The flight was fine and I snored. No class at all, that's me. Surprise, surprise, Aiko was waiting for us. She was at the airport with Anita, the girl getting married. Also there, having arrived from another airport, were several people from Anita's family, including her grand parents.
We went straight to Anita's parents' apartment. They don't live in Kolkata and come only for a few days a year but still have a nice apartment and there was a catered party for about 30 people. Frederick, Anita's fiance, arrived with his parents Jacques and Monique. It was a very nice evening and we again ate very well. So far our food experiences have been superb; nothing even close to ok.
Here is Anita with her new in-laws – Jacques and Monique St Hilaire.
I call this picture “Motherly Advice, Fatherly Correction”.
The traffic of Kolkata is more intense than that of Mumbai. When the airplane landed the aisle of the plane filled immediately. The streets of Kolkata are like that with traffic. The open space around the airport runway seemed like such an extravagance when you could see how densely packed were the homes around the airport. This picture shows two merging streams of traffic. The policeman is there only for the pedestrians and only for the foreign, tourist pedestrians at that.
Until December 15, it is wedding season here. So there are no proverbial rooms at the inn. Our hotel, the Bengal Guest House, is on the 4th floor of an old apartment building. The elevator was not functioning when we arrived at 11PM so we had to climb the stairs with our luggage, stepping over the men sleeping on the available flat surfaces. The first few floors were a bit of a shock but the guest house itself was fine although our room had only one large bed, which we shared with Aiko.
The elevator was a noisy affair. I took the stairs.
The grand staircase of our hotel spiraled up around the elevator.
The stairway had a window looking out over the city.
We all made it into the parking lot and set out for breakfast on Park St.
It wasn't so bad. Just kidding. This morning we are moving to a new hotel. Both our old hotel and our new hotel cost about $50/night. The difference is that the new hotel is correctly priced and the old one was worth about $10/night.
In the afternoon the women went shopping and the men went to visit an old lady called Victoria.
There was a large memorial built for her Diamond Jubilee.
England was such a small country but was capable of such grand gestures. Imagine a thin man but who moves as though he were obese. The guide book says that if there were no Taj Mahal then this building would be an alternative. I say that this is the kind of building that you build to memorialize an old dowager while the Taj was built for a beautiful, young queen. No comparison.
Here I am, just to prove it is all real.
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