Calcutta, the sixty-ninth day,

I closed my eyes in a truck filled with cattle and had reopened in a leper colony from the Middle Ages. On all sides could be heard endless deep coughing. By adding a few complaints of several litanies beggars, those 'cay' vendors, crying children and the table was full. The return to India was a bit difficult. I stayed three days with only one breakfast and four bananas in the stomach, thinking desperately I had ordered a meal which never arrived.
After such a disastrous trip, Calcutta seemed to me magnificent. Something of Nice in ruins, and finally heat! My two selected cheap hotels with terrace have proved to be complete, so I followed a guide to dozens of other pensions as complete as each other to finally accept a room in a hovel. Then I changed my mind, went looking for the bag that I had left and there was a mouse in the process of smelling it. I left alone that time to find another room and I decided for one three times more expensive than I could count, normal, there were three beds. It is the room "11"! I swear I did not mean it, "11" really has a meaning in my life, I learned on the top that it is the number of creativity and of femininity with tarot cards (well, well!). Anyway, if 11 would mean something, the 69 of my sixty-ninth day of travel doesn’t! No carnal excitement today! My room is large with a floor covered with mosaics and dilapidated furniture from the 30’s. In addition, there is a bathroom! When there is no balcony, the room must be pleasant otherwise there is no place to rest.

 
Already in Varanasi, I made the acquisition of an Indian film music that proved to be full of all the latest musical hits either in India or Nepal. Hear these catchy tunes all day long had aroused my curiosity about the contents of such a film, and of course it is not in the "free movie show" of Kathmandu that I could satisfy it. While I was still in the taxi that took me from the station to my hotel, I noticed a monumental movie theather playing it that I memorized the name immediately before I would forget: "Metro". As soon as my housing concerns were resolved, I set out to conquer the Indian delights. I did not care about the quality of my neighborhood and asked for a "bad place" at the first raw. I obtained one on the second raw,…, of  the balcony (in English "circle", I know now). To buy a movie ticket may be a sporting event in India, especially where I had experienced it in Jaipur, where there was a queue by category (five), each subdivided into men and women. The tourists are entitled to some exceptions under the rules - otherwise no way of knowing where to buy a ticket without all the Indians pushing and passing before you or worse, that the window closes under your nose. So I was fortunate enough to have a ticket of any kind and the "chosen" audience of my neighbors allowed me to have a few comments in English on the major surprises, although I was not among the whistling people which struck hands in the middle of the action. The film in itself was a bit annoying with such spread luxury for the destitute. The action was taking place successively in London, Zurich, then in an Indian palace. The hero, a macho man seen driving a Ferrari, a Porsche, a Mercedes, a Golf - all in convertibles with leather matching to the exterior paint - falls for a girl that you see as a hitchhiker, a peasant or a waitress; she refuses, she succumbs, her parents intervene, a little blood when the lover and the suitor chosen by the parents meet, some tears, but finally "Happy End! If the film was not a work of art, the cinema was a marvel of the thirty’s architecture restored in the fifties, just as if The Rex, in Paris, had not been altered since 1953. We think too often of New York for the “cliché” of a movie theater, and then it could resemble the "Metro", a monumental Art Deco building in Calcutta, and a very moving ruin!