Tuesday, 27 January 2009
Breakfast at Radhini’s for basic but tasty Bengali food to start the day.
We headed back to Victoria Memorial to go inside the museum and look at the history of the British in Bengal and how the city developed. It was interesting and laid out in a rleatively easy to follow date order. Although you don’t get to see much of the architecture of the building inside as all the exhibits are on large partitions. We also wandered back through some of the gardens.
The day is starting to heat up already and feels like it is going to be a hot one.
We headed down Shakespear Sarani and found the Park Street Cemetary. It is strange to think that this was once the very outskirts of Kolkata. Originally opened in 1760’s it was closed about 40 years later as it was full. It is currently an area in need of some serious restoration. A lot of gravesites have crumbled until there is nothing left and this happens more and more after each monsoon. However, it is leafy and more importantly shady. There seems to be a lot of graves for young women who came to India and hardly survived more than a year here. You can only imagine the difference between Calcutta after it has just been founded and their home lives in England.
We left there and had a cold drink andcoffee in Tea2, which looks stuck in the victorian times, but had lovely high celings ensuring it stayed cool without a freezing air conditioner. We decided to call a halt to sight seeing and had a hot Koti roll from a hole in the wall stand, which was fantastic. SB had vegetable and I had paneer. We then went to update the internet and reformat some memory cards as yet again the camera has spat the dummy. SB headed back to the hotel for a lie down while I finished emails etc.
I wanted to see the Victoria Memorial at sunset, but by the time we got there it was over, so we had a streetside bel puri
and waited for the lights to come on and get some photos.
We headed back to Chowringhee we popped into a supermarket where I bought some water and then had a bengali dinner which was more spicy than flavoursome. I bought some banabas on the way home – Rs20 for 12 bananas.