Saturday, 24 January 2009
We slowly started pulling into Kolkata but instead of 6am, it was 9am, apparently due to the heavy fog, which I had presumed was pollution. We pulled into the quiet and cleanliness of Sealdah Station, making our way to the exit and taxi pandemonium (we have never seen so many taxis in our lives) finally walking to the prepaid taxi booth in an attempt to escape the touts, looking to get you into their taxis.
We drove a fairly shortish distance to our hotel (Hotel Himalay). Our room was ready, so we checked in. I had a shower and SB then dropped down our laundry and we headed off to find something to eat. Finally coming across a small Dhaba and had what everyone else was eating – paratha and sabzi which is a potato dish and was lovely.
We headed on a walk to The Maiden.
Eventually stopping to catch the Metro which is a true subway and is cheap and you didn’t have to wait long and even better, because it only has one line, even I couldn’t get lost. We got off at Esplanade and walked around that area seeing many of the heritage buildings (Raj Bhavan, Courts, Treasury Building) stopping at St John’s Church to see the Mausoleum for Job Charnock (founder of Calcutta) and also seeing the monument to the black hole of Calcutta.
We also found a gravestone for Peter Pan.
We followed the tram tracks through the market area near the mosque and before reaching the hotel we found the local fruit market where fresh fruit were being auction to local distributors, it was just amazingly manic with people, fruit, fruit carriers all squashed together. We ended up wandering around the area for ages, trying whatever people gave us.
At the hotel we had an afternoon nap. Kolkata is very humid and mid-afternoon is the hottest part of the day – good excuse for a siesta we think. The hotel gave us instructions for a local bengali restaurant which we headed off to past, a huge range of shops, stalls and people toing and froing. Finding the restaurant (Aahar) where we obviously ordered the most complication dishes off the menu, whereas the constant stream of people all seemed to just get whatever was being given out. Our waiter wasremarkably like Basil Fawlty. The food, however, was great, really tasty.
We wandered back into the streets fulland walked back through the throng of people setting out their homes for the night to the hotel.