It's the day before Christmas, I'm in India, and everyone is sick except for me.

South India is hot. It's f***ing hot. And they say this is the cool part of the year. It's hot and everywhere there are crows. At the beach there are no seagulls, only more crows. I saw a pack of crows like vultures trying to kill one of their injured to eat it. So yeah, it's hot, there are crows. people are sick. In the state of Kerala there are daily power outages, like clockwork. In Kochi the power goes off every night at 3:30 am and the heat wakes you up and all you can do is lie there. It also makes it hard to use the internet, being in a state of constant fear of losing everything you've written.

But I digress. Let's go back to Kochi. Kochi has what is quite possibly the most disgusting beach in India. It's famous fishing nets are rotting and they smell. It's hot. All the time. But the town itself is a nice place. Once a Portugese colony where they traded spices and erected churches. There's even a Jew Town there. Any place with a Jew Town rates highly with me. The people in Southern India seem friendlier and more laid back than their northern counterparts. Maybe it's the heat. It's impossible to do anything active in this kind of humidity. Also there are Christians everywhere. This struck me as odd. I had always imagined Southern India as a bastion of all things Hindu. But instead there are posters of Jesus and the CSS (Christian Social Services) with their mobile megaphone propaganda, convoys of trucks with speakers rolling through the streets preaching (or so I assume anyway since I can't understand any of it).

In a matter of days my brother has Gone Local. He's got the Indian man frock and the dark skin, the jew fro. His life-long aversion to chilli has disappeared and now he can't get enough of the stuff. He takes tuk-tuk rides around town just for the fun of it. He haggles down to the price he wants, then changes his mind and pays the full price anyway. He tips the barber more than ten times the actual price, because it was "a good shave". Everything he tastes, touches or otherwise experiences is, up to that point, the "best in India". He collects elephant souvenirs. Carved wooden elephants, elephant t-shirts, elephant welcome mats, elephants inside of elephants. He takes photos of everything, his camera is full of blurry pictures of shutters, the surprised and unsuspecting faces of tuk-tuk drivers, beggars on the street, road workers on the job, his own feet. He lays down in the dust in his Indian man-frock (that may actually be pajamas) to get the "best angle" and draws strange looks from children. "Your friend is very problem," our tuk tuk driver says of him.

In Kochi we also meet our Indian friend and go-to man for everything, Manu. Manu manages the hotel we stay at in Fort Cochin (the traditional name for Kochi). He invites us to eat dinner on the rooftop amongst the pot plants and TV aerial, drinks with us and tells us how it is to live here. We become good friends and he tells us about a new place he is opening up with his cousins in Munnar amongst the tea fields, and he takes us there on the bus and finally we escape the heat.