The Trip Home

I was not really imagining that I would post anymore for this trip, but I sent an email to a few people about my trip home and realized it was just the kind of witty, interesting commentary that I usually post here, so I'm copying it below:

I had a VERY good return trip.  At least given the length of time and the fact I was leaving so early in the AM.

 I had my pickup set with Sathya for 2:30, and I followed Richard's lead of getting a copy of the hotel bill to look over early.  I set my alarm for 1:30 (and asked for a wakeup call at 2 just in case...it never came; what a surprise!)  Got to bed around 10.  I think I just dozed and eventually got up before the alarm.  Realized I had forgotten to make room for a couple of things like PJs etc.  But managed to stuff the suitcase pretty easily.  I decided to wear nicer (as RB would say "smarter") pants and shirt rather than my usual travel t-shirt in the hopes of charming the BA agent into an upgrade as Lenny apparently had.  Went down and paid the hotel bill by 2:15.  Looked outside and there was Sathya just down the street in the car.  I can't remember if it was this time or a previous time when he was dozing and I gently knocked on the car, but in any case, we were off pretty quickly.

 The traffic was trouble free until we turned of the wonderful new Hyderabad highway onto the access road.  There, there were a small bunch (30? 40?) of people partly blocking the road with cars, trucks, etc.  Sathya yelled a bit and honked a bit and we got through pretty easily.  I asked him what was going on.  He told me it was a festival (right...).  I said, "Really?  It looks like a protest to me".  He allowed as how that is what it was.  (I suspected having read about an upcoming airport strike in the paper...). 

 During the trip we were each professing admiration of each other and pleasure with each other's duties and patronship etc.  At one point, he said to me, "If I ever come to USA, can I be your driver?"  Assuming he would never manage to come and I would not be caught in a white lie I said "of course".  Then he asked if I have a driver now.  No...I drive myself.  .  "It is much easier to drive in the US so I can drive myself.  Here, you need to be a much better driver!"  Which I believe to be 100% true!

 I had already signed and paid for the car, but Sathya really wanted to give me the final individually signed voucher for the airport ride even though he had included that ride in the bill that I paid earlier.  We must have sat their for 10 minutes with him fiddling with the paper and calling his office and them calling him back etc etc till finally he handed it to me.  (Remember this is now about 3:15AM!)  I was glad I decided to go a bit early.  He took my bags to the airport door for me (despite parking in a 90-second drop-off zone; yelling at the guards ensued...).

I said goodbye to Sathya at the door.  I'll miss his chipper attitude, and the insights into his life that he occasionally shared.

Inside, the line was short and easy with my internet boarding pass.  However the shirt and charm did not help.  No upgrade.  Ah well.  Security was the opposite of most security places in India.  (Many places we went had a metal detector with people crowding through it and which went off all the time and was ignored.)  In this case, they took all the normal care of getting metal etc out of pockets and the metal detector did NOT go off, but I still got the once-over with a handheld metal detector.  (And when the plane was loaded there was yet another fairly serious body-search.  No, not cavity...  Stand on a pedastal and get patted down fairly seriously with questions asked about items in pocket.)

 In the plane, I had chosen a bulkhead seat on the aisle.  There was an Indian woman beside me who had a baby, about 6-8 months.  At various times s/he was happy or screaming.  At one time the baby was looking at me and screaming and I did my usual baby routines:  Making silly faces, playing peek-a-boo with my hands etc.  The baby stopped screaming and actually smiled a bit.  I said to the mother "I guess we made friends".  I don't know for sure who much English she spoke, but she smiled. 

 On BA's 747s, there is a table on the bulkhead wall that folds down for a basinette (sp?) to go on top of.  Shortly before takeoff, one of the stewards came by and said quietly to me that they would be folding that down during the flight and that would restrict my legs etc, plus they wanted to give the mother more room.   If I would accompany him, he would reseat me in World Traveller Plus.  YES!  The shirt worked after all :-)  As we were walking along he said to me that I was being a good sport with the baby.   So maybe it was my winning baby personality and not the shirt.  It also helped that there was an entire row of 8 or 9 seats that was empty in WTP.  They seated me in the back row of that cabin on one side, so I actually had two seats, a window and an aisle.  Plus I could push the seat back without bothering anyone behind.  I don't know how much this cabin costs, but it is much more comfortable than regular coach and way less decadent than business class (say nothing of first class!)  The window seat person could surely get out without making the aisle person stand up, although it would have been close quarters.  And best of all, there was a lot of space between the seat and the side wall of the plane to put feet.  I was able to sleep some even.  And I really did not miss not having a seatmate to talk to.

