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The secret to shopping here is to pace

The secret to shopping here is to pace yourself. Jackalope In this sprawling complex on Cerillos Road you’ll find textiles, furniture, pottery, handicrafts, music, and folk art from all over the world.S. Some pieces are versatile enough to wear on a Wyoming ranch or in a Manhattan boardroom. With 100,000 gifts, toys, books, and cards on display store, it’s hard not to find a souvenir for everyone, from T-Shirts made by local artists to “My Other Car is in the Arroyo” bumper stickers to Breaking Bad memorabilia to jewelry by local bottle-cap genius Goldie Garcia, and much, much more.A. So take a few deep breaths, relax, check your bank balance, then unleash the consumer within and enjoy the immense variety of souvenirs you’ll find in the City Different.August 25, 2014 Weld Studs Fasteners Manufacturers From cheesy kitsch to handmade silver jewelry to the finest paintings by artists of the American West to used cowboy boots, the shopping opportunities in Santa Fe seem almost endless


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Their drink of choice?Brennevin

Anything goes in wild international Berlin. But cities aren’t the only places to find a party. Tip: Head to Emporio de Serra tavern atop the Cantareira, overlooking São Paulo’s skyscrapers, to savor Brazil’s national cocktail, the caipirinha, made of lime juice, sugar, and cachaça (distilled from sugarcane).” He’s lived in the resort town 15 years. is of course way early to quit). One mile away at Amnesia, partiers kick up their heels at the regular Fiesta de la Espuma, or Foam Festival. Islands, too, often spur the urge to get up and dance.you get the idea.. Tip: Wear a swimsuit at Ibiza’s effervescent foam parties—the suds can get five-feet deep (and stain your clothes).m. “Then the beaches and clubs become populated with beautiful people, and techno music again percolates across the island. Claiming to be the “world’s biggest beach party,” the all-night outdoor celebration on Haad Rin Beach, on the moonrise-side of Koh Phangan island, explodes every month with some 10,000 globe-trotters looking to cut loose to techno, hip-hop, and psy trance on a white-sand beach under the glowing night sky. Hot Spots: Beautiful people, globe-trotters, and creative change-agents flock to venues like 360° sky-bar lounge for German techno; sky-high 40Seconds (named for its only access: a 40-second elevator ride), or club-restaurant Felix, where tables are cleared at 11 p. Hot Spots: Can’t make the full moon?No worries—the clubs rock daily, and in Ban Tai village, two miles northwest, you’ll find a biweekly Half-Moon Festival and a monthly Black Moon Festival.” And you know you’re in party-land when the nightclub holds 10,000 guests. Later, the action shifts to laid-back local hangouts, like Mahogany Ridge Brewery & Grill, featuring house brew Olympic Gold and live bands on weekends. And Bacchus is still alive and well here; after dark, when the sun sets on the whitewashed Cycladic buildings overlooking the Aegean Sea, straight and gay celebrants paint the town red. John, and Wynton Marsalis—goes wild during Mardi Gras and JazzFest (April 24–26, April 30–May 3, 2009), but in truth, the party never stops in the cobbled 18th-century French Quarter and beyond. But great parties aren’t restricted to tropical climes. Advertisement 2 of 10 © BRIAN ELLIOTT / Alamy Airlie Beach, Queensland, Australia The Scene: Along the central coast of Queensland, palm-fringed Airlie Beach—a jumping-off point for travelers (read: backpackers) sailing on charters to the Whitsunday Islands and Great Barrier Reef—has emerged as one of Australia’s top places to party.” Revelers may converge on party meccas like Rio de Janeiro, Munich, and New York City for specific events like Carnival, Oktoberfest, and New Year’s, but a great party town is one that buzzes year-round. That’s the claim made by Privilege, a club on the Spanish island of Ibiza (also home to the “foam party,” where cannons spray suds over exuberant dancers until they’re neck-deep in bubbles). Tip: Chill at Fish D’vine rum bar, which serves 74 different kinds of rum—one for each of the 74 Whitsunday Islands. Tip: Always carry sunglasses—no one ever leaves the clubs before dawn. Tip: Although it may be tempting with the balmy temperatures and free atmosphere, don’t go barefoot—broken bottles are not uncommon in the sand. Advertisement 9 of 10 iStock Punta del Este, Uruguay The Scene: “There’s always time to sleep in winter” is the mantra of Punta del Este, the peninsular playground of South America’s rich and famous.O.com Berlin, Germany The Scene: At Berlin Fashion Week in 2009, designer Michael Michalsky threw one of the season’s hottest after-parties—in a derelict swimming pool turned debauched nightclub, where bartenders sported priest collars. jive like Dixieland, funk, and blues. ***y Paulistanos’ unrivaled joie de vivre make the Brazilian metropolis one of the most sizzling spots on the planet. Related: America's Best Cities for Nightlife Take New Orleans., the party moves to New York–themed Soho.

