Saturday, June 13, 2015

First night in Kolkata.

I am too tired to process the sheer strangeness of the heat, noise, colour and movement that is Kolkata at night time. Instead, here’s a series of photos from my taxi ride from the airport to our guesthouse.

Chess tournament in the middle of an intersection. As we went past the older man on the right started shouting and flipped the board over very dramatically. I never got to see what happened next but I imagine it was eventful.




Bus, auto and car all honking furiously and ignoring eachother. The cacophony of beeps is actually quite melodic, you start noticing the rhythms and waiting for the next giant “HONK!” or bitchy little “meep meep meep.”

The traffic is so continuous, every time I tried to take a shot, someone would pull up alongside me. I have so many accidental photos of surprised Indians. This lady was not impressed.


 I love the horror movie vibe of this picture. It was a butchers-or meatshop as it’s more ominously called- and the guy stood up just as I took the photo.

Our journey took an extra hour as the taxi drivers got lost so we had a great tour of Kolkata. At one point they stopped to ask for directions at a restaurant and the owner tried to make us come in for a meal. Every time we stopped a huge group of locals would start a chain of information to try to figure out where we were going. When we eventually got out a crowd formed to make sure the drivers didn’t cheat us and charge us too much. It was a warm, friendly, chaotic introduction to India followed by a blissful, long overdue sleep.


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