriving Jewish population here in Cochin, one that had been here since 476 BC (so I am told), the Babylonian Exile.  The synagogue itself dates from only the 16th Century, so it is relatively new.

There are, now, apparently, only a small handful of Jews left here, the majority upped and left for Israel post 1948.  Jew Town, and Jew Town Road (and the interestintly named Jew Town Cafe), however are left behind, along with more menorahs for sale than you will find in Tel Aviv or on Broadway and 72nd Street in Manhattan.

They’re not for the locals, but for the continual cruise ship crowd that apparently all call at Jew Town.  (the Jewish population of our own ship I would put at about 40% or so, or maybe it only seems that way to me. It’s a bit like walking around Park Avenue and 70th Street and going over to 5th.  There is even a shipboard Rabbi! One of the salespeople on Jew Town Road (no kidding) told me that the QE2 had been in last week.

Speaking of which, the TCA went extremely well on board. We did a final screening yesterday

Final screening for the shipboard group

Tomorrow, we are going to have a film festival in the ship’s theater where we are going to show all the work that the participants have done.

All in all, we had about 25 people participate in the bootcamps on board.

The results were quite good – I mean they were shooting in game parks in South Africa or Kenya, and then editing on board this  ship.

All of this works, and I have every hope that this is just the beginning of a long and profitable relationship between Crystal Cruises and ourselves.