Well, I made it. All the way from NYC to Nice, Paris, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Delhi, and Mumbai. We carried three suitcases and three carry-ons each, which turned out to get a little pricey. From the US to France, they charged us only $90 each for the extra two suitcases, but from Nice to St. Petersburg it was the criminal amount of 12Euros per kilo above 20kg each. So that turned out to be 1300Euros. Ooops. Of course that price tag came with a puffed up attitude on the part of the Air France employees and three different ones of them telling us off for bringing three carry-ons. Nevermind they were all small ones (the carry-ons that is), and there was plenty of space on the planes. They all had to give us a good lecture. But the food on Air France is excellent, so there: you win some you lose some.
Of course going from St. Petersburg to Delhi was another $11 per kilo above 20kg, but luckily we left a lot of stuff with Ksenia’s best friend in St. Petersburg, so my bill was only $300 and I guess we’ll see how much Ksenia’s bill will be when she gets here in two weeks.
Russian and Indian airports seem to be in competition on who can be the most ludicrously inefficient and annoying (then again, on the way into St. Petersburg, one Russian customs guy helped us quite a bit, when one of our suitcases didn’t arrive and he didn’t make us go through customs again when we finally picked it up the next day). NYC airport gets the first prize for having a complete bitch of a security woman not even flinching a millisecond and simply continuing her blank fuck you all stare as she drops my passport and waits for me to pick it up while my hands are full. Anyways, for some reason, you pass five or six security stations in both St. Petersburg and Moscow. Not that anyone really seems to look at anything and it’s not like anybody at all couldn’t just walk around from the street straight to the aircrafts in St. Petersburg without much hassle. But for some reason, in St. Petersburg, the boarding cards get ripped off the tickets on the stairways to the aircraft, in wind and rain, by a single Aeroflot employee with a broken umbrella.
Aeroflot food was predictably crap compared to Air France, but the aircraft had an unbelievably high ceiling and the seats weren’t numbered at all. Or so I thought untill I found them above the trays on the back of the seats. Except those seat numbers indicated the seat whose back they were on, not the seat from which you could actually see the number. Luckily I was not the only one who was confused; half the people on the plane, most of them Russian, had no clue, so there was a lot of moving about to get into the right seats going on before everyone was happily settled. It was all very amusing.
The security procedures repeated in Moscow. In fact, I had thought the three hour layover would be plenty of time to have some food and a beer for bedtime, but they were barely enough to make it to the next plane. Different terminal, incredible security checks, ludicrous customs/passport controls, and of course three different lines to pay my $300 for excess baggage. Needless to say, noone knew, let alone gave the slightest fuck whether I’d get charged again in Delhi or even whether my baggage would actually go all the way to Delhi.
Yes, the story repeated itself in Delhi, except at higher temparatures, with more humidity and in the middle of the night. Some more papers to fill out, very important passport checks, the usual drill for the potential terrorists, smugglers, and tax evaders that we all are, and of course I had to schlepp my entire luggage around yet again. For some reason, in Delhi it seemed like one had to get out of the airport all the way to the hot and humid street just to get back into a different door in the exact same building to make the connecting flight. On the street, an army of cab drivers tried to convince me that my flight in fact leaves from an entirely different airport. Maybe I should have taken my cigarette break elsewhere, but it was 3:30am or so and I didn’t really mind, but was rather impressed that they seem to know all flight numbers and times by heart, so they actually backed off when I could give them my exact connection to their satisfaction.
The last leg was rather uneventful, if you don’t count my seat neighbor, who was belching, farting, and scratching his balls with gusto. After landing semi-safely in Delhi, the whole passenger cabin was clapping their hands, but no such entertainment now. To make up for that, the luggage arrived on the wrong conveyor belts, but they did arrive. The air wasn’t quite as bad as it had been in April, since it had rained a bit that night. My hotel pickup driver found me right away, carried me off to the Grand Hyatt (nice pad! yes, slums right next door!), quick shower and off to work. Well, not so easy, nobody in the army of drivers and hotel car pool managers seemed to understand where the hell my office was. So this was the first of what I expect will be endless encounters whereby I am waving a map and giving street names, but it never seems to matter, as not too many people understand my German accent I suppose, know how to read a map, or give a damn about street names in this town. Well, somehow, eventually, my cab driver and I get there. Luckily, I recognized the last stretch from April, so it turned out to be easy. The first day at work can begin.
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