On Tuesday Morning we all surfaced at a reasonable hour as we had arranged to go back to the market to go shopping again - apparently it wasn’t new market which explains why it didn’t look very new. With a little bit or organisation on my part we provided John with a shopping list of all the things that a mixed group of 11 students and staff from England might want to take home. These ranged from Salwar Kameez (these are a more fitted version of the men’s punjabi), postcards, costume jewellery, more punjabi’s, herbs and spices, Bengali books, and what we wrote on our list was ornaments but what i would less affectionally refer to as grocklebait. It was decided that although we were preparing to go at 8am in fact the market stalls were not likely to be open that early so the became to leave at 10am. We have learned that throughout our whole trip the timings tend to slip but no-one ever seems to mind. John had enlisted the help of a one of the female members of staff. Durba Pratra is the Bengali teacher in the school - she is beautiful and always immaculately turned out in modern Indian female dress - she loves shopping so really was the best choice to come with us and find our way around the market.

As before we were herded around the market crocodile style. In some ways this is quite frustrating as the men have to stand outside the ladies clothes stall and the women have to stand around in the punjabi shop whilst the men do their shopping, in other ways it was a very good way to keep the group safe and stop them getting lost or harassed by beggars.

Our first stop was the Salwar Kameez stall, rather like the Sari shop the boys hung back and let us ladies get on with our shopping. There seems to be some problem in the translation of colours which I noticed in the Sari shop and thought it was it was a one off. When I started to ask for specific colours every other colour but the one I was looking for would be brought off the shelf. The other thing is you state a price limit and the first items that are shown you are 5-10 times the limit of what you are hoping to spend. I am not really used to this style of shopping as I am used to being able to see all the colour and style choices on racks rather than having to wait for the shop owner to fetch out what he thinks he might want to sell me. This is an even harder process with 10 other people all standing around waiting to make choices of their own. I chose my Salwar Kameez first but stayed to help some of the other girls make their choices, whilst I was waiting I looked over at most beautiful dress. I asked Durba to find out the price only to discover that it was roughly £20 and came in a variety of colours and designs so alongside my lovely black cotton Salwar I bought a full length dress with a silver skirt and royal blue beaded bodice, it came with leggings a scarf and sleeves that I can sew on if I want. We headed back towards the main road and stopped a stall selling the most garish costume jewellery I think I had ever seen, one or two bits and bobs were purchased either to complete the saris and I think some younger sisters might have been getting the odd trinket.

The next stall was the spices stall. We had a very scary experience trying to cross the road with all everyone at the same time with tuktuk’s, taxi’s, buses, push bikes all trying to overtake one another. Herding 9 students who had no great sense of urgency to cross the road, as they are used to traffic in sleepy Somerset, was an intense experience. On other side of the main road were lots more fruit and vegetable stalls, We turned down an alleyway between the buildings which was so narrow at one point that we had to walk down it single file - this rather disrupted our staying together with John & Durba at the front and Dan & I at the back as one of our polite British students stopped to let some locals come the other way so we waited for what seemed like an age to be able to catch up with the rest of the group. At the of the alleyway we reached a roadway which was rather quieter, less market stalls and these were further apart. We stopped outside one which was a spice stall. Purchasing the spices was an exercise in organised chaos because getting 9 students to pay attention whilst we chose and ordered the spices was almost comical. Eventual we bought 100Rupees worth of saffron each, less than £1 and would be worth about would have been about £8 in England. Most of us bought the same amount of cinnamon which resulted in us each having about 1/2kg of cinnamon to pack, some lesser amounts of cumin and cardamom were purchased and the final bill calculated. We handed over the money and the cash came back in big sack which George carried over his shoulder - Father Christmas style.

After re-negotiating the alleyway at crossing the main road we headed back to the punjabi shop for the guys to buy more of them and for the girls to buy presents for their boyfriends. The last stop on the list was somewhere to buy ornaments/souvenirs. I think this proved a little complicated for John and Durba to locate so we returned to the minibus whilst they figured out where to go next. Eventually we were all herded across the road again - this time at what appeared to be a pedestrian crossing, although I’m not entirely sure that the locals really understood how they are meant to work. We came to another stall which was the most like a shop we had seen. The list of things they sold was outside the door and was a mix of the kind of thing you would buy in Proper Job or Wilkos plus a whole lot of small statues to Hindu gods - this seemed to make our students quite happy so I got to stand in the sunshine and watch the world, or rather the traffic go by.