Thursday, 29 January 2009
Last day here in Kolkata, so had a bit of a lie in.
SB decided to join me on my visit to the Indian Museum which should have been so good, it was a beautiful building from the outside, but inside it is just rundown and badly in need of maintenance or even just a good clean and relabelling or the items on exhibit. There was some large exhibits but the lighting was so poor you could hardly see them. Some of the areas were closed for renovation, but when you have a sticky beak the areas look like they are beyond help. Considering the history here in India, it could be a magnificent museum showcasing these things instead of what has happened. We also expected a very large display on textiles or tribes here but couldn’t find that. However, in the very small painting gallery there were some-ones pen doodlings – so maybe I have hope of being exhibited one day. Bengali’s (Tagore etc) are famous for their artistic talents but there was nothing highlighting this. We left there a bit disappointed.
We had a snack and ventured to College Street via the subway and wandered through all the book stalls. There seemed like thousands, selling or attempting to sell textbooks back from the dark ages. There wasn’t anything SB particularly wanted, so we headed back to Park Street and had a browse through the Oxford Bookstore, but nothing grabbed SB’s attention so we detoured to the hotel for a quick pit-stop before hitting the road again. By now it was about 3:30ish so we walked to Hogg Street near New Market to try a Koti Roll at Nizam’s but it is definately not as good as the Koti Roll store on Park Street.
We decided to take a tuk tuk to Victoria Memorial for some sunset pictures, but no-one would take us. The traffic here does an about turn, not seeming to help but confuse the situation, so we legged it, making it into the Victoria Memorial grounds just in time for some sunset pictures. We sat on the lawns enjoying the relative peace and quiet until the guards started clanging the bells and blowing their whistles indicating it was time to leave. The guard nearest us let us take a couple more photos but that was it.
We joined the throng leaving the park and went back to the hotel.
In my madness today I had worn thongs as I didn’t think we would be going for such a long walk, so we went back to the hotel as I had to wash my extremely manky feet. We also sorted out our hotel as we have an early train tomorrow. We headed to the supermarket to get some supplies for the train and then headed out to a restaurant for dinner which was nice but not outstanding, finally arriving back at the hotel to pack and organised for the train tomorrow.
Kolkata is surprising, certainly not the city of abject poverty you expect or imagine. Yes there are people sleeping in the streets, but there is also a huge population. They are certainly clean as all you see are people washing at stand pipes or in the river and somehow they manage to portray privacy and decency, it is just different to our expectations. The level of beggars that we have seen is no greater than other countries, we have visited. People just get on with their lives. Outside the hotel in the late afternoon a guy picks through and sorts/separates the rubbish, don’t know where it goes but it isn’t left to rot on the side walks, so it must go somewhere.
Kolkata may not have the stunning sites compared to Delhi and Mumbai but it has a varied history that is seen in the different migrant populations. Westernised style here is also much more prevalent in clothing – it is unusual to seea teenager wearing tradditional dress – it is all jeans and t-shirts, not necessarily for the better as I sometimes think India has the worst jeans styles you can imagine.