This is definitely not the Hilton....

(Posted on September 11, 2010)

Saturday morning after arriving at the Kolkata airport, we were met by a driver to take us to the hotel in the Ballygunge area.  The drive took approximately an hour and it was quite an experience.  There is no sense of driving laws on these roads, other than to make a best effort to stay on the correct side of the road, which would be the left.  The dotted lines for the lanes could be interpreted as lane dividers in most other places, but here it is ok to drive down the middle of the dotted lines while swerving around other cars, auto rickshaws, and the occasional cow or two.  When someone blows their horn, you don't take it personally, you just blow your horn just as unneccisarily. This occurs all day and night.  As one of my guide books stated, the people here blow their horns just to let you know they are there.  For all the horn blowing, no one seems to be getting upset or angry about it, as they would be elsewhere.

After driving from the airport through different parts of the city, we got an interesting look at buildings in various stages of construction with scaffolding that appears to be put together with bamboo and twine.  The slums on the sides of the road were devastating, yet the people that were just hanging out on the sides of the street didn't have any kind of urgency or place to be.  They were merely talking amongst them selves, giving hugs and enjoying each other's company.

When we arrived at the hotel, we waited in the car until the driver verified we were at the right place and the security guards inside the fence opened the gate.  The rooms are very basic, yet comparing the building to those around us, it is much newer.  I found out at a party they had for us Saturday night, that the building was turned into a hotel with 20 rooms about 1.5 years ago.

My room is on the first floor (second actually) in the corner of the hotel.  With windows on two sides, I get to see and hear the people and traffic (along with the car and bicycle horns) converging from two directions.  There is a jewelry shop or kiosk directly below my window on the ground level which is a hub for some of the locals hanging out on the sidewalk with nonstop chatter, yells, and whatever.  I don't think I will need my alarm clock as the constant flow of activity outside my windows will take care of that.

The team of 10 of us took a walk around the area last night and found the streets to be filled with people, many celebrating the end of Ramadan.  While we clearly garnered stares from the locals, no one approached us.

Here are a couple pictures I just took outside my bedroom window.  People washing their dishes in the curb.  After seeing another woman squat down next to the sidewalk, I wondered why she didn't have any dishes to wash.  After she got up a minute later and walked away, I realized she wasn't there to wash dishes.  Yet this was only a few feet from the other woman....