My husband’s work has taken him to New Delhi, and I joined him for a week of hotel adventures while he worked entirely too hard. I had arrived at the hotel Monday and by Sunday we were desperately hoping for more time together; it was the first and only day of our weekend, and I was heading back to Mumbai on Monday.
We slept in and lazily woke at 11:30. All week I had gazed wistfully at the dessert table of the restaurant buffet and my husband finally agreed to try it. We ate our overly expensive brunch and were not at all impressed. My husband, who doesn’t enjoy the lure of the chocolate table as much as I, was downright angry about the lack of food choices. It was probably a great price for the people who drank all of the free alcohol and ate the exotic meats and seafood. But we ate the cold pasta. I had a lot of cheese. We had just woken up, so drinking seemed plain wrong. I did try coconut milk, fresh from the coconut with a hole punched in it. It really looks a lot cooler than it tastes, because the taste was awful. But the dessert buffet did have really good dark chocolate truffles. My endless apple pie quest, however, failed as once again the apple crisp was terrible.
After stuffing ourselves silly we promptly took a nap/worked for the rest of the day (note that the latter option only applied to my husband!). In the evening, I woke and we ordered pizza. Once again the delivery came and the pizza was quite cold. Neither of us felt very well; we were both having hot and cold flashes, and our uneventful day ended with hot cocoa and going to bed early.
I was leaving on Monday, so we both woke early and left the building together. Incidentally, my bowl of choco flakes was much smaller that morning. How can they serve me a bowl that was half the size as the previous bowls? But I didn’t care, because I was going to the airport and I could soon eat American junk food.
My driver clearly wanted to practice his English, and the drive to the airport basically consisted of him pointing to cars and buses and telling me whether or not they ran on diesel or CNG. The buses were nearly all new, and, despite not riding the buses in India, I was jealous of the shiny new green vehicles, just for the sake of Mumbai. Delhi just makes Mumbai look second-class.
I do believe the majority of my blog entries revolve around the airport, and, as I am a consistent person in nature, airport tales will dominate this one as well. As you probably remember, to enter an airport in India you must have a printed piece of paper with your flight information on it. Since the stupid hotel charged $75 a week for internet (which clearly I did not buy), and my photon (like a USA sprint card for internet) was acting up, my e-mail had been down the day before and I had been unable to print out that little gem of a paper. So I, and the other unfortunates who didn’t have it in hand had to go stand in a small room outside of the airport and wait for the people behind the desks to take pity on us and print it.
I do mean that literally. I don’t know what the people do in those small offices, but they could care less about printing that piece of paper for us. I was flying GoAir, which is a lousy airline compared to Kingfisher. Fly Kingfisher if you come here. The employees wear all red and are super nice and cheerful. Even red shoes. That is cool, no wonder they seem so happy. GoAir is like flying in America circa today. Kingfisher is like flying in America back when it was cool to fly (minus the smoking, of course). At Kingfisher, as soon as you enter the airport, one nice employee takes your bags and you follow, empty handed, to the ticket counter, and they print off that magical slip of paper that is wrapped around the handle of your checked baggage that safely directs your bag from Delhi to Mumbai. Meanwhile, immediately upon entering the building, another employee took your precious piece of paper with the flight information on it and prints the ticket. The second employee brings you your ticket right in time for the baggage claim sticker to be placed on it. And you are done! No line, ever (well, so far for me), with Kingfisher.
But, alas, I was flying GoAir. I should really stop doing that, as my husband’s company was paying for the flight. But I picked a good time, not a good airline. And so I was stuck in that little sweaty room with three employees behind a desk. They were doing something, I am sure, I’m just not sure what. When I walked in, customer A being helped by employees one and two. Employee three was busy being yelled at by customer B. I stood around, for about five minutes, waiting for either employee one or two to stop helping customer A and help me instead. The conversation between employee three and customer B got interesting and I made an active point to listen. Of course I was eavesdropping, although I don’t think it counts as eavesdropping if you can hear the shouting of customer B from fifty feet away. Their conversation went something like this:
Customer B: “You told before me you’d have it in five minutes!”
