You should ride their insane train system, I hear you have to attack people for a spot on it.
Also you should eat some of their spicy food I hear it's the hottest in the world.
I rode the trains 7 years ago when I first visited India, they're good fun and more than a little bit crazy. I travelled from Mumbai to Delhi in shitty class, which was a great experience for me; unfortunately the girl I was with got groped by some seedy guys as she was seated in a different carriage to me. I also travelled first class from Delhi to Jaipur, which was absolutely spiffing. They gave me free chai and a newspaper to read and I had a butler to carry my things.
Indian food is a bit spicy, even things that have no right to be spicy in the first place. Supposedly Indian cuisine is spicy because before refrigeration all their meat would go off and they'd use spices to hide the rank taste. I'm not sure if that's true or not, or whether it's just classic colonial British bullshit to put down the locals, I'll have to find out. In my experience Thai food is spicier when you're in that part of the world - hottest prawn dishes I've ever eaten. Indonesia has the hottest chilli in the world that I've eaten, and their food is probably hotter than Indian too in my experience. I hear Central American chillis are the spiciest though.
I wish I had some suggestions. I've always wanted to go exploring the asian countryside, in any part of the continent. Are you trapped in the city?
Yeah, unfortunately because I'm only here for two weeks and my girlfriend is here for work I won't get the chance to leave Kolkata, which is a bit of a bummer but Kolkata actually seems like a really interesting city and it'll be good to be able to spend all of my time getting to know it well rather than being rushed from place to place.
Bean, is this just your sly way in telling us you have a girlfriend?
Yeah, we've actually been together for a few months, which might be why I'm posting less. Not that she doesn't support my MonkeyPro endeavours - she came and watched the Member of the Year Awards with me as one of our first dates :)
Tomorrow I'm going to try and visit the cemetery while she does some work stuff, and then I think we're going to check out some trendy streets full of art fags (she's writing an article about Kolkata's resurgent literary scene). Any more suggestions about what to see and photograph would be great. The cemetery already seems like a great suggestion.