Their drink of choice?Brennevin (a caraway-flavored schnapps) and Coke.m. Advertisement 8 of 10 © Adrien Glover New Orleans, Louisiana The Scene: Sultry New Orleans—the southern town that launched music greats Louis Armstrong, Dr. D-Edge, one of the city’s coolest electronic-music clubs, attracts partiers with a wild dance room that makes you feel like you’re inside a giant Rubik’s Cube. After the bars close, the crowd tumbles over to Mama Africa’s, a DJ-centric club with zebra-striped dance floor and tribal motifs. Four miles up the coast, Crobar creates a warehouselike party atmosphere, complete with multiple dance levels, disco balls, and strobe lights. Locals also love Mid-City Rock ‘n’ Bowl for its live Cajun, zydeco, and rockabilly. Tip: Heading to the airport directly from the party?Bouncers at Paradiso will stash luggage. It’s an expectation that Berlin lives up to, night after night. It’s not a surprise that many of our party towns are in urban areas.. In a spectacular location overlooking Paradise Beach, Dionysus devotees at Cavo Paradiso Club romp around a pool. Richardella cites the “Yampa Valley Curse,” which says, “Once you come to the valley, you are destined to return. Tip: Recover in Reykjavik’s plentiful “hot pots” and springs, including the Blue Lagoon, with 98-to-102-degree geothermal seawater that’s milky-blue from silica and other minerals. Ask Gable Richardella, a ski instructor in Steamboat Springs, in Colorado’s Yampa Valley. “The whole hungover island dozes until around noon,” says Mark Guiducci, 20, a Princeton University student from San Diego, reflecting on his most recent visit. Advertisement 6 of 10 © Chris Weeks/Wire Images Reykjavik, Iceland The Scene: Just south of the Arctic Circle, Reykjavik has midnight sun in summer (a grand spectacle to celebrate) and only four hours of daylight in winter—an essential reason to party indoors, and keep up with the locals on nightly rúntur, or pub crawls.m.Nightpaper. Tip: Some clubs are so trendy they don’t bother with signs. Advertisement Self-clinching 4 of 10 © MAURICIO LIMA/AFP/Getty Images São Paulo, Brazil The Scene: The fourth largest city in the world, São Paulo beckons with New York City–style big-city sophistication doused with hot sauce. 1 of 10 © Hemis / Alamy Ibiza, Spain The Scene: More “party isle” than just “party town,” Ibiza entertains a global crowd of revelers who romp in three villages: Ibiza Town, San Antonio, and San Rafael—a tradition that started in 1973 with the debut of the island’s first (and perennially popular) club, Pacha, in Ibiza Town. to make room for an epic dance floor between two-story-tall lighted pillars. Advertisement 5 of 10 © Chris Selby / Alamy Steamboat Springs, Colorado The Scene: Serious skiing and serious partying sum up scenic laissez-faire Steamboat Springs, which is also hometown to 54 Winter Olympic athletes.


