Sooz In India!: Kolkata, Calcutta, potato, po-ta-to

My two week tour d’India continues, for the last 9 days I have been in Kolkata, once again living out of a hotel room and helping to train surveyors. I feel like I’m living the life of a consultant - traveling alone to places, working non-stop, and ordering food from the hotel room service night after night. Of course somehow I don’t think consultants share their room with a large array of bugs, attempt to navigate public transportation in cities where no one seems to speak English, or have to deal with cold bucket showers. I guess this would be consulting done NGO style. I’ve really enjoyed getting to see Kolkata and the villages surrounding it, but now that I’m sitting in the airport I have to admit I’m really looking forward to getting back to Delhi and having some social interaction beyond thanking the room service guy for his excellent delivery skills.
Unfortunately, Kolkata is a bit of an intense city. Everything is covered in a layer of dirt and grime and it is brutally loud and crowded. I haven’t really had much free time here, and since the city is on the very eastern edge of the country (which, despite its large size is all in one time zone), the sun sets at about 4:30 which left me with little daylight to do any exploring. I did manage to take Sunday off and made an attempt at being a tourist which ended up being a complete Kolkata-fail. I started off fairly successfully and managed to get to the main landmark, which is a palace called the Victoria Memorial.

The Victoria Memorial - my one tourist success!

It was actually quite impressive, with beautiful gardens all around it and a nice museum inside describing how the British f’ed over Calcutta. After, I attempted to walk to another neighborhood that supposedly has cool architecture, but got completely lost in the crowded maze of streets. The problem was I couldn’t take out my map because as soon as I did I was surrounded by about 1,000 people, none of whom I could communicate with of course, who would all offer their 2 cents about which way I should go. I gave up and hailed a cab and attempted to tell him where I wanted to go. Fail number 2. I must have been saying something wrong because we circled around for about a half hour and ended up right back where we started. At this point I was so burned out that this Colonial Architecture the guide book talked about wasn’t sounding nearly as interesting as it had in the morning.
I accepted defeat and headed back to my hotel room. Then, in the ultimate of ironies, I turned on the TV to discover they were showing Outsourced, a movie about a guy who comes to work in India and experiences total culture shock. I embraced the beauty of the moment and spent the afternoon in my room laughing at this guy as he struggled in India. What a loser. Oh wait. Although the movie itself isn’t anything spectacular, it’s pretty hilarious if you’ve been here because it’s so true in so many ways (except for the fact that everyone he deals with magically speaks English). Still, I was impressed with how many little Indiaisms they managed to show – especially the way Indians always say “no problem, no problem” and shake their head back and forth even when there clearly is a problem and they clearly aren’t going to be able to fix it.
I managed to snap a few pictures of the city and the countryside, for all the city’s lack of beauty, the countryside definitely made up for it. It was incredibly lush and green and there was water everywhere. Sorry my pictures don’t do it justice!

I failed to fully capture it, but this was this super rickety wooden bridge that I thought I should take a picture of before our car attempted to use it. I was pretty sure it wouldn't be there any more after it tried to support the weight of our car...

One of my trainees interviewing my favorite doctor. First of all he was super fun and cheery and second of all when we asked him to list new medicines he had heard of he listed "Sooz-75". I don't know what it claims to cure but clearly I would take it in a heart beat.