Out and About with New Friends.

Even though we take cold, bucket showers from the same bucket that we wash laundry in and have no AC... there are advantages of living in a hostel. Such as the one we learned today, making new friends. Ally and I met Amanda, from Canada, in the internet room last night. She met us at breakfast this morning and a girl we met a couple days ago, Angela, sat with us. We asked Angela where she went to church and she told us where and invited us to go with. After going with her to the church her team goes to, we went to lunch at South Street mall with a lot of the college/young adults from the church, which is where we met Laurel and Melissa. (After our epic struggle to order our Subway... it's a far stretch from what it is in the States). This is where today's adventures began. The girls and I were talking to Melissa and Laurel about what we should, where we should go in Kolkata. They gave a lot of great advice - such as phrases like side korben: pull over and bus: stop, which will come in handy for when we are riding taxis and rickshaws - and invited us to go with them to see one of the places that they had told us about - Gariahat, a street market that took up the four corners of an intersection. These are the pictures from our adventures:

One of the houses on the way to church this morning.

Katie and me on our second bus ride in Kolkata.
(This first was entirely too crowded and too crazy to photograph!)

Ally with Amanda, Melissa and Laurel on our second bus ride.

The Mehndi Experience (aka Henna) 

We aren't really sure what went wrong with Katie's henna but something did.
This is the mehndi guy fixing it after he took off the first layer.

Dinner tonight. Mine and Amanda's dinners were super spicy!

My henna halfway through peeling off the dried parts.

Katie's pile of dried henna she peeled off under our table at dinner.

Flury's: Fine Generations of Fine Confection for Ally's Birthday!

Indian desserts are definitely different...

During our first rickshaw ride.

Katie taking control of the direction giving on our first rickshaw ride.