First Impressions of Kolkata, India! 🇮🇳 (India's Most Underrated City?)

greetings everybody and welcome back today we are in the beautiful city of Kolkata India here in West Bengal uh the ancient capital of India when it was moved to Delhi but yeah this is where originally the British Raj kind of ruled and was the cultural center of India for many hundreds of years and I've wanted to come to Bengal for a long time I never really had the opportunity to until now so although it is summer it's pretty hot out it's it's a beautiful very ancient cultural place and we are going to be exploring it today I'm taking in the sights of this amazing super super beautiful old historic city which as you can see buildings dating back 50 if not 100 200 years so right now I'm just walking around the kind of central area of Kolkata and I'm going to be heading down to the Malik Gat near uh the H Bridge which is where in a couple days I'll be getting on a train in heading to bernardis you'll see for a lot of these buildings A lot of these buildings although they've been preserved quite well are ancient capital buildings because again this was the capital of of India for a long time so there all this ancient Colonial kind of architecture here in Bengal that you don't really see in many other places in India or at least not in the amount you see them here so as you'll see like this one right here randomly it's currently a protected Monument so you have all these ancient cast iron doors they do their best to preserve them as much as they can some of them going back to the 1700s which is absolutely incredible you know so a few things I noticed right away when I first got to Bengal is one it's very tropical here the climate is very similar to Thailand where we've been the last few months and also it's quite clean compared to a lot of places you see when it comes to big cities in India it can be difficult to keep them clean especially compared to Delhi but what I'm saying is check out this incredible all this ancient kind of British architecture these buildings you know with the The Hub of everything going on in India for over 150 years so all these buildings have so much history to them think right here is St Andrew's Church of North India I think this church was built in the 1700s I mean even the the preservation signs here are so old themselves so they started to fall apart but this building is one of the ones I was most interested in seeing it is the original building if you can't see right here of the East India Trading Company one of if not the biggest company Corporation you could say to ever exist on Earth obviously the ethics of the company are Highly Questionable but this is where the company was headquartered here in Kolkata uh as it's now called but back then they called it Kolkata because the British didn't exactly want to uh abide by speaking in the native tongue but thankfully in 2001 it was reverted back to Kolkata the original pronunciation of the building here's the sign for writer building 1776 you can see some of the other buildings over here as well in that Colonial architecture I was saying on all these old buildings it reminds me kind of I've been to to Mumbai once and it's similar when I think a lot of those buildings those ancient buildings in Mumbai here in Kolkata as well have that architectural style that brick style that they're so famous for and that's why they're still here but honestly what I'm what I'm most surprised about I haven't I haven't really seen any people I've been walking around for a good 1520 minutes now and I've not seen very many people on the streets they're quite empty but I don't know if that's just because of how how hot it is now everybody staying inside or trying to find somewhere to be inside or some other reason it's a lot less populated sidewalk wise than a lot of other places I've been in India lots of little food stalls and shops here bu you CH EG CH let me get a little chai real quick so he's grilling this chai on these poles here you can see waiting for it to heat up and boil and we'll have a little quick chai good way to keep your shy hot no matter what time it is pour it now okay oh look at that fresh chai oh but who thought yeah very good that's good chai it's hot out but I haven't had a chai yet since I got here so I want to have a chai real quick look at that chai delicious all right let's enjoy it you can see it's also got these biscuits and cookies in case anybody wants a snack with their uh with their try 10 Rupees so it's hard to beat that no matter where you are in India it's pretty much always the same price which is awesome all right we got some chai amazing chai by the way and now we're going to be walking down closer to the H Bridge the M got we got to take a left up here at this like intersection Road and then we'll head down towards the water and get a good look at the uh so the river here it's to some it's the ganga still but it's technically called the hogly river there's also a really large flower market there which is one of the biggest in Asia a beautiful flower market so we're going to go check it out every single building is just at least 100 years old which is one thing that's amazing to us and that I love is just the history of places like this so take for instance this one this is the galander house an ancient house in building here from the 1800s in Kolkata and that one is well from the 1800s and you can see it even says it up the north British and mertile insurance company so back when this was the British Rod this is where one of the insurance buildings was here in Kolkata just it's so cool seeing all this this ancient history everywhere you look that's no longer you know a thing it's just a preservation a snapshot of the past North British building property of all these ancient businesses and companies back from the British Raj back from when they were trying to oppress the people here B and it's just everything you can think of in all these ancient buildings they tell a story if you can really like look close enough to them but nowadays it seems like a lot of these buildings are no longer occupy whatsoever they're just Heritage buildings there's lots of you can see people living here on the streets outside of the buildings but the buildings themselves seem completely empty making our way over still check this out beautiful little hamon Tempo make an offering real quick I'm going to get a little T loock too from the from punded here is going to give it to me okay all right little Tikka from the uh Temple give a little offering to Lord honaman and now we're going to get down to the river look how old these sidewalks are okay okay so this side over here must be the entrance and you can see from the G the H Bridge so we'll make our way over there I'm glad I'm breaking up this visit though to India for this region especially into uh just an hour or two out because when it's this hot out it's hard to be out for a while I've only been out for about a half hour now it's you can really feel it all