The TOPS market chain in Bangkok was great; Phuket had a Carre Four, great quality foods and veggies, and Sangita got some of the ingredients for TomYum soup which she prepared over here in Calcutta.

The grocery store checkout counters do not have the weighing machine feature like in the US, instead you have employees who do this for you when you pack your fruits/veggies.

Blog Date (Oct 23, 2007)
We hope you have been able to get a feel of our travel experiences from our previous email.

We did enjoy the President Park Service apartments in Bangkok (BKK) in the Sukhumvit area. The apartments were very modern and nice. They had a great gym close enough to the NPS gym. The staff were a bit sneaky but overall the interiors impressed us a lot. The outside view is much better in Monterey as BKK is not a very pretty city. We were constantly hinted not to cook and curry up the Hotel interiors but who can stop the culinary taste buds of the Bengalis :)

We almost got stuck in BKK as our flight was cancelled. We had to knock on airline doors to get us out of BKK on time. This is again something bad about Cathay Pacific as they refused to take responsibility for a leg of the journey that involved another airline, even though we paid our full trip airfare to them. Also our Sunnyvale travel agent was no help from the other side of the globe.

We later learned that the Indian government bureaucracy was partly to blame as two of India's airlines run by the government were merging, so they decided to cancel flights and basically leave the passengers to fend for themselves. We have more flights with them and we have learnt that some of their problems have been resolved but we are keeping our fingers crossed.

When one hears about India's high-tech genius they would assume that India is all very modern compared to the US, but is so untrue and false. All the modernization is in the grey matter and an average Indian lives in a schizophrenic state of several centuries.

My dad (Arijit's father Umapada or UP) visited pre-unification East Germany. It was basically lots of pictures of buildings in ruins. That is how Calcutta is, plus the pollution, dirt, over-population and general chaos. At the same time some of the Billionaire Industrial families of India hail from this "city of Joy" which Mother Teresa adopted as her home.

When we reached Calcutta we found virtually no waiting lines, unlike Bombay or Delhi or Bangalore, and a very polite and friendly ground staff.