Kolkata was our first stop in India, the last country we will visit on this trip. It was a harsh introduction to a harsh country to travel in, but we were grateful for the experience nonetheless. 

We arrived at nearly midnight from China and found the driver we had arranged ahead of time to take us to the Airbnb we rented in the Ballygrunge area of Kolkata. The driver sped through the streets, honking at everyone he came near (and sometimes honking when no other cars were around), and eventually brought us to the apartment in a secure gated area. We met the owner briefly before getting to our room and resting the night away. 

The next day we woke up slowly, and spent a bit of time with the girl who owned/lived in the apartment. She was a little younger than us, and from a well-off family. She gave us a few tips on what to see and do our first day, but it was more interesting seeing her go about her day as a relatively well-off unmarried Indian woman. She had a cleaning person come clean the apartment for 3 hours every day, and never had to wash her own dishes. Another person came to the door to pick up the garbage, and another to pick up the ironing – she had the sheets ironed each time they were washed! Another person brought her food daily – she didn’t have to cook for herself either. She said her electrictian was due to come soon to fix one of the plugs, and another person was to come to adjust the dripping faucet. It seems that the woman in a well-off household needs to stay at home just to answer the door for all of these people that come in and out of the house! 

After eating the breakfast our host served us – she was sick of eating the food the delivery person brought (puffed rice and a few veggies) – we went out to walk around town and find some lunch. Walking around Kolkata was like nothing we had experienced before in our travels. After getting maybe half a block away from the gated and guarded apartment complex, we were dodging human poop in the middle of the sidewalk, walking over grimy trash piles, and trying to avoid stepping on naked people sleeping on the sidewalk. We walked past a ton of good smelling street food and chai stalls filled with what seemed to be only men who stared at me as if I was walking the streets naked (I was quite well covered up!). And the cacophony of street sounds was nearly deafening – the cars, busses, motorbikes, moto rickshaws, and bike rickshaws all seem to honk their horns and ring their bells constantly – and I swear the horns here are louder than the horns at home. Also it was probably 100 degrees out and humid. I started to wonder to myself why we left the relative comfort of China for this mess. 

Below is one of the few remaining human powered rickshaws left in India. I read that Kolkata is one of the only places that still have these, as they have been outlawed, but the workers and people in Kolkata still want them around so they do it anyway. 

We eventually made it to the restaurant we were looking for, Peter Cat. It was a cool oasis from the heat and filled with relatively normal-looking Indian people enjoying a nice lunch out. We had chelo kebabs, our first lassi in India and a Kingfisher beer, and lingered for a bit to regain some sanity before heading back out into the harsh streets of Kolkata. 

Next we headed to the Victoria Memorial, built largely by Indian workers (on the order of a British leader) to honor Queen Victoria. It was relatively nice, but the gardens were not kept up that well, the grass needed cutting, and the inside was rather boring, except for an interesting corner that discussed the history of Kolkata.   

After a long day of walking around, we went back to the apartment to rest and get away from the noise and madness. For dinner, we went to a Bengali restaurant near the apartment called 6 Ballygrunge Place. We had a great chickpea dal with cashews in it, fish steamed in banana leaf with mustard sauce, and bread. It was so good that we forgot to take a picture! We were also kind of caught off guard by the service – they brought our dishes out and put the food on our plates for us too! For dessert we had a sweet yogurt while we finished our mocktails. 

The next day our goal was to buy our train tickets to our next destination, Varanasi. The normal Indian railways tickets that are sold online sell out fairly early in advance, but they keep some tickets aside for international tourists who book at the last minute. The only problem is that you have to find the one foreign ticket office in town to book them. After our exciting walking trip the previous day, we decided to catch an Uber to the ticket office. We waited for an hour and a half to get our tickets, because a ton of people from Bangladesh (very close to Kolkata) were buying tickets for what seemed like their whole families. Eventually we got a ticket for a sleeper train the next evening to Varanasi, and headed out to lunch. 

We walked the 2ish km to the restaurant, and it seemed like it took forever to get there because there was so much traffic and people and cars and rickshaws and cows and junk in the way. We got to Arsalan at like 4pm, and ate a huge meal – biryani and special naan. The biryani (rice dish on the right) had mutton, egg, and potato buried under the rice, and the special naan was phenomenal – it had several spices on it, including sesame and anise seed, as well as a few others I didn’t recognize. Overall it was a great meal and filled us up for most of the day. 

We stopped at the grocery store before heading home for the evening, and I prepared for a phone interview I had that night with a pharmacy in Portland. We ordered delivery for dinner from a restaurant around the corner, and had a spicy green chili mutton dish with rice that was very good but also very spicy – the green peppers in the previous food pic were used to make a sauce for the meat, and it was quite spicy but still flavorful.

The next day was our train to Varanasi, so we spent some time relaxing before the long ride out of town. We went back to 6 Ballygrunge Place for lunch and had their Bengali buffet, of which the Dol Murgi – the gray-ish chicken in the middle- and the Saag Bhaja –  the sweet potatoes on the right – were the best.

We took an Uber to the train station and tried to snap a few last minute photos along the way (I hadn’t taken many in Kolkata because I was getting stared at enough, didn’t want to have my camera out too). 

We got to the very busy train station a bit early with nothing to do and really nowhere to sit but on the floor, but soon enough we got to our nicely air conditioned seats and rode out of town exactly on time, off to our next stop, Varanasi!