Last Day in India

Calcutta, India

I say Calcutta, you say Kolkata...

Tomorrow morning this India experience will be complete. Time to move on and hop on a plane. Whoooohooo!

I wanted to write about the last couple of days but realized it would just end up as one long rant about the taxi, the hotel, the food, the streets, internet crashes, moldy books, amplified Christian singing, and monkeys on leashes. So, forget the report on Calcutta.

Reading Paul Theroux's book The Great Railway Bazaar he has this to say about the city:

Calcutta had been very unlucky: Chicago had a great fire, San Francisco an earthquake, and London a plague as well as a fire. But nothing happened to Calcutta to give planners a chance to redesign it.

It shows. I guess by that definition, New Orleans has hit the luckiness jackpot.

Tomorrow we hop on a plane and fly over the border into the country next door. We'll be there for a little over two weeks and completely without internet access as far as we know. No posting, no reading or writing emails. I'm taking bets on how many spam messages will collect in my bulk folder in the course of 2 weeks. 700+?

The blog will be a quiet place until the 17th of October or so. Once we reenter the 21st century by crossing the Thai border, it should be possible to make contact again and find out what's happened in the world in the meantime.