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It seemed a delicious nose-thumbing gesture to possess

Needless to say, the original wall was topped with barbed wire, watched over by soldiers in towers with guns and dogs, and its purpose was not art. Friedrichshain's Mondos Arts sells a "GDR box"; it contains authentic trinkets and a reprinted GDR newspaper. I remember the way grim guards used to inspect the underside of your car with mirrors on wheels. Children were encouraged to report on parents, teachers on students, friends on friends. Pictures of Karl Marx and former GDR leader Erich Honecker hang on the walls of Ostzone, a very funky bar that—like all cult hangouts—opens and closes without warning. Spy cameras, including some that were planted in watering cans, are exhibited here. It seemed a delicious nose-thumbing gesture to possess a forbidden piece of the system—a bust of Lenin, or a military uniform. The Ampelmann Galerie & Shop in Hackesche Höfe is dedicated to the figure on East German crossing lights, known as Ampelmann. There's a boot with a retractable knife in the toe." Maybe. It's a funny, moving portrait of the period; like the Ostalgie phenomenon itself, the movie is about coming to grips with childhood, memory, and history. The trend is called Ostalgie, and it means nostalgia for the East, as in the socialist East German state that fell soon after the wall came down in November 1989. On the air, Witt wore a tight top sporting the logo LOVE THE GERMAN DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC.May 04, 2009 Almost 15 years after the fall of the Ber-lin Wall, the German Democratic Republic, a vanished country, has become a state of mind. There is even nostalgia for the Trabant, the East German car made from 1955 to 1991 and constructed mostly of plastic. There are also memorials to its more brutal realities, none more effective than the Stasi Museum, named for East Germany's infamous secret police and housed in the force's former headquarters on Berlin's Normanenstrasse. There's a museum there, too; the souvenir shop sells key chains that contain a supposed piece of the Berlin Wall. For hip Berlin youth, it's about trend, about fashion; wearing Communist-era sparkly nylon pantsuits and pointy beige bras is a mildly seditious statement with no risks. "For very young people, to remember the old days is to be cool," says Ulrika, a stylish taxi driver. The restaurant is three levels with a club in the basement, and the walls are covered with a mish-mash of decorations, including Christmas lights and skeletons. The hero spends the film searching for Spreewald pickles—a brand beloved by East Germans—for his Communist mother, who emerges from a coma and doesn't know the wall has fallen. "People were locked away for many years. Sedition as kitsch, not as politics. Cookies, candy, and cheap shoes are cool reminders of a lost homeland. Ostalgie represents a yearning for another time, when—in the rosy glow of hindsight—everyone had a job and there was more leisure time, less capitalist frenzy, and fewer assaults from a celebrity-crazed media. WHERE TO SEE OSTALGIE IN BERLINMondos Arts6 SCHREINERSTRASSE FRIEDRICHSHAIN; 49-30/4201-0778 White Trash Fast FoodLUNCH FOR TWO ; 201 TORSTRASSE, MITTE Ampelmann Galerie & Shop40 ROSENTHALERSTRASSE, MITTE; 49-30/4404-8809 1000 Kleine Dinge14-16 WEYDINGER STRASSE, MITTE; 49-30/2900-7792 Schönhauser Design18 NEUE SCHÖNHAUSER STRASSE, MITTE; 49-30/281-1704 Mega Trend Humana45 SCHÖNHAUSER ALLEE, PRENZLAUER BERG; 49-30/440-6333 Ostغير مجاز مي باشدt Shop54 LYCHENER STRASSE, PRENZLAUER BERG; 49-30/4465-3623 EastBerlin33-34 ALTE SCHÖNHAUSER STRASSE, MITTE; 49-30/2472-4189 Trabi-Safari Tours49-30/2759-2273 Café MoscowSee the old murals in the part of the café that has been turned into a nightclub. In the Ostغير مجاز مي باشدt shop, the Spreewald pickles, Othello cookies, and Mokka Fix Gold coffee—all produced by old East German companies making a comeback—taste of home.The border has since been recycled as a little theme park, where actors in uniform pose for pictures with you. In East Germany, one in three or four citizens was in some way involved. And over at Schönhauser Design—where people scavenge the back room for old orange plastic lamps and black leatherette sofas—I find myself coveting a pair of authentic Communist sunglasses. The spying was pervasive. In the unified Germany of the 21st century, there is high unemployment and high anxiety, especially in what was once the East. (I once navigated a robin's-egg-blue Trabant through Germany; it was a sardine can on wheels. The characters are obsessed with the good old, bad old days of their youth: the clothes, the patriotic songs, even the food. Beginning here and stretching for over a mile is Karl-Marx-Allee (once Stalinallee), a grandiose boulevard designed for massive military parades. If you tried to escape to the West, their dogs were given the cloth to sniff. White Trash has become a gathering spot for tourists and internationals, and it serves standard American fare, including burgers, chili, and fries, along with a few international dishes like fish and chips and burritos. White Trash Fast Food This eclectic eatery, located in Mitte, is housed inside a building that was once home to a Chinese restaurant, and much of the original furnishings still remain.

