Ready for warmer weather we boarded a train to visit some friends from the mountaineering course in Calcutta. As you may have guessed from the title of this blog we are keen fans of the train travel (and Wes Anderson for that matter…okay, until this trip none of us had been on a train but we certainly liked the idea). Alarmingly, we almost missed catching our first “big boy train” (the toy train doesn’t fully count..) as all three of us were on waitlist and we couldn’t find any direction on which berth we were supposed to go into once the train arrived. Luckily we all made it onto the train, which was going to travel overnight to Calcutta, unfortunately only 2 of us actually made it off of the waitlist, leaving one of us without a sleeping berth. As a result Christina and Nouri shared a berth (already made for indian sized folk… which Nouri is not by the way) by contorting their bodies in various renditions of the foetal position throughout the night. Needless to say, it was not quite the romanticized version of our first train travel we had conjured in our imagination.
We arrived in Calcutta at 6 in the morning… way earlier than any establishment that we could loiter in opens. So we found a park with suitable benches and entertained ourselves for several hours eating the most time consuming fruit known to man… the pomegranate. Luckily for us this park was also the popular hangout for the city’s senior citizen crowd, who spend the mornings performing their fitness routines. Highlight of the morning incudes a local senior who chatted us up and performed not only a pretty good cover of “Adelwise” from the sound of music but also rapped us some Frank Zappa songs. Talk about vocal versatility. After a full day of aimless city wandering we met up with our hospitable friends Nikhil and Madhu who cooked us up a delicious Indian feast and treated us to great conversation till the hours of early morn… You heard right Christina stayed awake past midnight (insert gasps here).
The next day we checked out College street area where one can feast their eyes on more book stalls than seems sustainable in a city of any size. We also rode one of Calcutta’s famous antiquated trams around the city. Once they were off work we met up with Nikhil and Madhu for some dinner great live music. Before our departure Nikhil toured us around the flower market and the Ganges before guiding us to our next train to Bangalore—the city of boiled beans.
Thanks again to Nikhil and Madhu for being such great hosts!
The train to Bangalore was pretty amazing. First of all, as we booked our tickets late, we ended up having to travel first class. Not only that, but all THREE OF US had our own berth! Needless to say we were very excited as we boarded the train, would this ride fulfil our train riding dreams? Not to spoil the suspense, but it definitely did. Our cabin was huge and even had a door. As we set about organizing our bunks one of the servers came in to great us with a flower (yes, Nouri got one too) and bottled water. Off to a good start. After the train departed the server came around taking lunch orders (the two options were: “veg” or “non-veg”). Not only was the food good, but it was plentiful. Our meal started with soup and bread sticks, then came out the actual meal (which was dal and rice!, but it was tasty and accompanied by some other snacks), after a suitable digestion period they even brought out ice cream! We spent a couple hours watching India roll by the window (which meant watching a lot of cows mostly) and napping, after which the server came by to drop off more snacks (which was almost a full sized meal). Again, we passed the next few hours reading, sleeping, and gazing out the window. It doesn’t sound particularly amazing, but keep in mind that sleeping and eating constitutes an almost perfect day for most of us...
And so, after 26 hours of read-eat-sleep-repeat we reached Bangalore at about 4pm at which point we pretty much met up with Arvind, our super friendly couchsurfing host, ate a few dosas and went to bed (ya know, because our train ride was exhausting). Our following day in Bangalore could be described as a vacation from our vacation: Bangalore, being the IT capital of India, is a very large modern city complete with Booster Juice and Levis Jeans outlet stores. So in our days here we got legs waxed (not Nouri), beards trimmed (only Nouri) and ate at a decadent buffet on the thirteenth floor of a building where we were obviously judged for going back for seconds on the dessert round (all three were involved in this one). Oh and we also saw a matinee of TinTin in 3D.
That night we met up with Vishal, Smitha, and Shirley, all friends Nouri and Christina met mountaineering. They took us to get South Indian chat (which are basically Indian tapas) and coffee (which is like any filtered coffee, except it’s made with chickory), and then we checked out one of Bangalore’s many restaurants.
The next day we were off to Kerala, the neighbouring state, to check out the famed “backwaters” and tour a bit more of the south before heading to our month of surfing.
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