Warm weather has arrived a little earlier than (at least I had) expected in Boston, so my plans to write about my own neighborhood once tourism season really gets rolling need a jump start as well. The neighborhood is hopping, even in the middle of the afternoon on week days.
I just went to one of the dwindling number of butcher shops to get sweet and hot Italian sausages for a friends moving away BBQ tomorrow afternoon, and was fortunate to have to wait. It was a real treat. I sat in a chair for about 15 minutes and relaxed while 3 white-haired butchers filled all sorts of orders, for trip, kidneys, steaks, and livers from fellow white-haired Italians. Meanwhile a few latino restaurant workers came in and cut the line to pick up standing restaurant orders. Some neighbors stopped by just to gossip, in Italian, with the people waiting, and with the butchers.
On my way to the shop, took a little walk, down to North Square, and back along Hanover Street, to enjoy the crowds. It's still mostly locals at this time of the year, drawn outside by one of the first really nice, warm days of the year. But it's not quite warm enough for just a T shirt, so one of the shops was doing a brisk business in sweatshirts to the tourists who are here.
Earlier in the day, I went to the post office. This too is a real pleasure, even though (because) the wait is often long. Today I didn't have to wait at all, and since no one was around I got to chat longer with the guy behind the counter, who continued to ask me about my trip. The North End is the kind of neighborhood where the people who work at the post office know what I've been up to, when I've been away for months. Today we continued where we left off during tax week, and today he asked me if there were really people sleeping on the streets of Calcutta (which he had heard). I explained that yes there were some, though not as many as I'd expected, and that I found this common in most cities in India.
What struck me about Calcutta, was the amazing state of the old Victorian era government buildings. Some used, some disused, almost all appear in a state of complete disrepair, with facades all but falling off, but many have plaques on them declaring them protected. It is illegal to demolish or harm them, but aparently this doesn't apply to simple neglect. On one level they look beautiful in a way, but at the same time the scene is deeply depressing. And yes, when you look inside some you can see that they have been taken over by people who are living in them, and integrated into slums. And others, are still filled with mazes of bureacuracy, in some cases the same departments they were originally built for.
In other ways Calcutta is a modern, bustling city, with a huge middle class, two local chains of high end coffee bars that have expanded Indiawide, international retail chains, and broad streets filled. The juxtuposition of poverty and wealth is some of the most extreme.
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