Disneyland India

Back-blogging as I just recently regained internet access, but I hope to be current in a few days:

A panicked "last shot" of sunshine on
the way to the airport in Delhi

Onward and upward... or eastward, at least - that's right, I officially moved onto my new home base, Kolkata! The fifteen of us dispersed after our initial three days in Delhi - five moved south to Chennai, five (including me) went to Kolkata, and the remaining five stayed on for their assignment in Delhi. Splitting up was a strange situation - between the initial orientation in D.C. earlier this summer and the Delhi orientation, it's safe to say we felt like a unit, and breaking up that unit was not a particularly fun experience. Also, the thought of resettlement (or settlement, rather) was still a stressful one, not in the least because a few of us Kolkatans remembered during the ride over to the airport that the Delhi sunset may have been the last one we'd see in months (or so we feared) due to MONSOON. Monsoon season strikes much of India to varying degrees, but it seems to leave Delhi relatively dry. And as a particularly big fan of Vitamin D, I was a bit concerned about the rain situation in Kolkata before arrival... but more on monsoon in a future post.

What doesn't Wikipedia have these days?
[For reference, New Delhi is in the middle of North
India, northwest of me/the red dot on the map.]

The trip to Kolkata went smoothly. Notable, though, were my expectations, particularly those I voiced to my Fulbright friends in preparation for our trip to our new hometown. Of the five of us Kolkata ETAs (English Teaching Assistants), I was the only one that had been to Kolkata before. And in my infinite(ly limited) wisdom, I felt the need to share these two tidbits of information about Kolkata to my friends: 1] that the airport leaves A LOT to be desired (in that it's old, run-down, and a little sketchy), and 2] that the city is EXTREMELY crowded, and the traffic situation is insane here.

With images of my last trip in mind, I was poised at the window upon landing, ready to point out the teeny airport of my memory as soon as it came into view. So, shocked was I when our puddle-jumper finally turned on the tarmac, revealing a nice, large, glass-encased terminal! Seriously. I'm certain whoever coined the phrase "I couldn't believe my eyes" must have gone through a similar experience. My friends joked that I must have very high standards if I considered this airport run-down. My response? I'm pretty sure I further insisted they just wait until they saw the intensity of Kolkata traffic... which only ended up being another false claim! Our plane got in late so by the time we cabbed it to our hotel, it was just about midnight and Kolkata looked like nothing but a ghost town. There was nearly no one on the streets (but for the people that sleep there, a permanent fixture on a lot of Kolkata streets). I'm pretty sure I even saw some papers blow across the road as if they were tumbleweed. It was so insanely quiet, it was eerie.

View from my hotel window: night...

... and day.

I don't know why I was expecting otherwise, as I know Indian cities quiet down at night like nowhere else. The vivacity of an urban street in the evening versus that of one at midnight is literally as different as night and day. But as I was travelling alone the last time I was in Kolkata, I didn't make it a habit to go out at night so I think I never really realized how radically different a place it is then. Nothing hits you quite as hard as rare moments of silence after hours (or weeks) of the constant humdrum of a city that contains some 5 million people (and what seems like a million cars with functional horns); the silence hit me hard on that initial ride through the city that would soon become home.

Street view of the scene outside my
hotel room window [see above]

But those moments, as all, were fleeting. Just as quickly as I lost my credibility for "lying" to my friends about Kolkata's streets and airport, I regained it back (or most, at least) when the city's people woke up and emerged from its nooks and crannies, repopulating and re-bustling the streets. And also when one of the city's people told us that Kolkata just completed the construction of a shiny new airport terminal. So phew, I wasn't going crazy after all.

Oberoi Grand's grand chandelier 

It's impossible really to describe how crazy/lively/ busy/crowded Kolkata streets are. I've retroactively gathered that I didn't know the meaning of crowded until I got to India (and later, China). But an even stranger feeling than experiencing the crazy streets is experiencing them through a window - particularly through the window of the nicest hotel in Kolkata. That's right, Fulbright put us up at a 5-star business hotel that makes it on the list of places to see in many travel guides about this city. It's called the Oberoi Grand Hotel (one of many Oberois around this part of the world), but I began calling it Disneyland India because of the weird, sheltered impression it began to give us of India as we got comfortable there. (All in all, we spent about 10 days in Oberois in Delhi and Kolkata.) Don't get me wrong, it was a beautiful place; I could easily have stayed there for much longer (on someone else's dime, preferably). But it was so intensely odd to be in my cushy hotel room, looking out at the street below at a guy sleeping on a mat on his bicycle trailer right outside my window [see photo above of the view from my hotel room at night for some idea of that scene]. I must say, though, that people-watching in the hotel's lobby was a fun experience - the clientele was an odd mix of businessmen, pilots, wealthy Indian couples, American teachers (us and another group), and the occasional young woman in a crazy party outfit (an infrequent sight around town).

That's all for now, folks. Tune in next time for a post about apartment-hunting, our first outings in Kolkata, and settling-in stories.
Bhalo thakben ("be well" in Bangla),
Rach