No lazy Sunday afternoon for me

Every day in India is a rich experience, and yesterday afternoon after I had signed off on my “purple is a fruit” blog was no exception. Ajith had kindly organised me on the Kingfishers flights via e-ticket (which, of course, is supposed be paperless, but you can’t get into an Indian airport terminal without a “ticket”. You might remember, dear reader, my experience in Mumbai back in August when Jay and I had to fight to get me into the international terminal to leave India because I didn’t have a “ticket”; just a piece of paper with the details on it, but it kind of defeats the purpose of the “e”, doesn’t it?)

Anyway, at my request, Ajith had sent an email to the Centaur so that the “ticket” could be printed out and I could get into the terminal. He had not accounted for the woman who had taken his call the night before to confirm that the email had been received and that a copy of the contents would be printed out and passed to me not bothering to actually print out the email. When I came to check out then, and asked for my email …. Ta da! … nothing had been done. The circus began then when the banquet manager led me down a corridor to a room where the “secret computing business” took place and proceeded to try and log in to a Gmail account with a vsnl.com domain email address. All the while the bell “boy” (a nice guy of about 50 years) was haranguing me about the need to get to the airport.

On the basis it was clear the banquet manager had no clue, I simply gave up and walked out, hoping that I would be able to do something at the airport before we passed into the terminal. I was assuming I would be at the right terminal sooner rather than later but this too was a misapprehension. Kingfisher flies out of terminal 1A at Delhi but the taxi driver took me to 1B, insisting that I was in the right place and then looking askance when I refused to give him a tip for the bags I had. It was just as well I hadn’t tipped him because that would have added salt to the wound of his deliberately taking me to the wrong terminal!

I had noticed the road signs and was surprised when we ended up at 1B – on the other hand, I’ve also learned not to take much notice of signs here so I wouldn’t have been surprised if we’d arrived at the right place. It was only after I’d walked for 15 minutes over to Terminal 1A, past heavy traffic flowing into and out of Terminal 1A, I realised that he’d dropped me off at 1B because he didn’t want to negotiate the 1A traffic! Insult was added to injury while the Kingfisher front counter lass gently berated me for being late (as if I had chosen to be so) then encouraged me to “rush” into the terminal to get checked in (at least she gave me my “ticket”, duly presented to the CISF officer at the door). Inside I was given another chiding for my tardiness, along with my boarding passes in crappy seats for Delhi-Bangalore then Bangalore-Kochi – at least I was getting closer to my objective. Well at least in terms of distance – we were delayed on the ground by ¾ of an hour before took off and so the 1 hour turnaround at Bangalore had now been reduced to 15 minutes.

With a sense of the most simple solution (forgetting the 300 OHS regulations that would have been broken if we’d been in Australia, the US or the UK), when we got to Bangalore we were “de-planed” and kept waiting on the tarmac while our bags were unloaded and the 10 or so of us who were making the Kochi connecting flight were shuffled across the tarmac to the waiting turboprop that was going to take us to Kochi (again an hour late, given “the late arrival of an incoming aircraft”). The ever reliable Ajith was there to pick me up and take me, via a masala dosa at the Dawarka restaurant, back to the apartment, where I unpacked bags, packed the washing machine and packed myself off to bed. So there it is, another adventure filled day here in India, and no lazy Sunday afternoon for this little black duck.