A whole New World...

I have not seen Venice... whatever I know about that city and the canals there is from photo’s and movies like merchant of Venice.... But after last week visit to Cochin and Alapuzza, Now I can certainly say I have visited the rural version of Venice.

when I looked around while I was roaming around the Backwaters through villages and all, I had an impression like I m moving through a typical village scene and was expecting some typical things like electricity and drinking water shortage.... poor education... no connectivity...etc etc...

But what I saw was totally different. The concept of roads was not there in those villages....
The canals were their roads...
The ferry boat was the bus and just like a normal bus stop...
You could see People standing along the canals at what i will call as "Ferry stops" waiting to board ferries... (see the image of the "bus stop")
People were using small boats like we use cycles...
a whole new perspective where your Doodhwala comes in a small boat...
Children go to school in a ferry boat...

All the transport everything through water transports. Through the main canal small canals were leading to houses just like we have small roads...

Through conversation with people we found out some information about daily life of the village.

Contrary to our assumptions... they had 24 hours electricity supply.... full "drinking water" supply.... almost every home had telephone connection and of course cable connection.
The level of education is also good. The main reason I could see was the missionary schools that ensured the proper penetration of basic education.

We did not face a single incident of language barrier because most of the people knew English including 8-10 years old children….

Another aspect I observed was the "Gulf Readiness" of this region. On very first day when we were looking for return journey booking, we realized that the city had more airline agents than the domestic bus and railway booking agents. All Gulf airlines had offices in Ernakulum.
There are more international flights flying from Cochin than domestic flights.

At least one person from a family is either settled in Gulf of has come back after spending a lot of years in gulf.

The height of this Gulf-o-mania was that most of the schools were teaching Arabic as third language instead of Hindi.

But whatever it was... they had a nice world of their own...