March 20-22. Calcutta. Mother Teresa.

Our hotel in Calcutta is quite comfortable. Unfortunately, our couchsurfer was not available so we couldn't discover the city from the inside as much as we would have liked to. Now we just walk around the old streets and drop by an Italian restaurant that serves delicious pizza. The place is owned by an Indian food enthousiast, and whenever he likes a cuisine, he adds a restaurant to his culinary imperium.

We have run out of ideas and energy to be frank, and it comes in handy that this is the city of Mother Teresa. We will visit her charity here and support one of the affiliated orphanages. It is easy to find, and they welcome us. But we are not the only visitors. This is a multi million dollar charity industry of devout followers of mother Teresa. I like to support her though, especially now in days where the Pope is saying a lot of harch and unfriendly things. We explain a nun about Charity Travel, and she nods her head in kindness. Yes we can make a donation and we can visit the place where they are enrolling volunteers. We walk over to another compound where about fifty foreigners are filling out forms and lining up in front of a desk to get their volunteer assignment done. We speak to the man standing behind that desk but he doesn't seem very interested. So we simply donate some cash inside (have to get rid of it in some way) and interview one of the participating volunteers, a middle-aged Canadian woman. She is very enthousiastic about the openness here: they literally take everybody that lines up here with their passport.
Calcutta, what else? A friendly giant, cosy old market streets, motives and moments for your camera on every corner, and you can still sense the British colonialism on some of her streets. There is a cathedral with a stable roof.

I buy the book "the white tiger" on the street.