The Victoria Memorial

Victoria Memorial Kolkata

That’s the Victoria Memorial in Kolkata, a memorial for Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom which was built between 1906 and 1921. It’s located in downtown and it’s just about 1km away from the hotel I’m staying.

The weather was looking good this morning and I took a short walk along streets to reach this famous landmark in Kolkata. It’s actually a museum inside. Majority of the exhibits are century old paintings of famous landmarks and places in , together with some canons and guns used by the Bengali soldiers last time.

Nothing much really interests me, except to snap some photographs from outside as cameras are banned inside the memorial.

I’m now in my final leg for this trip. 3 more weeks in Kolkata (hopefully they don’t ask me to go the city nearby) and I’ll be home and ready for my next dive trip.

And after that, it’s going be a looooong 6 months away.

July 6, 2008 | Filed Under Photography, Travels | Leave a Comment 

Terribly Pathetic

What the fuck is wrong with this hotel?

It’s been 17 days since I’m staying here. There aren’t much choices of decent hotels really when you’re stuck in a place where I am now.

This is the one of only two decent hotels here in Durgapur. The ONLY reason I’m not moving to the one next door is because there’s a free broadband Internet over here. Besides, there are things like daily power cut (it happened twice as I’m writing this), poor service, super cold air conditioning and staffs speaking Hindi to me, et cetera. These things don’t piss me off as much as what happened this morning.

I HATE to be disturbed when I’m sleeping. What more after last night’s match between Spain - Italy which went to penalties and finished at 3am.

There was this idiot from the room service knocking on my room door as early as 7.30 am. I didn’t want to get up to open the door and hoped that he just gave up and come later. But instead, he kept knocking, and knocking, shouting ROOM SERVICE! all along. What really pissed me off was the way he did it. It was 10x worse than how my mum used to knock on my door when I tried to skip school last time.

I thought he wanted to bring down the whole damn door, but when he finally realized he couldn’t, he tried to open it with the card. Obviously he couldn’t since I’ve double locked it from inside. He knocked and knocked and knocked.

After 10 minutes of trying, he finally left and I went back to sleep. But after a little while, he came back again. This time he was screaming, HOUSEKEEPING! and bang! bang! bang! on the door again.

I got up, opened the door and with my sleepy face, screwed that poor guy upside down like there’s no tomorrow. He ran away.

You see, the hotel don’t provide the room doors with the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign. Maybe I should bring one from home which I stole from many hotels in the past.

June 24, 2008 | Filed Under Travels | 1 Comment 

Where On Earth Is Durgapur?

When people asked me, So, where are you now?

I replied, Durgapur.

And the next thing I knew was, Where on earth is that place?!!

It’s in state in , about 160km north east Kolkata. To be precise, 23°29′N 87°19′E or 23.48, 87.32.

I was playing around with Google Maps just now, so I thought I would just try to embed the map into this post and see how it shows up.
View Larger Map

June 21, 2008 | Filed Under Travels, Web | Leave a Comment 

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