Kolkata - the layover

Salt Lake City. This is where the Hyatt Kolkata is situated. No, not in Utah, USA but in West Bengal, India. God knows why that place is called Salt Lake City as I could see no lake, let even a salty one. It was actually a typical nightmarish Indian suburb with all the typical poor people, rickshaws, cows and sewage lying about. Only the hotel stood as a mausoleum in the middle of the mayhem. By the way Calcutta is now called Kolkata. As Bombay is Mumbai, Madras is now Chennai and Trivandrum is (get some breath) Thiruvananthapuram!!! Understand India? No?! Me neither!!!

However I have a love and hate relationship with that crazy country. When you are far from there you dream in being there. Once you reach any Indian airport you pray for the day when you will catch the plane out of there!!! The food is amazing but it almost always gives you (what better word to put) Delhi Belly, which means, diarrhoea!!! Powerful ones indeed! And so on…

After landing in Kolkata and getting to the mausoleum hotel (Hyatt) I quickly got ready to explore the city! With my Lonely Planet guide in hand I noticed that there should be a metro station nearby. A taxi to the city should cost 100 Rupees, therefore to the metro station should be much less. Got outside the hotel and asked the first cab I saw:

Me) Speak English?
Cab) Me, English.
Me) How much to city centre?
Cab) –he lifted two fingers, meaning 2, 20, 200 or 2000-
Me) Twenty?
Cab) Too hundre
Me) Too much! How much Dum Dum metro?
Cab) –he did not move- and I started walking away – he immediately turned on the engine and started following me and said: Metro?
Me) Yes, Dum Dum metro.
Cab) yahooga lflaflahg hagahglah (some bengali I did not understand) metro too hundre.
Me) No thank you. Too much. – and he still followed me
Cab) Ok. Come Come. Dum Dum I put on metre (taxímetro)
Me) Ok, Dum Dum with metre!

And off we went to some scary place that did not look like anywhere like nearby the hotel. After 12 minutes driving away I told him to stop, got off the cab and paid the fare: 100 Rupees. Great! I was lost in a Kolkata suburb and had already spent 100 Rupees. So I started walking trying to look confident and got into a shop to ask where the metro station was.

Me) Hello! Speak English?
Shop) Yes, English little.
Me) Where Dum Dum Metro?
Shop) Outside, left, hhgaskh hgals hwowue mgalala (more Bengali).
Me) Good.
Shop) laflrere larelrelww llaflas falslg.
Me) Thank you. And just started walking and decided it was too much hassle to try to find the metro. Took a cab who could speak English all the way to the city centre. 200 Rupees. Total 300 Rupees and 45 minutes to get to a place I could have gotten in 15 minutes, paying 100 Rupees. I love India!!!

Anyway, there is not much to see in terms of sights in Kolkata. There is only a palace called Victoria Memorial, build by the Brits and served as the Buckingham Palace of the British Empire in India (Calcutta being the capital until 1912, when it moved to Delhi). There is also an impressive bridge over a muddy river, also built by the Brits. Basically the Brits built the whole city and left to New Delhi in 1912. Nothing was built there afterwards, not even repaired.

I walked for 7 hours under a tropical heat. Got lost many times, bought Bollywood movies, had mango lassi, drinks at the Oberoi hotel, took the metro, made my way through a massive slum, crossed the immense bridge on foot, got told off by the police because I took pictures of the bridge, got a boat thinking it was going across the river and it actually took me upriver for 25 minutes. When I got off the boat I had no idea where I was and started walking looking for a cab to go back to the hotel. First there were no cabs, second there were no cabs who could understand me. Not even Hyatt Kolkata, please. They thought I wanted to eat because many small restaurants in the city are called hotel whatever (Hotel Masala, Hotel Biryani Palace, Hotel Tikka World, etc). When I finally made it back to the hotel I was so happy to be staying in the beautiful 5 star comfort, with my king size bed, flat satellite TV, air conditioning and room service.

What was most impressive of the whole Calcutta experience is that I was wearing a watch, carrying a camera and a bag and looked obviously like a rich tourist. However at no moment I felt threatened, scared or in danger. Were it Africa or Latin America I would have already been chopped in pieces, my belongings sold in the black market and my body parts exported illegally to Europe!!!