Durga Puja in Kolkata

---

So I spent a few days in Kolkata with a cool couchsurfer, and did basically no sight-seeing at all. We basically had too much fun eating out and exploring the Kolkata scene.

I arrived in Kolkata from Dubai via Doha at 3:10am, and we in fact arrived a bit early. The flight turned out pretty awesome since I got an upgrade to first class which was nice since it was a 5 hour flight. I didn't really get a whole huge amount of sleep, but damn it was comfortable. A nice dinner, a glass of wine, and even my own DVD player.

When I arrived in Kolkata I took a taxi to my couchsurfers apartment. I got ripped off and paid 800 Rupee ($16.7) since I couldn't use the prepaid taxi booth since I had absolutely zero rupees on me, and the only ATM is outside the international arrivals. I found out afterwards that I could have shown my ticket stub and gone back in, which would have saved me about $14.70. I thought I would be causing a problem with my timing, but as it turns out, she had just gone to sleep from the Durga Puja festivities. We talked for a bit and then I went to sleep with great appreciation.

When I woke up, I decided to go on a quest for two things - a ticket for the toy train up to Darjeeling and a SIM card for my phone so that it would work in India. In order to attack the Darjeeling ticket, I took a taxi from her apartment to Howrah station on the West bank of the Hooghly river. I had forgotten how absurd the number of people in Kolkata is. Everywhere you go around Howrah there are swarms of people, it is never ending. Unfortunately I couldn't take photos to show the craziness.

I went to a bunch of counters trying to buy the toy train ticket, but didn't have any luck. I had previously successfully bought a Tatkal ticket from Kolkata to New Jalpaiguri with clearticket.com, and I figured I could just buy the toy train ticket online. The clearticket website wasn't playing ball with the Darjeeling ticket, but I ultimately found the reason is because the toy train tracks were damaged by the earthquake in Sikkim, and as a result, it makes sense that I couldn't buy a ticket. Oh well.

So on to quest number two. A SIM card for my phone. It being Durga Puja, almost everything was closed. Along Park street there were two cell phone stores open - Airtel and Vodafone. I had heard good things about Airtel and I found their store. After I had waited like an hour, I found out that I couldn't get my SIM card because I needed a copy of my visa, and I needed to bring in the original passport, even though I had a copy of my passport and a passport photo. Grr.... So I figured I would try the next day, but when I tried to do this, I found the store was entirely closed because of the holiday. Poopers. Hold this thought.

One of the really cool things about being in Kolkata at this time of the year is the Durga Puja. This holiday is a big deal here, and people come from all over India to come back to their families and celebrate the holiday. The girl I was surfing with is a journalist and actually wrote a paragraph about me coming to Kolkata without knowing about the holiday. Made first page. So now I am famous in Kolkata. Or something.

I was able to wander around and see a lot of the Pandals that are built by people in the city at great expense. At each of the pandals there are guys burning large amounts of incense, and lots of people passing through. Here is a video that gives you a sense of the sound: pandal scene. Very loud! Because of all the people visiting the pandals in Kolkata, the streets are totally packed. Here is a video that shows one street crossing, with police blocking the streets to allow traffic to flow. Honestly I was quite impressed with how smoothly everything ran considering how many people they needed to manage. I have to say though, the people that we saw celebrating the Durga Puja with liquor made quite big fools of themselves. At one meal we were neighbors of one hilariously drunk soap opera. I missed out on some of the fun due to the language barrier, but some fun was language independent.

I still hadn't given up on the thought of finding a SIM card, and as I was wandering around looking for a STD booth to call my surfer, I found a vendor who was selling SIM cards for Airtel. I gave him my passport photo, my copy of my passport, and he was able to get my SIM card fired up. But he didn't seem to have submitted my documents properly because my SIM card died a week later. Boo.

My surfer's friends were a lot of fun, and I feel like I learned a lot about India. We ate some delicious food, loads of shrimp, and some delightful curries. Because of the holidays, we were able to go to a Bengali place for a good Bengali Thali with a monstrous prawn and other stuff. And I even got to practice eating with my hands again. And then back up the mountain to Darjeeling.

---