right let's go check out the m g about the truck here the big flower market as well go see what we can find and there's a lot of fairies too there's fairies on every point of the down the hogly river that will take you across the river or farther down the river very so much what they have in places like Bangkok and whatnot stopped the road is stopped I think a train is coming don't know if we should pass or not so we got the gates down for the car so that these trains as you can see can come through here and make their way across but right now there's no trains so we going to go ahead and cross the uh cross the road everybody else's and make our way down to the G you can see way in the distance that's the uh the H Bridge which is this huge steel Archway Bridge that's also very old but very famous when you look at pictures or images of Kolkata or if it's ever featured in a movie too you you'll see people do this a lot as well they'll take what they can find what tarps what buildings you know metal sightings and whatnot and they'll make their own homes out of the supplies they can find just so they have shelter at at night and that's one of the biggest things you see especially when you visit India is just the the disparity the highs and the lows are are everywhere you look that okay okay so as we get closer you're starting to see a lot of the flowers for the flower market here wow just entire huge bailes of flower fedal for offerings they usually make them into garlands as well so I assume that's where a lot of people do here they'll come and buy them in bulk possibly basil leaves yeah see so he has garlands right there so they'll tie them into garlands and then use them as offerings or they'll bath the deities in the Garland offerings wrap them around their necks and so forth every day or every few days it depends now we're right up on the uh Sahar oh I must have missed the G cuz now we're right up to the bridge you can see the uh the H Bridge [Music] here full Steel Bridge right okay yes okay so missed it by 200 200 M I must have walked right past it so the mik gets it right a little bit back here but so that entire Bridge right you can see behind me is a fully Steel Bridge built in I think the 1800s to cross the Hy River beautiful massive Bridge what a cool little market I mean not even little it's a huge Market there just tons of as you can see flower offerings see if we can find the uh the entrance to the gat beauti flowers everywhere what I'm curious about is cuz we're not I think we're roughly 10 kilomet from theed duction War Kali Temple I wonder how many of these flowers used for offerings to go there for uh devotees who are there I don't know but now that you can see I'm unloading a lot of these huge veils of flower so I think on the other side of this building must be the uh Malik guy just going to go try to go down to now and get a view of the river by if I can find the entrance I haven't been able to find it yet okay mik gu this must be it that sign says it so let's go try to get a uh a view of the hogly river first view ah this is why I messed up so it says chog Gat but I think it's actually the m g maybe it's a different name for it a beautiful Temple down there first view of the river look at that wow I'm just what a view beautiful gut it would be nice if it wasn't so so hot but you can just see here the H this huge beautiful H Bridge crossing the hle river and then the hly itself unbelievable it's hard to get a scale to of just how huge this bridge is a full Steel Bridge especially impressive for how old it is and ancient it is and what a beautiful view she's got this fold Gap here Danga so yeah especially it's called the hogi but I mean people like Shri Ram Krishna himself would refer to it as manga cuz it's an offshoot of manga or it is manga when it joins up with the other rivers later and it comes from the same source so he always considered it the ganga so I'm going to consider the Ganga [Music] beautiful and then farther down this way is the balour moth and ruction is for Kali Temple as well man the heat is what really gets you but besides that Kata is such a beautiful historic City I'm really excited to be exploring it for the next couple days taking it in and it's cool knowing you know everywhere you look all these buildings even the inconspicuous ones the ones that are boarded up or not really paid attention to that they too are 50 if not 100 years old maybe even more we got some pundits doing prayers over here and you can see over here too these make offerings to the bions okay so they do pu at this little Temple over here yeah D all right so my camera keeps turning off cuz it's it's too hot out here and it's overheating but what the pundit was telling me is that this little there's a little Shrine here for hamon and then also shivi with a pendit are now they're eating uh but in the form of of B so it's a b a temple on lag Ganga so that is where they have give worship to Lord Hanan and then to Shiva in the form of B all right so I'm trying to keep my camera from overheating but it keeps it's 100 plus degrees so it keeps overheating well we made our way down to the hly river about high noon now man it is telling you it's insanely hot but I think now we're going to make our way back to home base to the hotel try to find some lunch Kata is so interesting it's definitely very unique Place compared to anywhere else I've been in India I'm excited to see a lot of it this week while we're here go to some amazing temples explore some markets and so forth I hope you guys have enjoyed joining me today on our first day here in Kolkata uh there's a lot to see it's been a busy time we'll be in India for the next two plus months so lots of exploring lots of places to visit going to be going up in the mountains maybe doing the CH to chardam and more so it's going to be a really interesting time for sure over the next few months but as we're walking out check this out so you can see this huge this ancient brick building it says unsafe structure please keep away so rather than demolish it they're just telling you not to get too close to it that must be a very very old building I didn't even see this little mahad mandere when I came in but how pretty is that her beautiful little uh Temple or mere I guess you could say so yeah back on the main road day one uh in Kolkata beautiful area sure there's a lot to see here but we're going to be uh heading home now having lunch resting make sure to stay tuned for another few awesome videos in the coming days here in CA before we head to barasu and I'll see you then rum rum

Channel: The Wander Years

Views: 27,134

Keywords: travel, travel video, travel adventure, india travel, travel vlog, india vlog, india travel vlog, adventure, adventure vlog, family travel, travel family vlog, backpacking, backpacking vlog, india adventure, world travel, kolkata, calcutta, hooghly river, kolkata india, kolkata vlog

Id: 0xMXglhWJZ0

Length: 19min 46sec (1186 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 22 2024