Travel Day 875 – Kolkata, INDIA
We actually made it out of bed early enough to keep the resolution from yesterday and so we joined the morning Christmas mess at 8.30am…
Christmas in St. Paul’s Cathedral, Kolkata
The funny thing was that this was Christmas day in a Hindu country and only very few shops actually seemed to acknowledge that Christmas was in fact very much happening. But since India used to be a British colony for some 200 years, at least there were some churches around and for me they provided a somewhat familiar, festive atmosphere on this Christmas day. The big St. Paul’s cathedral was naturally the best choice and when we arrived, we had to find out that a lot of other people agreed with our conclusion…
The cathedral was packed to say the least and we first only made it into the rear end of the church. After a while one of the church workers had mercy with us and he offered to guide us into the main hall and show us two empty seats. Even if we hated being treated as tourists, in this case it worked out to our advantage and minutes later we were seated in the nicely decorated main hall…
It was actually really great to be in the middle of St Paul’s cathedral. The wooden décor reminded of some British parliament building and the flower decoration gave everything a nice festive touch. Also the fact that everyone else was dressed in their best suits, made this event feel like something really special. Even if we didn’t have any suits, we were perfectly contempt to soak up the atmosphere, listen to the texts and sing along when we could find the passage in the booklet on our seats…
Christmas items in a store, Kolkata, India
Three hours and two chai later, we felt we had done Christmas proper justice and we went back to the last round of Tablaphilia practice. Even if some transitions between different pieces were still not absolutely perfect, the overall performance seemed really good and what was left was only to hope that the actual concert would work out well too…
For us, what was left today was to end this special Christmas day with a nice home cooked dinner at the house of our teacher… : )
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