Christmas in India ...

... was something completely different. We had 35 degrees Celsius on Christmas Eve.

I didn't want to spend Christmas in Bangalore and thought it would be better to have some distraction. Since I saw on social media that an acquaintance from Cologne was also in India, I wrote to him and we decided to spend Christmas together. It was nice because he was in the same situation as me - not at home with his family for the first time at Christmas. We went to Kochi, which is a city in Kerala on the west coast. Or rather, I flew there and he was already there. He had already seen a few places, so we decided to take a trip to Munnar, in the mountains. After a 5-hour bus ride, we arrived, got a room, and explored the town. We walked around the area, visited the tea plantations, and eventually arrived in a tiny village. There were a lot of people outside and they greeted us and smiled at us at every house. The children ran excitedly into the street and waved at us (and were delighted when we waved back). Later, we passed by a house where the father was decorating a tree with Christmas lights and he spoke to us in broken English and asked if we liked Chai. So we went into the tiny house where seven people lived (how they all fit in there remains a mystery to me). We had a really delicious tea, and the father even works in a tea factory. Just another nice gesture: they can hardly communicate with us due to language barriers, but they invite us to have tea and are so happy to have visitors.

The next day, we decided to take a motorcycle tour and drove from Munnar to Chinnar. It was an incredibly beautiful area and we even saw wild elephants! The next day, we returned the same route, but it was not bad to admire the same area again. We made a stop to take a three-hour hike to a waterfall and in the evening, we took a bus for 5 hours back to Kochi from Munnar. The next day was Christmas Eve, we had 35 degrees and had a very relaxed day: we treated ourselves to an Ayurvedic full-body massage and ate a lot. We spent the evening with our 'landlord' and a family who also stayed in the guesthouse. They were incredibly nice people as well. The landlord said that we are now friends, haha.

On the 25th, I flew back to Bangalore and had to work on the 26th. That was my Christmas 2017 :) I really missed my family, especially.

In India, the 25th is a holiday and Indians decorate everything as kitschy as possible with red, yellow, pink, green, and blue blinking lights - even if they don't celebrate the festival itself.