Kolkata, India.
Five days in Calcutta, India with stops at Hogg Market, Victoria Memorial, and Mother Teresa's House.
Our guidebook made Kolkata seem like it would be some sort of cesspool where we could only find expensive yet run-down hotels, where we’d be accosted by touts and beggars, where we’d pay too much for too little.
We were dreading leaving our beautiful little Darjeeling, but also knew we had to move on.
Luckily, Kolkota wasn’t as bad as we had imagined it would be. Though, it was also one of the least exciting of places we’d been so far. It was a big city, devoid of cows and goats with mixtures of hole-in-the-walls and big chains. The touts weren’t as aggressive and the pan-handlers, while present and annoying, not nearly as threatening as you might assume.
It was also hot. And spread out. And so in our five days there we did only the bare minimum.
We walked through the markets, where people tried to sell us anything from cat food to chickens. As if we look like the kind of people who need cat food or chickens.
We visited the Victoria Memorial and marveled at the paintings inside. OK…marveled at the air conditioning inside.
We visited Mother Teresa’s House and saw a museum of her life and her tomb.
And we walked around, getting lost on the map, never quite finding everything we were looking for…
