Kolkata!
Trip Start
Sep 02, 2008
1
8
12
Trip End
Dec 22, 2008
Kolkata (Calcutta),
West Bengal,
India
Monday, September 29, 2008
The 32 hour train journey was quite long, but not as bad as a 10 hour bus ride in the Himalayas. I was in class 2AC which was the nicest class on this train. I had a upper berth which is kind of like being in solitary confinement! No windows from my area but it was really fun to go between the train cars while the train is moving and just watch what goes by outside.
Got to the train station and saw thousands of people going every which way. Pretty chaotic, but I was with a local (he was a journalist for Reuters) who I got a ride with in his cab. Got dropped off at Sudder St. (tourist area) and found a room for one night. My Mom arrives tonight so I just went now and checked into that hotel, The Lytton, which is very nice. It has A/C and a fridge! It's strange to walk out of a nice hotel and the first thing you see after leaving is some homeless dude just sleeping on the broken sidewalk in the middle of the day.
Kolkata has about 14 million people officially, but the whole metro area is roughly 20 million people. Let me tell you, there are people everywhere (but no cows). I went to the "New Market" area last night and saw crowds that went on and on and on down every street, completely nuts I tell you. Kolkata seems more developed than the other two big cities I've visited, Delhi and Amritsar. Although there is a herd of goats right now directly outside the door, Kolkata has more commercialized areas than I've seen thus far. I saw a KFC, a Ralph Lauren store, and a Reebok store.
Being in such a crowded area last night at New Maret, everybody was staring at me cause I'm about a foot taller than the 1.2 billion people in this country. Instead of saying "you're tall" or something like that everybody phrases it funny, saying things like, "your height is very good" or " you are very long". I wish I could've shrunk about 8 inches for this trip. I hit my head on something at least twice a day! If I'd known it was gonna be like this I would've brought my bicycle helmet with the nifty little mirror attached to the side.!
There are several beggars in the Sudder St area, they know this is where the foreigners come so this is where the $ is at. One of the scams the women use is to ask for milk for their baby. Some of the time the babies aren't even theirs, they actually rent them. There are also hand-pulled rickshaws here. I asked a local what he thought these guys make in a day, he said no more than 100 rupees, that's only $2.25 or thereabouts. Quite sad to see these emaciated men pulling people in a carriage down the road, lots of times they don't even have shoes. But even though it's sad these people have to live so poorly they're also quite annoying. Just to walk the 2 blocks to this internet cafe I had about 5 rickshaw pullers lined up asking me if I wanted a ride. You tell one "no" then the dude right behind him ask the same damn question, and then the next ask, then the next, then 3 cab drivers in a row ask "where you want to go".....they're very persistant to say the least.
Looks like my Mom and I will spend 3 days here in Calcutta then we have a Deluxe-Tourist bus up to Siliguri which is in the foothills of the Himalayas. From there we'll be taking the "Toy Train", a World Heritage Site, up to Darjeeling in the mountains. Not sure how long we'll be there or what exactly we're going to do after that. We might go down to the Sundarbans, south of Kolkata, these are the mangrove forests at the Bay of Bengal. A boat trip down through the swamp sounds fun. There are man-eating tigers there but the odds of seeing one are slim, and fortunately the odds of being eaten alive by one are even less.
One thing I really like about India is the food and being such a large mammal I can eat quite a lot. Often I go for the "thali". This is a meal they bring out on a metal tray kind of like the ones we had as kids in the school cafeteria. One portion of rice, one of dhal (lentils), another portion of vegetables of some sort, and then maybe something like yogurt, and you also get chapatis (thin unleavened bread). So what you do is scoop the food with your right hand and the chapati then you cram it all down your mouth. And if you want more food you can eat all you want, it's great! Eating with your right hand is actually pretty fun, but messy. All the restaurants have small sinks in the back where you go after eating to rinse your hand.
Another good thing here is all the fresh squeezed fruit juices. I just had 4 glasses of OJ that were made right in front of me for only 15 rupees a glass (35 cents). You can also get papaya and sugarcane juice just about on any street corner. There are fruit sellers with little carts lined up and down all the roads. Lots of apples, bananas, mangoes, papayas, and other fruits for sell for very good prices. At 2 rupees a banana it's easy to eat 5 or more bananas a day. I usually don't eat the apples because you can't eat the skin because it could've been rinsed in contaminated water.
Other good things are:
chai (tastes like hot chocolate w/a hint of spices)
samosas
pakora
aloo ghobi (potatoes and cauliflower in a curry sauce)
sweets (there are Sweet Shops everywhere that make and sell sweets, I don't really know what most of them are but they're good)
banana milkshakes
chocolate milkshakes
Before arriving in India I'd been vegan (no meat and no dairy) for several years, just eating vegetarian while I'm here in India. It would be nearly impossible to be vegan here because they put dairy in a lot of dishes. Plus I don't really have a moral dilemma with eating dairy products here, it's not like it is in the US where dairy cows live in "factory farms" and have their calves turned into veal, in India cows rule! There can be chaotic traffic like you can't believe and then there will just be a cow chilling in the middle of the road and everybody swerves around it! And having all the cows around is also the unofficial way that the trash is taken out. People throw their trash anywhere and then the cows eat what's edible.
Speaking of trash, Indians don't seem to understand the concept of "the trash can". Everybody, literally, just throws their trash anywhere they want. They don't even have trash cans on the train, in hotels, or along the streets. I asked one of the train workers what to do with my trash and he just grabs it and throws it off the train onto the tracks. In the mornings there are some people that go out with these tiny little brooms and sweep some of the trash off the streets, put in small piles, then set it on fire! In some places I've been there would be little fires every 50 yards or so.
Gotta run, time to go drink some sugarcane juice, be assaulted by beggars and rickshaw drivers, and try not to get hit by a crazy taxi driver!
namaste
Comments
Food & Trash
It sounds like you are enjoying yourself a bit more. It was good to hear of your eating exploits as well their trash dilema. I guess I won't worry so much if I put the recyle stuff in the wrong container on trash day from now on. Or we could get a few cows to hang out in the neighborhood, that would add some excitement to the area.
Dad & CQ