This may sound rather obvious, but fourteen hour flights are long. There’s something that happens when you hit the seven hour mark and you realize that you’re only halfway there that makes you begin to curse all flight travel and yearn for a bed. Luckily I had spoken to the ticket agent in Chicago before I left and he switched my seat from being in the middle to an aisle much further up in the plane. I was also located next to the bathroom, so it was nice that I could just turn around and scope out the line before getting up. I was seated next to a very nice gentleman who was also going to be stuck in Delhi for twelve hours. I had a hard time understanding what he was saying, so we didn’t speak much, but when the duty free cart came around he bought two bottles of whiskey and two watches, which peaked my curiosity about who exactly this guy was. I thought about striking up another conversation but he replaced his headphones almost immediately afterwards, so we continued our journey in amicable silence.
When I was checking my bag in Tampa the woman at the ticket counter seemed to imply that I would be stuck in some sort of transit area in Delhi that had no food, water, or bathrooms. This, thank goodness, turned out to be totally untrue and instead I’m now residing in a pretty typical international airport, with a food court, shops, a couple of restaurants and some nice lounges. They even have free wifi if you have a cell phone they can send the information to. I’ve set myself up in a nice little corner behind a staircase, and have gotten around four or five hours of sleep.
There are a few things, though, that divulge the fact I’m not in Kansas anymore, with the clothes and the language being the two most obvious. I love the kurta’s and sari’s the women wear here. Kurta’s(I think that’s what they’re called) are the outfits with the long shirts, matching pants and a matching scarf. I love how bold they are, the colors choices are always bright and because they’re generally one color they stick out nicely in a crowd. What’s odd about the language is that while most people are chatting in Hindi/whatever Indian language they’re speaking, all of the signs are in English. Even the television I’m watching that is streaming some Indian news station has all of the writing in English. From what I understand about India, this is because with the plethora of different languages spoken on the subcontinent English is sort of a lingua franca, a leftover from the colonial days when everyone had to speak it.
Most of the restaurants at the food court had their menus separated between vegetarian and non vegetarian options. None of them served beef, as cows are sacred in Hinduism, and some of the places served sea food like fried calamari and tuna flakes. I broke down and bought a mango lassi, which is like a mango smoothie made with yogurt. It was delicious! The mango they used to make it was HUGE.
Finally, the air conditioning here isn’t set on winter in Antarctica like it is everywhere in the US, and I’m actually sweating a bit waiting for these twelve hours to be up so I can finally make my way to Kathmandu. Thank goodness this is only an hour long flight. It’s so close I can taste it!
(Sorry no pictures this post, there are a lot of security people wandering around and I suspect they wouldn’t be thrilled if they saw me taking a bunch of photos)
