Greetings...
from the black hole formerly known as Calcutta!

Like everything in life the last couple of days have been a mixture of the sweet and the sour.

The Air France strike left me waiting for 6-hours on a standby list at Charles de Gaulle, only at the last minute to be handed a business class boarding pass and told to sprint for the plane. I make a bit of a habit of leaving boarding until the very last minute but this is the first time i've actually had to knock on the door of a 747 and ask them to open up.
I slipped back into the luxury of my flatbed seat safe in the knowledge that there was little hope of my bag having made it on to the same flight, and woke up 7 hours later in Dehli to find my suspicions confirmed.

Having filled in multiple 'wheres my luggage..?' forms at Delhi and randomly picked a hostel in Kolkata as a forwarding address for my pack I jumped on a Jet Airways flight and landed here bright and early Tuesday morning. Finding a taxi was a breeze, the ride into town was the usual scramble of bikes and buses, all accompanied by the clamour of horns, and I quickly felt like i'd slipped back into the India groove and was on vacation.

The Lonely Planet describes the hostel I randomly chose as 'cosy'. I'd describe it as a bug ridden flea pit, complete with wildlife in the form of roaches and a mice.

Heres what they left my right arm looking like. If you flip the image 180' you get a picture of my left arm... lets hope they don't scar.

Waking up with the call to prayer this morning I was aware of not having had a very good nights sleep, the reason possibly being the 60+ bug bites smattered all over my body and face. The owners promptly exploded a bug bomb in the room, rendering it a chemical war zone for the next week and upgraded me to a bigger room downstairs, again with the complimentary in room mouse. I'd happily have upped and moved off to a new hostel if this place wasn't the only link between me and my luggage.

Despite all this, today has been a good day. Its lashed with rain so i've sat in a cafe and, for the first time in a long time, had time to read the Economist from cover to cover.




I met a group of volunteers working at Mother Theresa's home for the poor and spent lunch learning about how the charity works and how they're involved. I've also scrambled around a few shops to pick up toothpaste, deodorant, a clean t-shirt etc etc and just a few minutes ago the hostel received a call saying my packs arriving on an Air India flight tomorrow morning! I wonder if its had as much fun as me in the last 3 days...

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