March 19, 2010

3/19/2010
I can’t believe it is already half way through March. Life is going so fast right now!
Calcutta (now called Kolkata) was so much fun. The British influence was much more in your face in here than anywhere I have been. Kolkata is mostly Bengali populated so the food we ate was Bengali which meant TONS of seafood. We went to dinner at this one restaurant which had amazing fresh seafood, maybe the best I have ever had. The crab just melted in your mouth and the sauces used were so rich in flavor and spice. I used to be such a spice baby but after living in India I feel like I can eat anything.
The Hotel we stayed in in Kolkata was called Hotel Fairlawn. It was the most flamboyant, kitche, fabulous I have ever stayed in. It was owned by a 90-year-old woman who is still feisty as ever. There was not an inch of bare wall because the entire hotel was covered with photographs, articles, artifacts, and art. It was sort of living in a grandmother’s house with everything plastered to the wall except there were no plastic coverings on the sofas.
Storm-ji took us around to St. Paul’s Cathedral, Park Street Cemetery, and the Victoria Memorial. It was definitely interesting to see the British institutions plopped down in India. It was as if we were in an English city rather than an Indian one. The cemetery was so eerie to walk through because all the tombs (all British) were of people who died who were my age. They were all young people coming to India to work for the East Indian Company who just couldn’t handle the disease and bacteria. A much as I felt bad for them, part of me felt like it was their karma to die in India. They just expected to move to India and become rich from exploiting all f her resources for the benefit of the British economy. They attempted to conquer India but in the end it was India who conquered them.
The Victoria Memorial was probably one of my favorite places in Kolkata. It was a museum full of paintings and photographs of India done of the British in the 1750’s- 1850’s. It was so cool to see how much India has changed and developed since then. They had illustrations of lush green land where my school is which is now in the middle of a bustling city full of roads and cement.
Right now I’m on the plane back to Delhi. I am sort of over Delhi right now. After seeing places like Kolkata, Rishikesh, Bandhavgarh, and Orissa it just makes me want to explore India even more. There is so much to see and I am only here for such a short period of time. I can’t wait until ISP where I’ll be in Jaipur and then Bandhavgarh on my own. Although I am nervous to travel alone, I’m even more excited to get my feet wet.