I'm mesmerized by this new, mocking nostalgia for the East, which crops up at places like White Trash Fast Food, a late-night bar in the fashionable Mitte district, with great cheeseburgers and a mix of Communist and American memorabilia. Ostalgie is, in the end, ambivalent in all its incarnations. There are other businesses around Berlin flogging Ostalgie.) Now Ampelmann is back, not only as a signal at many crossings but also as one of the symbols of the new Berlin, available on shopping bags and T-shirts. REGGIE NADELSON is the author of Somebody Else and a columnist for How to Spend It, the Financial Times magazine. Young people who were only children when the wall was up are throwing "Ost Partys" and chugging Rotkäppchen, East German bubbly. Like so much that plays off the Cold War period, Ostalgie is shot through with ambiguities, ambivalence, and profound longing for a golden time that never was. Nowhere has Ostalgie been expressed with more wit, humor, and irony than in Good Bye Lenin! the recent Golden Globe-nominated German film.) Back in the 1980's, when the Berlin Wall not only separated the city but also defined the world, I visited East Berlin half a dozen times. It's not so different from the way Americans sentimentalize fifties clothes and music without acknowledging that the era was also a period of structural rivets Manufacturers institutionalized racism in many parts of the country. They miss certain things. It looked as it was: repressive, gray, frightening, a place locked in for 28 years by its own government. (After the Berlin Wall went up in 1961, the East designed this icon, a cheery little man in a hat, more impish and welcoming than the stiff West German fellow. At the Prenzlauer Berg secondhand shop Mega Trend Humana, the pièce de résistance is a purple nylon wraparound dress, last seen in an East Berlin disco circa 1979.. For a while, as the Eastern bloc crumbled, I, too, was taken with Communist kitsch. Most sinister are the "smell jars. Ostalgie is not associated with Communism; it's about heritage. 34 KARL-MARX-ALLEE, MITTE; 49-30/2463-1626 VESTIGES OF THE OLD EAST BERLINMauermuseum Haus am Checkpoint Charlie43-45 FRIEDRICHSTRASSE, KREUZBERG; 49-30/253-7250 Stasi Museum22 NORMANENSTRASSE, LICHTENBERG; 49-30/553-6854 Eastside GalleryThe largest remaining fragment of the Berlin Wall, which runs for eight-tenths of a mile along Mühlenstrasse, is covered with paintings created in 1990 by international artists to celebrate the wall's collapse.

