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I've heard of some people who fly to India, get out of the airplane, and never leave the airport before they decide the country is too much for them and hop on the next flight home. First days in India are always a jolt. After navigating the mob of taxi drivers trying to take me into the city without getting too ripped off (too much), I had to laugh at myself. I was actually laughing out loud in that taxi, shortly after it (minorly) crashed into a concrete embankment. Here I am, a woman, in India, by myself, baraged by the intensity of colors, smells, and noises that is India. Here I am in my first taxi ride, crashing into an embankment, and laughing about it because it wasn't any more foreign and absurd than anything else going on all around me. I was feeling giddy excitement, liberation, and silly for doing what at the moment seemed like such an absurd thing, all with a (very faint) background note of terror.
Well,
Kolkata
(aka Calcutta) ended up being pretty decent. Turns out the Dominique Lapierre book City of Joy only showed
the downer side of things, not that I ever read it, but I did fall asleep
during the Patrick Swayze
movie many years ago. The city does remind me a bit of New Orleans,
like people told me it would. It's the old stone and brick buildings and the
crumbliness of the sidewalks and the huge old trees. Also the river, which is enormous here on the delta, just like the Mississippi in New Orleans, and that it's near the
largest mangrove forest in the world, and all the little Kali shrines
remind me of the voodoo of NOLA. There's a huge park in the center of town a la Central Park in New
York with lots of monuments and formal English
gardens and huge meadows. And you know how Sheep Meadow in Central Park supposedly used to have actual sheep grazing on it? Well, in Kolkata, there are actual
sheep actually grazing on it. With shepards and everything.
Eliminates mowing and fertilizing--very permaculture.
Mostly I walked all over the place, and because I am interested in such things,
I took the subway once, down to the Kali
Temple. Kali, the
gruesome incarnation of Shiva the Destroyer's wife makes her home in Kolkata, her namesake.
The subway ride was the calmest, cleanest, most efficient thing I'd experienced
in India up to that
point, it only cost 4 Rupees (less than a dime), and I really liked sitting in
the ladies-only section. The Kali
Temple, however
interesting, left a bad taste in my mouth. I hate feeling ripped off by
priests for a donation. (I knew it was coming. I've experienced
this routine at Hindu Temples before in India.
I don't mind dropping some dough in the offering plate, but I hate the big
set-up.) And besides, I got there too
late in the day to witness the ritual beheading of goats to Kali the
Destroyer. Bummer. Notably, Mother Theresa's Missionaries of Charity is
right next door.
Bodily functions. Everybody pees everywhere and nobody bothers to be
discreet about it. In Thailand,
it's just spitting you have to watch out for. I'm often choked by the
acrid smell of degrading urine, which, come to think of it, is another thing
that reminds me of New
Orleans. I didn't particularly relish
seeing a random weiner taking a leak at 8 in the morning. On the other hand, I was only minorly surprised by the time a woman squatted not 4 feet from me when I was standing on the ghats of the Houghly. Also, I saw two vomits on the floor
in one day that no one had bothered to clean up, one right in the middle of the very formal, very
victorian Victoria
Monument (which gives a very good background on the British Raj in Calcutta and the people's eventual uprising against it) and one in the train
station. It wasn't a big deal or anything, just notable. I haven't
seen vomit in a while.
Transportation. In Kolkata,
they still have rickshaws, and I don't mean the bicycle kind. I mean the
kind with a tired-looking fellow trotting along in front of a little
chariot. They kept asking me to hire them, but I have legs, too. I
don't quite comprehend the net energy benefit. I saw lots of cool things
happening on bikes, like a couple with at least 2 dozen pure white chickens
squawking uncomfortably upside-down all around the back rack, and milkmen with
their big stainless steel milk cans where the panniers would be. I also
saw lots of bitchin' cargo trikes I wish I could fold up and take back to the
farm in Thailand with me. There's almost no private cars, but lots of taxis, tons of
buses, delivery trucks and bikes, and some motorbikes, but not near as many as Thailand.
I remember once deciding that that's how Manhattan should be run, but make no
mistake, you can still have hella traffic jams with just taxis and buses all
blaring away on their horns. I like crossing the street. There's
lots of "Pedestrian Cross Here" signs in strategic locations, and
then you just wait until you have a force of people, which never takes very
long because there's so many people everywhere, and then once there is a
critical mass and someone decides to go for it, everyone crosses.
Walking--another prominent form of transporting goods, especially by
head. I've seen some huge things going by perfectly balanced on some
guy's head just casually jaunting along, the biggest of which was carried by
two men single-file. It was like a refrigerator or an armouir or
something seriously enormous.
It was a good intro to India. I knew I would be back in town on my way home to Thailand, so I wasn't there but three days and two nights before I made my way over to the Howrah Station for my overnight ride to Gaya and dawn taxi ride to Bodhgaya, tales of which I'll save for next time.
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