Things I will miss

• Once I figured out the bus situation, I got really comfortable getting around on my own. Getting from BCollege (Shibpur) to almost anywhere in Calcutta with a combination of bus, metro and taxi was pretty cool. There's different colored buses that take different routes, and depending where I want to go, there's a strategic route I should take that's the most direct and perhaps closest to a metro station. So once I got my hands on a map (which was a challenge in itself) and knew the general location of specific neighborhoods, the next challenge was to decipher what the hell the bus guy was yelling at the stop. If the bus is going Howrah Station, he yells "howrahowrahowrah" in a loud monotonous robotic voice. If I've never heard/seen the bus stop name before, it just sounded like a random mix of sounds that had no meaning. Some of the buses had writing on them indicating the route, mostly in Bengali and few in English.
• I'll miss crossing the Hooghly while sitting in a window seat on the rattling buses. I'll miss the cool bridges.
• I'll miss the small victories I celebrated each time I made it to a new destination w/o getting lost. A compass would have helped tremendously but my internal compass and amazing (if I say so myself) sense of direction gave me the confidence and security to get around on my own, even when the buses did not stick to a route I knew. I knew I would figure it out before the end of my trip, the hard part was just getting the initial information so that I could make a mental map.
• No commitments, no appointments, no pressure to hang out with friends, family, boyfriend, pretty much no social calendar. Although it was scary and lonely at times, it was nice to have very few commitments.
• Working very few hours a day. 5 minute walking commute to lab. 2 hour lunch break.
• Chai
• The hospitality shown by Mallika Maasi and Nandita Auntie, they treated me like family even though I had never met them.
• The joy of hearing someone speaking English, especially with an American accent.
• Reading. I'm pretty sure I'm going to give up this crazy reading habit once I'm back in front of my tv. I'm not ashamed to admit it. In fact, this reading was starting to hurt my eyesight.