Calcutta

During the 3½ months I lived in Calcutta, I went to the city to see the sights on several occations, but I did not want to write a post for each time. So this one will summarize some of the things I have seen in Calcutta.
One of the first weekends we were at campus some of us took a trip to the flower market and then to Part street to have lunch. Here are a few pictures from the flower market.

Since it took almost 1 hour to drive to the city from campus, me and the French girl I went to Darjeeling and Sikkim with decided to find a hotel in the city and stay there a Friday, Saturday and Sunday. During this time we went to see Victoria Memorial. It was very fun to walk around both inside and outside, today the inside are used as a museum where they have a lot of old paintings and photos of the city.
This is a few pictures of Victoriw Memorial.

During my time in Calcutta, I became a big fan of visiting the markets around the city, like New Market. The first few times I went there it was very overwhelming, because the salesmen are running around trying to get you to go to theie store or some specific store where that have a deal with the owner, that they get a small fee if they can get customers to come to the store. But after a couple of visits I got use to it, and it did not borther me anymore. I took it as a part of my Indian adventure. These pictures are all taken outside New Market.



Placement week = time for another holiday

In November there are placements at campus, where the first year students are getting placed with companies for their summer internship. During this time there were no classes so we took this as an opportunity to go travelling again. This time I went to Nepal with some of the other Danes and one of the Norwegians.
We started out fine by getting to the airport in good time before our flight would leave. But as we were going through immigrations a few of us ran into some problems. I do not want to get into the details, but it ended up with some of us being off loaded from the flight and then we had to go visit the FRRO in Calcutta. After some problems and a phone call to the Danish embassy and a few days of going back and forth to the FRRO we managed to get the paperwork fixed and got on a flight 3 days after the rest of our group.
This was a very emotional experience because we had looked forward to the trip for a long time, and just wated to go. But in the end we ended up getting to Nepal. :-)
Here are a few pictures from the drive from the airport to our hotel, where we meet up with the rest of our travel group.

From our hotel there were a good view of the mountains, see this.

One of the days we went to see the sunrice over the himalayas, so we got up at 4 something to drive and then walk the last bit to the view point. I was very happy to find out that the weather was good and there was no cludes. Because I miss the sunrice at Tiger Hill in Darjeeling because of bad weather.

This last picture was taken when we were o our way down from the hill after the sunset, it is one of my favorite pictures from that morning.

This is something I will recormend to anyone going to Nepal, especially if you come from a countrie with no mountains like mine. :-)
During our time in Nepal we also spend a day of sightseeing in Katmandu, here are some pictures of a few of the thing we saw.

Since our trip was cut short I would like to go beck to Nepal at some point and spend a few days in Katmandu.

Diwali

Tuesday the 28 of October it was the festival Diwali. Diwali is a five day festival that is also known as the festival of lights. At campus there were events both the Tuesday and Saturday. Tuesday there were decorations, a special festive meal and fireworks at campus. I had an evening class that ended around 7.30 and then everyone went to their rooms and changed clothes into something more festive. Some students made decorations with lights, flowers and rice mixed with color.  After that we had puja (prayer) and food.
Here are some pictures of the light decorations around campus.

The courtyard of the dorm I lived in, was also decorated and prepared for the puja. See the following pictures.

And our dinning hall was rearranged and decorated for the occaion.

After dinner I took a walk around campus with some of the other student to see how the other dorms had been decorated. these pictures are from one of the all boys dorms called New Hostle.

It was a great thing to experience, for me it reminded me a little bit about Christmas, because of all of the decorations with lights. But it was just 20 degrees to hot :-)
The following Saturday there was a party where all of us were dressed up again. This time almost all of the girls including the exchange girls wore saris. For me the biggest challenge was to actually get the saris on, and learn how to walk in it. But in the end I managed with a lot of help from one of the Indian girls at campus that had volunteered to help dress us exchange girl, who were wearing a saris for the first time.
This picture are with all of the exchange students that were present at the party.

A very fun evening where I got to wear a saree for the first time in my life.

Durge Puja - from Sikkim back to Calvutta

As I mentioned earlier, when going back it was again just me and the French girl travelling. We decided that there were a few things we could see on the way back to Siliguri.
We made a stop at Namchi to see the temple there, here are a few pictures of the temple.

Again we had book seats in a jeep that we could go back to Siliguri with, the jeep was very crowded, I think we ended up sitting 10 or 11 adults and children in the jeep.
When we came back to Siliguri, we found a hotel where we could stay for the night, and the next day we had a train back to Calcutta. We were early at the train station and decided that we could go for a glass of juice, so we bought one from this guy.