The show was a curious mix: partly no-holds-barred documentary footage of GDR history, partly a celebration of East German pop culture. Ostalgie is a campy, sometimes defiant, reinvention of history, and it pops up everywhere in the former Communist world: in the KGB uniforms worn by a rock band I once saw in Moscow; in the videos of ex-Soviet leaders shown at a gay bar in St. Our parents' generation knows this is much better, a free unified country, but they lost their country, their culture. I can't help thinking, What if this longing were for the 1930's and early 1940's?What if people were buying up outfits worn not by Young Pioneers but by Hitler Youth?What part of history is it acceptable to preserve, remember, cherish?When do the icons of a brutal regime become amusing souvenirs? Ostalgie raises questions much bigger than a jar of pickles. Last fall, Katarina Witt, the East German Olympic figure-skating star, appeared on TV for several weeks in her own series, GDR. Some of these dogs had no vocal cords; the Stasi removed them so the animals could attack you before you heard them coming. The fact that it's housed in a former Chinese restaurant once frequented by the Party faithful is what really gives it street cred. Intrepid tourists can embark on a Trabi-Safari, a drive-yourself tour of Berlin. When the wall came down, East Germany'sbusinesses were squashed. They are also cheap, as are the pots and pans, aprons, Rotkäppchen, candy, and cleaning products available at 1000 Kleine Dinge (1,000 Little Things), a kind of East German Woolworth." Whenever possible, the Stasi got your scent on a piece of cloth and stored it in a jar. A mile or so east,Alexanderplatz, the heart of East Berlin, shows remnants of the old days: a mosaic mural of heroic workers; the television tower; the former Stadt Hotel (now the Park Inn), a high-rise monstrosity where important visitors to the GDR stayed. At EastBerlin, a spare, recently opened boutique in Mitte, there are chic sweaters and scarves imprinted with the Alexanderplatz television tower, symbol of the East. "The culture was the creation of separation," says Stefan Elfenbein, a leading Berlin journalist. Where does the joke end and the terrible reality begin?I head for Checkpoint Charlie; East Germans trying to get over the wall were once shot dead here by their own soldiers. Discarded with disdain in the months after the wall came down, the Trabi has become a sentimental icon. But I'm not so sure that you can separate culture from politics, heritage from history. Almost a mile of that wall is left; it runs along Mühlenstrasse and is decorated with murals celebrating its fall, a kind of outdoor gallery. For older people, Ostalgie is different; for them it's an affirmation that their lives under the East German regime were not completely meaningless, and a reaction to the currently depressed economy


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The city government had no nostalgia

The city government had no nostalgia for British rule, and attempts to eradicate traces of the British from the city are sometimes surreal in their symbolic economy. Otherwise you become a museum. This is officially called the Holwell Monument, but it was always known as the Black Hole monument. In 2002 a lawyer named Smarajit Roychoudhury filed a suit claiming that his ancestor Lakshmikanta Roychoudhury, who was the local landowner at the time of Charnock's arrival, should be heralded as the city's real founder. In 1969 the Ochterlony Monument, a 160-foot marble tower that was built in 1828 to commemorate the achievements of David Ochterlony, a general in the British Army who led a successful campaign against forces in Nepal, was renamed Shahid Minar, or the Martyrs' Monument, to honor those Indians who had given their lives in the struggle against the British." The monument was built to commemorate the 146 British settlers who in 1756 were rounded up by the forces of the nawab of Bengal and forced overnight into a tiny, stifling guardroom, in which all but 23 of them suffocated to death. Traffic comes to an absolute standstill at rush hour every day, with cabdrivers actually switching off their engines rather than simply idling at a red light, knowing that the wait to inch forward may be 20 minutes or more. Perhaps the most breathtaking sight in all of Kolkata is the Marble Palace, a wealthy landowner's home built in 1835, the lavishness of its construction matched only by the extent of its moldering neglect. REBECCA MEAD is a staff writer at The New Yorker.

