Kolkata and Shanti Niketan pics (pic warning, obvs)
Happy new year, everybody!
This year we went to my mother-in-law's house in Kolkata (Calcutta to you old folks) for Christmas, and then we went to Shanti Niketan in rural West Bengal for new years. Shanti Niketan is a town where Rabindranath Tagore founded a utopian school and arts community with his Nobel prize money. (If you don't know Tagore, follow that link and read his poetry some time.)
So, some Kolkata pictures:
This is an old colonial-era house in my MIL's neighborhood.
Here's a corner shrine.
This is a poster for the West Bengal communist party, reminding people to vote in the recent election.
Here's a garage door I really liked.
And another.
Broken glass sunk into the top of walls keeps monkeys away.
On St. Stephen's day (boxing day for the Canucks here) we got on a train to go to Shanti Niketan.
This is a field in rural West Bengal. I think they're growing rapeseed (trivia: they came up with the term "Canola" because "rapeseed oil" didn't focus group well for some reason...)
These are the farmhouses typical of the area.
The train had several vendors wandering around: coffee, tea, lemon tea, boiled eggs, a kind of puffed rice with mustard oil and chilies the name of which escapes me, and books. There were also some buskers:
This guy was playing a flute
And this guy was playing a hansa veeda, a sort of mandolin-sized sitar derivative invented by Ravi Shankar for when he was touring (I'm going to get one of these, I think).
We got to the hotel, which wasn't particularly interesting, so I didn't take many pictures there, except for two things. First, the food:
This was our breakfast: dosa (the big triangle; kind of like a crepe stuffed with onion, tomato, and potato), coconut chutney, samber (a sort of lentil broth), chole (the chickpeas) and fried flatbread.
They were followed by jalebis, which are sort of like funnel cakes soaked in karo syrup, and probably a major reason for the diabetes epidemic in India.
Second, my old nemesis appeared:
Damn him.
(That's actually a langur, which the hotel keeps on the grounds because it scares the smaller monkeys away.)
We went to the ashram ("hermitage", roughly)
Here was a band that was playing
And two statues I liked. The gentleman with the beard is Tagore.
I bought an ektara. It's the Indian instrument that goes "boing boing boioioioioiiiing".
That's in addition to this guitar my mother in law got me for Christmas (handmade -- don't ask me how cheap that is here, American guitarists. You don't want to know.)
Then we went to the Tagore museum, which unfortunately doesn't allow photographs, so I'll use some official ones:
That's the university main building
That's Tagore's car 
They had a lot of his artwork up, which is definitely worth checking out.
Since photographs weren't allowed, I figured I would try to sketch a few things. I remember reading one of Tagore's pieces of advice to an art student: "don't draw what is there, draw what you see." So I tried that, and came up with these two:
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