Home Forever

Oh my goodness...where do I even start? We have only been gone about 48 hours and already, I am having to stash most of our experiences in the "will process later" box I created in my brain when we started this trip. I will just say that it has been full of "unexpecteds". We are now in Calcutta, we arrived this morning after an overnight layover in Delhi. Tomorrow we will explore the town, pick up some remembrances and try to capture on video and camera as much as we can of our journey. Tuesday, is gotcha day :-) These are our plans...now for a story or two. I will post some and then Brian will give his take as well....
Like I said, there have been MANY unexpecteds. I was not expecting to feel so COMPLETELY removed from the planet I thought I lived on :-) I am amazed at just how reliant I am in my life on familiarity as a source of peace and for functionality. We have a phone card, for example, that I researced to use for international travel in India, and for the life of me cannot get it to work! The communication barrier, pace, culture, every aspect of my life here is completely foriegn to me. I am just completely at a loss to how to put all this to words...But to give you a taste of our journey, let me tell you about our overnight in Delhi. First, we THOUGHT that we were going to be staying at a hotel IN the Delhi airport (we did use a travel agent, and he has done an excellent job, by the way, so I think we all may be the victim of a "misrepresentation" in advertising here). We THOUGHT that we would simply get our bags, find our hotel in the terminal, get a few hours of sleep, regather our thoughts, take a hot shower, have some time to process, just refuel. THIS was our expectation ;-) Here is what REALLY happened....we get to the Delhi airport, (along with three other international flights of about 450 people each) at 1130pm (an hour later than our original time). We stand in long lines and are twice told we haven't filled out some paperwork we need to fill out to get into the country...so we figured that out and stood in our line. At that point, we had to wait for our baggage...and wait....and wait....and wait. I think ours literally was the last off the plane. Meanwhile, I am trying to connect with our "driver/excort" rep from the "airport hotel that was going to help us with our smooth transition to our nice relaxing convenient hotel room. We ended up having to call him which is when I found out my phone card doesn't work right. It took the better part of an hour to try and figure out a way to just contact our hotel which was supposed to be in the airport. OUr first clue should have been whent the people at the airport info desk didn't recognize the name of our hotel. About two hours later, we finally get in touch with someone where we are supposed to be staying, and they are to meet us at "gate 2" outside with a car and driver. I am thinking at this point, okay, so the hotel is on the airport grounds, just not INSIDE the airport. I am cool with that. We get in the car, after they rubberbanded two of our suitcases to the top of our car and we are off...I expected crazy driving, dirty streets, all of that, but we were driven through a war zone and dropped off somewhere that looked like a scene out of slumdog...I will let Brian take it from here.

...my wife elbowed me in the backseat of the cab as we were careening down the wrong way on a 4 lane one way street. I looked at her reassuringly, "Not to worry babe." Then, the driver turns off into an dark, dirty alley where 8 men are gathered, no hotel is anywhere in site, and remember, that this is about 1:30am. I began to feel pretty scared, helpless, and stupid all of the sudden. Eventually, some kind of hotel did emerge. Broken windows, a bucket in the floor of the shower (because there was no water pressure AT ALL, and the sense that we were the ONLY customers in the hotel led us to quickly change clothes, pay an exorbitant amount for the room, and have them drive us directly back to the airport at about 2:30am.

This morning we got to Kolkota. The hotel driver (whom it took 1.5 hours to connect with) drove us 13 miles to our hotel. Along the way, we saw probably 70 or 100 buildings all at least 50 stories tall littered about the city - all of them halfway done, the contruction efforts abandoned a year ago due to a recession. The clash of concrete, trash, people and noise here is like nothing I've ever seen. And today (Sunday) is supposedly the least busy day of the week.

More later, gotta go...