More of my journal
6/30 – At the Oberoi after the scariest car ride
We literally just arrived at the Oberoi Grand Hotel, and it
is magnificent to be “home” after days of travel. I am just waiting for the staff to bring up
my bags so that I can shower off my days of travel.
My first introduction to my city has been unreal. As we were landing, it was clear that about 5
airplane hangers had about waist high water.
The planes were immersed up to the top of their tires and some men were
wading through the water around them.
The terminals were on higher ground and we were easily able to disembark
and make it through immigration. My
experience with the Kolkata airport is one of seemingly endless lines that just
lead to more lines. And my approach to
lines is not exactly the same as the approach that many others were
taking. The rule seems to be that if you
leave a little space between you and the person in front of you, someone will
squeeze into that space and you will wait a little longer. Note to self – get comfortable sharing
personal space if a line is involved.
continued 7/1 after returning from the American Center where
we made appointments to register our visas
Well, I didn’t really get a chance to record many of my
thoughts yesterday as we were very busy with meetings and shopping to try to
avoid the realization that we hadn’t slept much and need to adapt to a new time
zone. I managed to stay awake until
about 11 last night. I did wake up
around 3:30 in the morning and had some trouble falling back asleep, but when
my wake up call came in at 7:30, it had to rouse me out of a deep sleep. I should say that wake up calls here are quite
phenomenal. First the phone beside your
bed rings. You answer and say good
morning. Then about 40 seconds later,
your doorbell rings and a man brings in a tray of tea and cookies (or whatever
else you want to request the night before when you arrange your wake-up
call). Obviously this is heaven.
Back to my first impressions of Kolkata and the weirdest car
ride ever
Once we made it through immigration, we waited at baggage
claim for a solid hour to retrieve our bags.
I was feeling extremely sleepy so I looked around and found that the
only bench in the area was free. I
claimed it and had been sitting there a few minutes before a man approached me
for directions to customs. I obviously
couldn’t help him except to direct him to a man wearing a lanyard walking
past. I had decided that lanyards meant
you worked at the airport. I was sort of
wondering why he asked until I noticed that the table in front of the bench
where I had taken up residence was an information desk. I had unwittingly been passing myself off as
the director of information. I decided
it would be a good idea to join the others in my group.
Once we made it through customs with our bags, we met with a
representative of the hotel who had been sent to drive us (or so we
thought). He patiently waited as we
exchanged currency and used the bathroom.
Then we walk outside with all of our carts of luggage, and we are
greeted by a row of Oberoi employees each holding a sign with our names. That is right, we each had our own car and
driver. What?!?! I wish I had thought to take a picture, but I
was not really thinking. So my dear
driver loaded my luggage into our sweet black SUV and off we roared. Yes, roared, not rolled. Apparently our 10 drivers were on a mission
to get us settled into the hotel as quickly as possible. They zoomed down streets where there were no
lines or organization that I could discern.
And they beeped constantly.
Presumably to let others know they were driving. In order to cope with the sheer terror of
being surrounded on all sides with vehicles driving any direction and speed
that they chose, I decided to try to decipher the codes of the beeping. I think that I determined that for my driver
two short beeps meant “I am about to hit your left side, move.” A longer blare meant, “I am going to dart
around you to the right regardless of how close that puts me to the barrier,
and then I will cut you off.” It seemed
like a complicated language to me, and I am pretty sure there were different
dialects because some other drivers seemed to give long blares when they were
attempting to squeeze by us on the left.
All of the roadways were overwhelming. In addition to all of the cars, hand pulled
carts, small little taxi-ish wagons, crowded buses, etc., there were also
hundreds of pedestrians. The sidewalks
were full of people selling goods or standing around, so people trying to walk
to anywhere also used the road. On top
of that, there were also dozens of stray dogs and cows on the streets. I actually only got to see 5 cows and only
one of them gave us a disgruntled moo as we whizzed around him. I honestly have no idea how people can stand
to drive here. It is madness. Even in the streets right around our hotel,
there are just throngs of people and cars bully their way through with lots of
beeping and dependence on people to value their lives enough to get out of the
way. Caitlin told us that around 11pm
the police but barricades around most of the roads so that the cars have to
slow down and avoid hitting the people who use the sidewalks as home. These barricades are apparently like speed
bumps. We returned from the market
around 10 and the streets were still bustling at that time.
