Highlights

* Government organized group tour for New Delhi - We had heard mixed reactions to government organized tours, with the main concern on the comprehensibility of tour guides' English. The price was low, and the agent's English was good, so we relaxed. When we got on the bus, we were met with two girls who guided the tour. One appeared to be the trainer, and the other the trainee. The trainee was no older than 16, and appeared to be a high school student. She spoke very softly close to the microphone, and we could not understand much of her Hindi-English.

* Trip to the airport - Our bus was stopped by the police on the way back, so we ended up taking an auto rickshaw back in order to catch our flight to Kalkata. Little had we known that waiting for the taxi at the hotel was even longer. We finally got into a car with a driver who appeared to be half asleep, but became wide awake when we told him our flight time. Next thing we knew was he turned the car around to navigate back roads, and got us to the airport in less than 30min (a record)!

* Navigating the systems - We were surprised to learn that our phone credits were already out when we thought we had paid enough to last at least a week! After talking to and negotiating with the Airtel customer service center, we added more credits on our sim card.

We stayed at the Hotel Airlines in Kolkata:
Tel: 2211-2949/4167/3651/0545

Hotel evaluation:
convenience 4/5 (kind of hidden, but close to the metro)
value 4/5 (the manager refused to give any discount, but on the receipt crossed out the 850, and wrote 935... we felt they probably overcharged us.)
experience 4/5 (the room had a bug, which the clerk caught and pleasantly took away... what worried us was that the hotel had no guests for 4 days before us)