Kolkata - Drive, Design and Connect

I went to Kolkata with my friends in holidays. We went there via railways, I still remember the great journey from New Delhi to Howrah through Rajdhani Express. We were three friends who agreed to visit Kolkata after a fierce debate. We want to travel to a city we have never been to. But this doesn't mean us to go to a lonely island. We preferred the city that must be well connected with the rest other parts of India and with good roads to drive on because we didn't want our body to be shaken by jerky roads while travelling the city. Kolkata was an ideal choice for us to enjoy our holidays.

While reaching the Howrah junction, first we kept noticing the size of the station, the number of platforms and the number of people. I at once said this is too big! All my friends agreed. We also noticed the design and cleanliness of Howrah Junction. It is very much common to the Grand Central station of New York. While we were enjoying the beauty of Howrah junction, one of my friend brought four cups of tea with the “Indian Railways” logo. After taking a sip of that tea, we realised that it was one of the worst tea we ever had. None of us agreed to sip it once again. After the tea, we didn't look Howrah junction's beauty anymore. It took half an hour to exit.

It was approx 11 am on the clock. We took a yellow taxi from the taxi stand which was painted yellow from the car parked there. The driver was the bonus because he was also a travel guide for us. While travelling from Howrah to Kolkata, we saw the famous Howrah Bridge and noticed its unique structure. We spared some moment at the Strand Road Riverfront from where we could see an incredible visual of Howrah Bridge. Then we roamed around the city of palaces and noticed the buildings of British colonial era architectural design when Kolkata was the capital of British India. But what we liked the most was the Victoria Memorial. It was Lord Curzon's idea to build a memorial to the Empress of India and queen of United Kingdom, Queen Victoria after her death in 1901 which was modelled on the Taj Mahal. We kept looking its aesthetic design which was driving us crazy. We wanted to go inside but we didn't have much time to invest just looking a building and seriously we had no interest in history at that moment. we had to leave for Delhi in the next morning and so we moved on after taking some pictures of the Victoria Memorial.

Our travel guide cum driver suggested us to visit Alipore zoo. We agreed and he took us there. The zoo was quite big and has many lakes. We saw birds, rhinoceros, giant tortoise, and of course our trademark the royal Bengal tigers. We saw the sunset while we were relaxing near one of the lakes in the Alipore zoo. Then we asked our driver to take us to a budget hotel where we can stay the night. He took us to the Free School Street where we got a hotel where we stayed. In the morning, we left to the Howrah Station to catch the same train to Delhi.

Kolkata holidays will always be remembered by us. We connected very well to the people of Kolkata despite having some difficulty with language. I want to give two suggestion to you if you are planning to travel Kolkata. First, people talking to each other peacefully can appear to be quarrelling but they're not. And the second, don't mess up with anyone who is a fan of 'didi' or 'dada'. In a nutshell, I can say that Kolkata is Made of Great!

This post has been written for Indiblogger contest and Tata Motors campaign #madeofgreat.

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