Free School Street Wedding Celebration

TG and I ran into a wedding parade on Free School St. Monday night on the way back to our hotel. The celebration included a huge neon statue of Ginesh (picture in the previous post) and a ton of dancing, drumming, fire cracker weilding wedding attendees. Leading the parade was a teenager blowing fireballs.

Kolkata Day 3: Getting Acclimated

TG and I are in the Park hotel right now drinking $2 pepsi's and frantically getting the most of our 30 minutes worth of prepaid internet. Surprisingly, there is not much in the way of free wifi here in Kolkata. There's an IT conference going on here on the first floor by the wirelss router so for the first time we're the most unkept ones in the room. Its a little akward but does a lot to illustrate how closely the two ends of the economic spectrum coexist here in Kolkata and throughout the country.

Yesteray, we took a walking tour with Sarah from Sari Bari through Kolkata. We took the Howrah Bridge over the Hooghly River, then to Howrah Station, and after that took the ferry back across the river to catch a bus to Kalaghat. After about 2.5 hours and five miles of walking TG and I split up from the group and went back to the hotel to pick up his bag (just delivered from Lufthansa) and some much missed American underwear. We spent the rest of the afternoon searching for a SIM card for my mobile phone, two power adapters for numerous uneccesary electronics, and an airconditioned bar to have some much needed cold beers. After about 4 hours of searching and 6 miles of walking we had found all three.

Despite 300 years of British influence, queeing is still a foreign concept here in India. If there's space in a line, someone will jump into it and if there's room to form a new line next to the first one, its only matter of seconds before a resourceful person starts one. From the AirNet mobile phone office in Kolkata to the ferry over the Hooghly river, everything is at about 10 times the capacity you would expect to find it in the U.S. Irregardless, the people here find a way to make it work.

We're meeting with Sarah and Beth this afternoon to tour Freeset (sort of a larger scale Sara Bari) then hopefully sitting down for a few hours before dinner to troubleshoot their business issues. For those in the country who'd like to give me a call, my new Indian number mobile phone number is: 983-154-5294. Add 001-91 to the number if you're calling from outside the US.

I've posted some photos from the last couple days onto my flickr gallery for India. Some of the photos and the video, which i hope to upload to youtube the next time we get access, are from the wedding celebration that we ran into on our way back to the hotel on Monday night. The rest are either from the cab ride in from the airport or Tuesday's walking tour of the city.

(the photo above is a neon statue of Ginesh. It was paraded through the street as part of a wedding celebration that we were absorbed into on our way back to the hotel on Monday night; there's a video in the next post of someone breathing fire during the celebration; Indians know how to throw a good party)

From in Kolkata

Graeve's luggage finally arrived this morning after spending a few days in Germany. Kolkata is a blast and a total eye opener. I can definitely see how mother teresa had her work cut out for her here. we're staying at the YWCA now, which although it a step up from the hotel Hilson (not to be confused with the Hilton) still has a cement shower and drainage hole in the wall for the water to flow out (and maybe rats to crawl in). I hope to post some more pictures soon and a more detailed account of what we've been up to.

The pictures above are LEFT: a mud and straw sculpture being prepared the festival of durga pooja - the sculpture is floated into the river where it eventually sinks or dissolves amid fanfair and RIGHT: the entrance to the Kolkata train station, apparently the largest train station in India.

En Route to Kolkata (Calcutta)

The Charlotte airport has free wifi and Thomas Graeve and I are taking full advantage of it. Below is an image of the route we will be taking to Kolkata (they changed the named from Calcutta about 4 years ago). The trip started in Nashville at Noon Saturday and will end in Kolkata on Monday afternoon (india time + 5.5 GMT, almost exactly the other side of the world). Our route includes: Nasvhille, Charlotte, Frankfurt, Hyderabad, and then Kolkata. We'll be in Kolkata for four days working with an organization called Sari Bari, a not for profit that helps reform sex workers, doing some pro-bono consulting work before meeting the rest of the group in Hyderabad on March 2nd.



This will probably be the last post for a while. I hope to include some photos from Kolkata in the update.