He explained that the monument was once located at a major intersection, and in the 1940's was removed to this inconspicuous corner by the post-independence government of Calcutta. Besides, he adds, if Kolkata's imperial edifices were built at the instruction of British overlords, they were built with the labor and skill of Indian craftsmen, and Kolkatans should make this legacy their own. "This monument was a very nice piece of branding," Chakraborti said. These models, after being painted with bright colors, will eventually be thrown into the river as part of the goddess's festival—and dissolve back into clay that will one day be transformed into more idols, an endless cycle of indigenous religious industry. And there is so much in Kolkata that belongs to an entirely different universe than the stately governmental buildings. Thus a monument celebrating imperial rule became a monument celebrating resistance to it. The Marble Palace, in a twist that Dickens would appreciate, is still home to descendants of the family that built it: several elderly brothers live in one wing, and visitors might well bump into an ancient, toothless brother taking the air on the veranda and looking as much like a relic as the spindly, threadbare chairs edging the ballroom whose wooden floor has long since rotted away. But in recent years, the government and other civic organizations have been starting to think differently about the city's historical legacy. "Economic reasons drive any development in a Third World country," Chakraborti says.) The city does have an odd, transmogrified, Dickensian air about it, but that's not just because the lowering Victorian brick office buildings, with their winding central staircases and wrought-iron fire escapes, evoke the world of Jarndyce and Jarndyce. And alongside the Hooghly River, where British officials and their wives used to promenade, the city government has recently built a short strip of waterfront park (there is an entrance fee) where musical concerts are held. Dalhousie Square, the central district that is home to most of the Victorian governmental buildings, was blighted with ugly new development. By then, though, the public-relations damage was done, and Calcutta was perceived by the world not just as a place that once had a Black Hole, but as one that was itself a black hole—a gaping maw of poverty, sickness, and misery, whose every inhabitant was a leper or a beggar or both. British architects—and their Indian workforces—filled the city with Neoclassical buildings, riverside promenades, and manicured parks, as well as office buildings and apartment houses, all constructed along the lines of European models. Early one misty Monday morning not long ago, he was standing in the run-down, weed-filled grounds of St. John's Church, which was built by the British in 1787, gazing at a large stone monument inscribed with British names that had been stuck, unceremoniously, in an overgrown corner of the cathedral's plot. One of the city's most astonishing sights is the neighborhood called Kalighat, a network of narrow streets filled with the storefronts of craftsmen who mass-produce, by hand, the clay models of deities that are used in the many festivals on the Hindu calendar. Five years ago the town hall, built in 1813, became the first major public building to be renovated. Kolkata and its inhabitants are urgently engaged in surviving the present moment, and the whole place is perched perilously on the edge of dysfunction. Calcutta's Black Hole reputation—exacerbated by the endeavors of Mother Teresa, whose work on behalf of the poor had the secondary effect of establishing the name Calcutta as a global byword for unspeakable poverty—is a great frustration to Chakraborti and others who would like different dimensions of their city's heritage to be recognized. "Calcutta has been marketed very badly," Chakraborti said. (There is, however, an efficient subway serving a stretch of the city on one side of the river, equipped, surprisingly enough, with television sets on the platforms to entertain commuters. Recently Dalhousie Square was included in the World Monuments Fund 2004 Watch List, something for which Chakraborti campaigned, and he hopes that this will be a first step toward reclaiming Victorian office buildings, many of which are in a terrible state of decay, as office space for modern Indian companies. The buildings once occupied by the British need not, however, be haunted by imperial ghosts—at least, so Chakraborti would argue.February 18, 2011 Manish Chakraborti lives in the city of Kolkata—known until recently as Calcutta—where he is an architect and a historical preservationist. "It pervaded the whole city and was detrimental for the whole city. Chakraborti could barely persuade the city to relocate a Dumpster that had long been positioned right in front of the building's main driveway; it was finally moved a few feet over—just enough to give access to the driveway, but not enough to give the illusion that the government thought aesthetics was more important than garbage. Within 200 years, Calcutta had been turned into a bustling metropolis, as much a Victorian city as Manchester, Leeds, or Birmingham, and grander by far than any of them. Calcutta is where British dreams of global dominion were given their most extravagant expression. "If one can establish an economic rationale for restoration, it can and should be done. Last May the authorities agreed that Kolkata's alleged birthday was a contrivance and should no longer be celebrated. Chakraborti, who is 35 years old, is a man of great enthusiasm and energy; he is also a master of understatement.. Chakraborti, who works for a nonprofit organization named Action Research in Conservation Heritage, or ARCH, dedicated to the historical preservation of Kolkata and West Bengal, also conducts heritage tours of the city. The legislation that three years ago substituted Kolkata (the name of the original Indian settlement) for Calcutta (the pronunciation and spelling bestowed upon it by the British) was part of an effort to reclaim the city as categorically Indian, and there have been other attempts to diminish the legacy of imperial rule. Just what those dimensions should be, though, is a politically sensitive matter, since Kolkata's history consists largely of its role as the most important component of the British Empire—a relationship of subjugation that is hardly seen as a cause for celebration in post-independence India, especially in Kolkata, where the Communist Party has controlled the government since the late 1970's. It now functions as a museum of the history of Kolkata, and includes a high-tech audiovisual panoramic display depicting the city's past—the first installation of its kind anywhere in India. It's stunning to walk along these streets and see thousands of two-foot-tall, half-finished models of, for example, Saraswati, the goddess of learning, her graceful figure shaped from clay smeared onto limbs that are fashioned from straw and bound to a wooden frame. There was even a Magic Castle: the Victoria Memorial, a white marble palace with domes and towers and gardens. Many of the public buildings are outright copies: the governor's mansion is a duplicate of Kedleston Hall, a stately home in England, and Kolkata's law courts are in a replica of the statehouse in Ypres—though with an oddly truncated tower, since the marshy foundations couldn't bear sufficient weight to build it as high as the original. Similarly, no effort was made to preserve the architectural legacy the British had left behind. True to its name, the building is filled with fine marble, with intricately inlaid floors and an extravagantly paved courtyard. "If a use can be established for them, why should they be demolished?" Chakraborti asks. The Victoria Memorial mirrors the structure of the Taj Mahal, though it is a Taj refracted through the lens of British imperialism, with a statue of Queen Victoria on her throne rising in front of one entrance and, at the building's other flank, a statue of Lord Curzon, for seven years the governor of