Employee three: “it will just be another five minutes”
Customer B: “Don’t tell me five minutes if it is really twelve minutes!” (Yes, he really picked the number 12 while yelling).
Customer B: “Or twenty minutes! Don’t tell me five minutes if it is really twenty minutes!”
Employee three just stammers….
Fortunately, at that point, the male employee behind the counter decided I was hot (it is the curse of blonde hair in India), wanted to flirt with me, and thus took my flight information and printed the paper for me. A full minute of stupid banter later, he finally handed me the ticket from the printer. I happily left, customer B still shouting.
Of course, the curse of GoAir was not over; I still had to go into the actual airport building. Once I showed my passport and printed piece of paper to the security officer (four people cut in front of me before I pushed my way up to him), I went to the GoAir ticket counter to check my bag and print my ticket. Yes, this is all very repetitive, isn’t it? Why couldn’t the piece-of-paper-printer guy have just given me an actual ticket instead? Regardless, I’m used to the process now.
But remember, I was on GoAir, not Kingfisher. So I went up to my counter. The counter on my left had a guy yelling, too. But he was yelling in Hindi so I couldn’t eavesdrop.
I was quite early, so after my bag was successfully dropped off (no yelling by me!), I made a beeline to the bookstore. I love shopping at airports. My husband’s life goal with airports is to spend as little time as possible in them. Mine is just the opposite. It is a great place to window shop. And book shop. I buy so many books at the airport. Plus, as I said earlier, I get to eat American junk food. The ‘before going through the security line’ bookstall was pretty small, and my ongoing quest to find a new copy of 2 States was denied. I had given my original copy away to an Aunt, and I hate not having books in my actual possession. Even if I don’t read it again for a year, I need to know that all of my books are in my home where I can lovingly stare at them. You never know what book craving will hit next. I’m sure I could just go to a book store in Mumbai and buy it, but then what would I do at the airport? I fly nearly ever week, so I know that I will find it at some point.
I went through the security line. The line was short and no one cut in front of me. Usually, that would be the end of the security line discussion. BUT, I was utterly shocked to see that the security line wasn’t segregated by sex! I thought that in India it was a hard and fast rule to have the males on one side, the females on the other. But we all went through the same line. Go Delhi! I like you more and more. Of course, it did lose the advantage of the super short line for women. But I’ll go for equal rights over the shortened line any day.
I was still frisked by a woman, though. In America, the word ‘frisk’ is mostly reserved for drunk, shirtless men thrown against their car in an episode of Cops. But here, you get frisked each and every time you are in the airport. They feel you up so much that they find the chapstick in your tight jeans pocket. Normally the women who do the frisking are serious, don’t smile, and scare me just a teensy bit. But I really like the woman who frisked me this time. I think she did her job about as well as I would. She first tripped over a chair and fell against the x-ray machine. She wasn’t embarrassed or angry, she just broke out into cute giggles. She straightened up, brought me behind the curtain and continued to giggle nonstop while she waved the wand around my body. It was much preferred to the scary women.
As someone who uses the restroom at least once an hour, I of course do that first thing when I get through security. I then window shopped the entire terminal (it was quite small) and read for an hour before deciding the choco flakes had completely worn off and it was time for some good old fast food.
I selected KFC, because sometimes there is just nothing more satisfying than chicken strips and honey mustard sauce. Well, no honey mustard sauce here, unfortunately… they had cold salsa and ketchup, though. I saved the ketchup for my Freedom fries and threw away the salsa. A nice guy from Tibet sat at my table, and we had a good conversation about his ethnicity. He lived in Toronto, so he confused everyone- was he Chinese, or Indian from the subcontinent of India? When he had long black hair, everyone thought he was Indian from the continents of the Americas. Anyhow, it was very nice to have a conversation with a stranger who just treated you as a human being rather than something to creepily stare at.
