wanderings around Kolkata

I spent the entire day wandering around Kolkata looking for one specific site that I desperately wanted to find (the Town Hall that I mentioned earlier). I couldn't find it... and I ended up in a municipal building talking to a bunch of old men.... but I found things that were far cooler and better.

The first thing I found was a great bookstore with amazing biographies of Rabindranath Tagore (learn the name, I'm doing my ISP on him, so I'll say that name a lot for the next month). I bought one, and also bought a book full of his paintings that I plan to cut up and use in my collages. HAH! That's great too.

Then, as I was wandering around the streets of Kolkata and being treated like some sort of low-class prostitute (really, the color of my skin is a dead give-a-way that I'm up for grabs. I was dressed in FULL Indian garb and still getting harassed), I stumbled in the New Market. It was a frightening indoor market full of wacky guys who wanted to show me all the silver and salwars and silks that I could buy. I didn't want to buy anything, so I shooed them off in a rather rude manner (I'm finding myself to be really, really unforgiving when I'm alone in India--I kind of just yell at people who follow me or piss me off) and ventured into the market by myself. I ended up at this little spice shop and I asked an old man if he had any vegetable dyes (in broken hindi/english-HINGLISH). He said "ha-ji" and he got some other little man to run off to get me a bunch of colored dyes. He told me they were "bahut mehengue" (very expensive).... but then we got to talking (they gave me a bunch of Darjeeling chai in garum-garum pani (hot-hot water) so that it was safe-safe) and I explained that I'm an "art student" studying Tagore...

And you see, in India, TAGORE is a big name, especially in Kolkata. Actually, Jawaharlal Nehru said that he learned more from Tagore than from Mahatmas Gandhi, chew on that one for a bit. Anyway, Tagore's a big deal, and so this spice man got very, very excited and showed me how to make the vegetable dyes (add water-not too hard) and then sold me bright orange and this beautiful eggplant purple color for 300 rupees, down from Rs 1000! Quite a deal, I must say.

So, on my first day I didn't find what I wanted, but this was better than some weird museum...

My hotel is a little weird because it's full of travelers to India. I am used to travelers to Delhi, who are all kind of party-going young folk who drink coffee and are from France and Britain. Here in Kolkata the tourists are all parachute-pant-wearing hippies who smoke a lot of pot and sit on the roof doing really bad yoga postures.

I'm going to go eat dinner and hang out with them on the roof, I guess. Namaste.