Labor Day and the Sunderban-Tiger reserve

Yesterday was the wildly popular "Labor day". A concept that is still kind of a blur to me. What I've gathered so far is that they celebrate the concept of "working" by not working. That doesn't really add up to me. Like I told David, it's almost like celebrating your friends birthday by not congratulating him.

Also, I met this guy today. I'm still trying to figure out what it is that he's actually selling. It kind of looks like floating cotton-candy. I think his pose is just a tiny bit hilarious, considering the fact that he's selling some of the most gay items I've ever seen. But I guess you have to look that way to sell anything around here. After all, what G around here would buy wobbly-pink-helium-cotton-candy from a pussy? Nobody.


Tomorrow it might be time to pull out some india-pictures. Ergo, be prepared for the following: Traffic, Goa, Camel-spiders in my fucking room, Cockroaches the size of a snickers-bar, and general pictures of the people who revolutionized the concept of "turning the other cheek". As a result, anyone who was alive before 1947 probably has at least one permanent bruise. Just to give you a sneak-peak, I intend on telling you the story about the day that I lost my fear of regular-sized spiders.

Me and my friend were going to visit the Sunderban tiger-reserve, situated close to Calcutta. The journey from Calcutta included:

1. Local bus 3 hrs(a trip that cost about 50 cents = we should have turned around)
2. Cycle-rickshaw 1 hr
3. Boat 45 minutes
4. Auto-rickshaw 30 minutes
5. Cycle-Rickshaw 1 hr
6. Boat 10 minutes

All of them good fun, obviously. At least if you compare it to the feel of chronic hemoroids that followed.

When we finally arrived at the reserve, the staff accused us of stealing 100 rupees from them(which is about 2 dollars) and so we ended up arguing with them for 2 hrs about that, getting a shitty tour, not seeing any tigers(our guide got a phone call 30 minutes after we left saying that they had spotted a tiger. Thanks for the info, dumbass.) and missing our only opportunity to get back to Calcutta the same night. We ended up finding a hotel that sported a sign that said "Rooms 200 Rupees, good quality". We did the customary rock-paper-scissors and I got to go up and inspect the room.

I walk in the door, decide that this is fine and then turn to inspect the opposite wall. This is what I see.


At this point, I didn't know whether I should call the police or Lebron James(since this thing was the size of a fucking basketball). So I ran for my life, ending up in the lobby where the receptionist had fallen asleep. I decided to wake him up.

"What, what?"
"I'm sorry but there is a spider in our room"
"Okay(clearly not understanding the severity of the situation)"
"Correction, there is a baby-dragon in our room, could you remove it?"
"Don't worry, it's not venomous(I hadn't even told him what it looked like)"
"Well, it might not be venomous but it probably weighs more than I do, so could you do something about it, please?"
"Sigh...(god damn scaredy-cat tourist) Okay."
"Thank you!(feeling very relieved)"

The solution was walking into the room with me and sweeping the spider down on the floor. I have never seen that room since then.

We ended up getting the room next door, staying up all night, looking for spiders with only our ipod-lights to guide us(obviously, the power died = no lights, no fan). We left at 4.00 AM and went back to Calcutta. We spent the next day bowling and eating pizza. After all of our endeavours that day, one question still remained:

What the fuck does a tiger look like in real life?