On the way home we had 2 confirmed tickets :-) so we had a bed each in the train, this was very good since we were to arrive around 7 in the morning at the station in Calcutta, so we needed the slep. When we came back we found a cafe where we could get a brunch. Even though I have come to like a few of the Indian breakfast specialties I still like a good brunch with, toast, jam, fruit, eggs, sausages and so on.
We had found a hotel in Calcutta where we spend a few days since, there was no mess food at campus until the last night of the holiday. So we spend the rest of the time just walking around in Calcutta sightseeing.
During these days we also needed to pick up our sarees for Diwali, we had bough them before going to Darjeeling and Sikkim and only needed to pick them up, and find assessories.

Durge Puja - random pictures of the mountains

In this post are some of the pictures I think are the most beautiful we got of the mountaine while we were in Sikkim. The first ones are taken from our hotel room an early morning.

The rest of the pictures are taken while we were driving around Sikkim, on our way there and back.

Durga Puja - Sikkim

My first feeling when we arrived in Sikkim, was that the climate was wonderful, after almost 2 months of being in India, we had come to a place where it was warm but hot humid, or hot. It was great :-) As much as I find Calcutta charming the climate are very humin and we had not had temperatures below 30 degrees or more all the time we were there. And comming from a Scandinavian countrie I was beginning to miss the weather at home just a bit, even though I love sun and heat.
We spend the first day walking around in the city to see it, for me it looked more like an European city than the India I had become familiar with. As I wrote in the last post Mall Road are the main street, see the picture below.

Most of the stores in Gangtok were on Mall Road or the roads wound it, in the next picture there are a picture of one of the other roads in the city.

I really enjoyed the city, it is small compared to a lot other Indian cities. But most people use it as a stop over to go further north, so there are a lot of hotels, and restaurants. And there was a really good bakery where they made some of the best cakes I had gotten so far in India. It became a place we went to almost 1 a day the days we were in Gangtok.
The next day some of the people we were travelling with decided that they wanted to go further north, while me and the french girl wanted to stay in and around Gangtok. Because we had decided that we wanted to go beck to Calcutta to try and see a bit of the Durga Puja festival.
So we decided that we wanted to go on a trip around the city and see different thing and then we wanted to go to a lake up in the mountains called Tsomgo Lake.
The trip around Gangtok included a monestary, a botanical garden and other things, here are a few pictures from that trip.

The second day we went to Tsomgo lake, this was very nice too. Below there are a few pictures from that trip. The day we went it was very cold and clody, but still the lake looked nice.

This summarices what we did the few days we were in Sikkim and Gangtok. 

Durga Puja - from Darjeeling to Sikkim

The trip from Darjeeling to Sikkim was another experience I had never had before. We found the jeep where we had booked 6 seats, and got our luggage well placed on the roof of the car.

After waiting around for some time it was finally time for us to leave, there was not a lot of room in the jeep but we managed. On our way out of the city the driver stopped and talked with a guy after some time, some guy came with a big closet, the driver got out and helped the man put the closet on top of our bags on the roof of the car. This was a first to me, and of course we were all a bit surprised by the fact that we would be driving with a closet on the roof of the car.
The trip up through the mountains was nice, but after some time the sun went down and we could not see anything. We arrived at the border and had to go in and show our Sikkim permits and get our passport stamped. After this we continued to Gangtok that is the capital of Sikkim. We quickly found hotel where we got 2 rooms, 1 for the girls and 1 for the boys. The hotel was located just across from the mail street of the city, in many of the hills stations is called Mall Road, this will be the main street, and in a lot of the places also a street where cars cannot drive, so it is only for pedestrians. But Sikkim and Gangtok will have their own post later on.

Durge Puja - Darjeeling

During the holliday we stayed a few days in Darjeeling, here we meet up with a few of the other student from IIMC. Among other things we went to a sunrise spot called Tiger Hill see link here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_Hill,_Darjeeling
Unfortunatly the day we were there it was very clouded, and it was almost impossible to see anything.

But close to there were a Tibetan Buddhist monestary that we went to see and after that we went to see Batasia Eco Garden. Here there are a few pictures from both places.

The next fre pictures are from our hotel room window, the view of some of the city.

The day we left Darjeeling we went to see a tea plantation, before we proceeding to Sikkim. The next pictures are taken while we walked through the city and down the mountain to the tea plantation.

We got the idea to go see the tea plantation because we had meet a guy that told us he would be able to show us the plantation if we wanted and what way we should go to find it. We figured it would be worth a look and knew we had time. On the way to the tea plantation we had booked a jeep that could take us further north to Sikkim. This is a picture of how the tea looks when it has been plucked from the bush, before it get treated in the fabric.

The next picture are the tables where the tea are put up to try before it get processed, into the kind of tea we buy from the stores.

On our way back to the city to get our jeep further north I took a few nice pictures of the tea fields.