Good morning

I'm sure that you all will be astonished to hear that I got up at 5am this morning to go to a flower market. By the time that I got there at 6am it was already winding down but as you can see from the photo below it was still busy by any normal standards. Kolkata is wonderfully quiet in the early morning, with most taxi drivers still getting their night's sleep on the top of their vehicles. From then until 7.30 the city gradually woke up as the parked up cars and trucks left their resting places and took to the roads, street sellers put out their wares and beggars took to the increasingly busy crossroads.

The flower market was an intense sensory experience, but, as is rare in Kolkata, a pleasant one. The sweet nectary smell even took over the usual smells of decay.

The flowers are sold mostly for the temples but also for housekeepers of rich properties and to be sold on by other sellers. I didn't buy any.

I then decided to take advantage of the lack of crowds and walk down to BBC Bagh, a square dominated by 18th century colonial buildings. It used to be called Dalhousie Square but was renamed after the three men who (unsuccessfully) try to kill the British Governor Lord Dalhousie. Kolkata has periodically indulged in renaming squares and roads which is very confusing when looking at a map and even worse when trying to explain to taxi drivers.

In the middle of BBD Bagh is a small 'tank' of water. This, like every spot of water in Kolkata, is primarily used for bathing and washing clothes. As I had stood looking out over a ghat (a jetty near a temple uses for burning bodies that are then released into the river) at the flower market earlier that morning, the mother of another volunteer said that she didn't think they used the riverside space in Kolkata very well, presumably thinking of pleasant docklands apartments like Annie and Dan used to have. I disagreed strongly. A window just uses it for a view. In Kolkata the Hooghly is used for birth, death and every bodily function in between.

Besides, who wants to look at the Hooghly? It's worse than the Thames!

Flower market, tank and ghat below