India and the queen's representative in the country over which she ruled but never visited. For a long time after India won independence, the question of what to do with all this heritage stuff did not particularly preoccupy Calcutta's government or its inhabitants: there were more pressing issues, such as how to shelter and provide work for a largely impoverished population now swollen with refugees from neighboring Bangladesh. Kolkata's official birthday, August 24, the date in 1690 on which Job Charnock, of the East India Company, is said to have landed in what was then an undeveloped port, was celebrated annually until very recently. Elsewhere are reminders of the Indian aristocracy that flourished by cooperating with the British imperial rulers." Blind Rivet Nut manufacturers There's little chance of Kolkata becoming a museum of Victoriana, as Chakraborti was reminded when he was involved, a few years ago, in the restoration of Metcalfe Hall, a grand limestone building that once was the imperial library and now houses various government offices. The architects of colonial Calcutta were operating on principles not so different from those that later motivated the architects of Disneyland: they were creating a fantasy space intended to evoke other places and times—one that, like Disneyland, was meant to be a massive economic engine. Rather, they can be put to use in ways that would benefit the city, with their aesthetic contributionas a happy by-product. In the 1960's a boxy, concrete office tower was erected, slap-bang, between the governor's mansion and a large man-made pond, obscuring what had been designed as an elegant vista from the mansion over the water. It looks like an insult to the intended visual harmony, and perhaps it was. Its musty rooms are stuffed with decaying treasures, their advancing ruin caused by age and humidity: vast gilt-framed mirrors now too clouded and spotted to re-flect much of anything; oil paintings whose canvases are so warped and darkened that the pictures are almost obscured, but are said to include works by Rubens and Joshua Reynolds. This, Chakraborti claims, makes more sense economically than knocking them down and putting up new ones. It's also because Kolkata buzzes with a street life that technology and prosperity have all but erased from the West: Kolkatans without running water in their homes use the fire hydrants for bathing or for washing saucepans; the proprietors of stalls selling cheap pakoras or clay cups filled with chai jostle each other for space on the sidewalk; men with manual typewriters set up desks on the street outside the law courts, copying and filling in documents that in the United States would be dealt with on home computers or at Kinko's


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