But I got the creepy stares, too. After I ate, I sat and opened my kindle. A guy was staring at me SO intently; I had THOUGHT he was looking at the kindle. I was about to offer it to him, in case he wanted to see what it was all about, when he left. He came back a minute later with a friend. “Can we take your picture?” “NO,” I said emphatically. I buried my head back in the book. The woman sitting next to me gave me a dirty look. What the heck was the dirty look for? Am I supposed to say yes? I am in an airport, for goodness sakes. You are all rich people who can afford to fly and obviously have seen a white person before. Just leave me alone. I continued to stare pointedly at my book. After a minute or so of intense staring, the woman turned back to her family. Weird.
I had an aisle seat and the flight was smooth. Of course, I was in India, and pushy people rule on the airplane. Someone, and I still can’t quite figure out HOW, the two people next to me, that is to say, the window seat guy and the middle seat guy, both managed to get off of the plane BEFORE me. Seriously, how on earth did they both manage to squeeze out like that? There must be some dark arts employed here.
In my notes (as I’m writing this over a week later), I had written a funny phrase that I saw sometime along this trip. The phrase was SO good, I didn’t write where and when I actually saw it. Clearly, it impressed me so much I thought it would be ingrained in my memory forever. Regardless, I now have no idea where the heck I saw it. Maybe it was on the airplane, maybe it was in the airport. But here is the phrase:
Caution door may operate.
Thanks for the warning! I wasn’t sure if the door functioned properly as a door or not, but now we do indeed know that the door is in fact a door, and not a painted door like some Wile E. Coyote v. Road Runner adventure. Thanks, sign maker!
I landed in Mumbai and went out to get my cab. It was HOT. Now, before, I’ve been saying, “I live in India, I expect it to be hot, blah, blah, blah”. I hate hot weather, by the way. Everyone who knows me knows that, temperature-wise, summer is my least favorite season. But I had been bracing myself all year, and so I’ve managed to delude myself into thinking it wasn’t that hot. But a week in Delhi, with no humidity, and air-conditioning that I wasn’t paying for had unconditioned my body. It was HOT. Darn it. Michiganders are highly embarrassed to be bested by the weather. We think we can handle anything. My skills are slipping.
It was so hot; my cab driver didn’t even stand outside to wait for me. Usually they stand at the airport exit with a little sign with your name on it. Nope. I couldn’t find my name. So I called him (they always text you the number of your driver). He just told me to go wait at the pick-up location and told me the last four numbers of his license plate. By the way, you don’t say ‘license plate’ in India. It is your ‘car number’. My driver is endlessly correcting me on this.
So somehow, instead of him waiting in the hot sun, I stood there, sweat dripping between my legs. I mentally prep myself not to tip him for being lazy and staying in the car. He pulls up ten minutes later. He can’t speak a lick of English, despite that being a requirement when we book the cars. Even worse, his car looks and smells exactly like how you’d expect a car to look and smell in Jamaica. He had a tropical towel draped over the seats, and the entire car smelled like that Cucumber Melon scent from Bath and Body Works. I can’t stand odors of any sort (from BO to too much perfume) so it was really not my favorite. I get carsick easily, so any odor is really not helpful. I sat there, mentally trying to decide if the overwhelming perfume or BO was better. I’m not sure. But I’m getting used to the BO, at least, in this country.
I tried to give him my address. I kept saying, “Bandra” and “Carter Road” as slowly and clearly as possible. He had no idea what I was saying. He called up a boss/friend/whomever and I said the same. I pass the phone back to the driver, who listens. “Oh! Carter Road” he exclaims, understanding the word when spoken with an Indian accent. Who knows? I really try to say stuff with an Indian accent, but it is hard.
We drove home. I gave him a tip, anyway. I’m a creature of habit.
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