Another Brick In The Wall

A couple more pieces fell into place today. It looks like we have our San Francisco hotel nailed down, as well as the hotels in Singapore and Cochin. We had a delightful response from the aptly named Bijus Tourist Hotel in Cochin in repsonse to my question about their policy of only holding a reservation for two hours on your check-in day.

Dear Sir,
Thank you for your mail and we are keeping two hrs time because there is lot of fake reservation in the net and we cant hold the room at the season time without any responds from the reserved person , in your case we will hold the room and if you can, please make a call to us when you arrived india , so your room is confirmed and dont worry we hold 2 double rooms NON AC on the date 7th DEC -08 to12th DEC-08, We dodnt take any advance payment for reservation and 2 hrs time is given after the check in time and which can be extend if you make a phone call and give your new arrival time .

with warm Regards,
Manager ,
Bijus tourist Home

All that remains now is the vital link between Mumbai and Cochin, and we have a travel agent looking into booking that for us, as we've been stymied at every turn. No one in India wants to take our visa card! If the travel agent comes through today with that final flight, there's a bottle of cheap Spanish champagne in the fridge!

Tomorrow is a big day in Vancouver. We drop off our Chinese visa applications with a "visa consultant" and pay the appropriate bribe. Hopefully our visas will be granted within the week, unless they suspect Isaac of being a Tibetan sympathizer. Then we have a meeting with the Vancouver School Board distance education person to set up and register Miles, so that he can somehow make it to grade 4 next year. Then we have lunch with Chindi Varadarajulu, who is the proprietor of Chutney Villa South Indian Cuisine. We were introduced by my old friend Barry Benson, the "B" in R&B Brewing in Vancouver (the best microbrewery in the city, hands down). Chindi guides culinary tours through India, and has graciously agreed to help us out with some contacts. She will be in Kerala in February, and might even do a stint on camera with us. After that, we pop in to see Laurel's dad, and then try to buy a computer that we can leave in Laurel's workshop so that her employees can fulfill web orders for Naked Soapworks. A pretty typical day in town for us.

I also got a message today from my old friend Masahiko Yoshizawa in Tokyo. He has offered to guide us around the Tokyo fish market. Seeing the Tsukiji fish market is a long standing dream of mine and its very exciting to have he possibility of Masa being our guide. Hopefully, he can fix us up with a reasonably priced place to stay while we're there.