 The trip to London passed pretty quickly.  I was actually a little sad to have to get off and look forward to a regular coach seat on the next part of the trip.  But at least in this case changing in London rather than continental Europe (as I did last year) meant an extra hour or so in the good seat!  The route we took this time was a bit different.  I think last year we went out over the ocean at around Mumbai and then across the Arabian boot and up between Iraq and Iran (gulp).  On the way to India this year, we came somewhat west of that and ended up going down the middle of the Arabian peninsula.  On this trip we stayed over land the whole way going N over India and crossing into Pakistan around Punjab and up across parts of Kazakstan, Russia, Ukraine (right over Kiev), one of the Baltic republics, Poland, etc.

 This time terminal 5 at LHR seemed a bit more managable, partly because I knew what to expect.  The security guys did seem to keep changing their minds about what they wanted people to do:  Belts, shoes, and jackets were all variously required or not required to be removed at various times.  I ended up having to remove all of them.  Anyway, there really were seats on the far side to put yourself back together.  They were very close to the security outflow; maybe that's why I missed them on the way east.  It still seems like for a brand new terminal, they did not design the security area well.  Anyway, I found another place to sit while waiting:  Starbucks.  I got a Latte with soy milk and then sat in their little seating area.  I found a pretty comfortable table and stayed sipping and reading for an hour or so.  Finally guilt got the better of me and I moved to the other seating area that Lenny had found earlier.  It was also reasonably quiet and with slightly more comfortable than standard seats.

 On the trip back (another 747) I had another bulkhead seat, but this one was an aisle seat on the outside, just behind the galley.   The door between cabin and galley was wider than the aisle so I could stretch my feet into it.  Unfortunately that seems to be one of the cart storage areas, so the stew-people were always struggling and grunting trying to get the carts over a bump and into the storage right where my feet wanted to be.  But still way better than being folded into one of the interior coach seats.  No upgrades forthcoming.  Instead of a baby, my seatmates were two young women; one was a Harvard med student of Pakistani decent, a Muslim from her headscarf.  Don't get the wrong impression; she was a very modern woman, and very willing to talk with me.  She had obviously grown up in the US; no accent other than the 20-something accent :-)  The other woman was of Chinese decent; she was pleasant, but much more interested in talking to the other woman than to me (no big surprise).  And she was in the middle so not much chance to talk to the med-student.  We did get a chance to talk about the movie "Slum-dog Millionaire".  Turns out that she had done some volunteering at a clinic in the Mumbai slums and she found it quite a realistic depiction of them.  I had told her that some friends in India had felt it was not at all a realistic depiction of India.  I agree not of India as a whole, but I felt (and she confirmed) that it might be realistic about a small part of India.  She commented that there was poverty in Pakistan but that she felt the depths of poverty in India were much worse.  I asked if the felt that the heights of richness and even the middle-class in India might also be bigger (i.e. India had more extremes than Pakistan) and she agreed.  Take all this from whence it comes knowing the, shall we say rivalry, between the two countries. 

She and I also ended up beside each other in the customs line after we landed.  No major substance to our conversation except to note that she chose to walk with me and to converse.  I only mention that because it is different from our stereotype of Muslim women. 

Easy pass through immigration; the bags were already on the carosel when I got to the claim area; easy quick interview at customs and then I was OUT.  Ran to a water fountain to drink!  Then outside where Flightline picked me up and delivered me home.  And here I am.

 Unless I think of something additional to say, this WILL be the last entry for this trip.  Who knows if there will be another!  To all my readers who travel, I can only hope that your trips are as interesting and rewarding as mine have been!