The trip over

Some travel math for you:

                What is the answer to this problem?

38 hours+ 7 airport terminals + 4 flights + 3 continents + 2 days +1 cyclone = ?

The answer= tired, smelly Zara….in Bangladesh!

 Yup, I made it, and in one piece to boot.   This was one of my more unusual and memorable journeys, so it warrants it own blog post.

Things started out well enough.  Esther kindly helped me finish packing up my apartment and drove me to the airport in Detroit at 4pm on Friday, May 22^nd.  DTW was surprisingly empty so I waited for 2 hours, pretending to read but instead people watching.  We boarded our flight to Amsterdam at 7pm, and that’s when the reality that I was actually going away for the summer finally struck me; until then it had merely been a hypothetical.  The flight to Amsterdam (7 hours) was relatively uneventful, except the young guy sitting next to me, who was on his way to a vacation in the Greek islands (I was so jealous of him!) required the oxygen tank because he was extremely short of breath. Apparently that happens a lot, but I had never seen it.  So take note, if you are every short of breath on plane, you can get hooked up with some free oxygen. Yay?

I spent most of that flight watching movies—Frost/Nixon, Gran Torino (both of which I would recommend). It seems to me like Northwest has sunk all of its money into its entertainment system, rather than its meal service, because the dinner and breakfast they served were truly inedible.  And you all know me, I’ll eat anything, so the fact that I wouldn’t eat it is saying something.  Luckily I always travel with enough food to feed a family of 6 for a week, so I was able to survive.

We got to Amsterdam right on time (got to love the Dutch) and conveniently, the flight to Bombay (aka Mumbai) was leaving from the next gate and already boarding.  One of my pet peeves in life is when people stand too close to you in line and push you forward, as if that is going to speed things up.  (As an aside, one of the great things about being short is that when people do get to close in line, your elbow is at the ideal level for an “accidental” jab to the groin or gut.  I must confess to taking advantage of that opportunity several times, but it is highly effective.)  Indians in particular seem prone to this closeness and shoving.  Perhaps that comes from a lifetime of having to fight for every inch they can get in a country with limited space and even more limited resources.  However, I wish someone would remind them that their seat is reserved and will be there for them regardless of when they get on the plane.  I’ve also learned that one way to spot the most experienced travelers is that they wait until the last possible moment to get on the plane (without holding it up), as they recognize that sitting an extra 30 minutes on the plane is not to their benefit. 

Anyway, the most enjoyable part of this leg of the trip was the conversation I had with the check-in/security guy, a very nice gentleman from Turkey.  He asked me the origin of my name, to which I replied ‘Hebrew’, which is what my mom has always cited.  This apparently was the wrong answer, the correct one being, of course, Turkish.  He then spent 10 minutes (holding up the line) trying to convince me that I was named after a famous Turkish singer (Mom, have you been hiding this fact from me?) and that I should check out her music as she has “some very lovely songs”.  I don’t have access to iTunes, but I’d love to hear what you think of my namesake’s music, if you can track it down.

Now for the more entertaining parts of my trip.  After arriving in Bombay at 10pm we headed for the immigration desk, since I had to transfer from the international to domestic terminal.  In a sign of the times, before reaching immigration you had to go through the “swine flu checkpoint”, which consisted of filling out a form on which you promised that you did not have swine flu and getting it stamped by some guy wearing a mask.  Clearly, a very highly effective screening system.   And although the airport has been modernized, the same smell of old spices and sweat pervades the entire place (I wonder if they manufacture Indian airport carpet with that smell sealed in— that would explain it), as does the general atmosphere of barely contained chaos. 

After going through immigration and customs, and collecting my bags, I went to the transfer lounge (i.e. dimly lit, poorly ventilated room with a couple of plastic chairs) to catch the shuttle to the domestic terminal, where I was to catch my flight to Calcutta (aka Kolkata).  Over my two hours there (from 11pm to 1am) the lounge became progressively more crowded, yet no buses came.   As you can imagine, 150 tired, hot, sweaty people standing crowded into a little room and becoming more irritated every moment as they wait for a long-promised bus is a recipe for disaster, and naturally a fight broke out between a particularly angry gentleman and the airline agent.  A very pregnant woman fainted in the middle of it.  Minor pandemonium ensued, during which time I crouched in a corner trying to stay as far away from things as possible.  Eventually people calmed down, the buses came and slowly we headed off for the other terminal.  Given that the peak time for international arrivals is between 9pm and midnight, the lack of buses seems to be another example of India’s inability to anticipate, and deal with, predictable, routine events.  (For a classic example, see the monsoon.)

Once in the domestic terminal I had to wait 4 hours until the security checkpoint opened so I changed my clothes and purified some water with my UV pen light, which caused minor panic among the janitors in the restroom who couldn’t figure out what I was doing.  I then managed to take a couple hour nap tethered to my backpacks. 

By 5:15am I was at the gate for my Kingfisher (as in the beer) Airlines flight to Calcutta.  Even on short domestic flights in India you get ridiculous service.  On the 2 hour trip we got fresh lime juice before takeoff, a very nice breakfast, the offer of tea/coffee 3 times, ice cream, and multiple newspapers.  Bizarrely, the only two English language programs offered on the personal TV were Larry King (in which he talked with a panel about women’s self-esteem and empowerment—so strange) and the movie version of the Baby-Sitters Club.   We arrived at 9am to Calcutta’s old, dingy airport, where I collected my bags (yet again) and set off in search of the international terminal.  It appears that Calcutta does not place a premium on signage, so I had no idea where to go.  The few people who did speak English simply pointed outside, to the busy road and said “two minutes”.  Was I supposed to cross the road? Walk down it? Get a bus that was coming in two minutes? With the help of a very nice local guy I realized that I was supposed to walk along to road into oncoming traffic (there was no sidewalk) for the Indian version of two minutes, i.e. five/ten minutes, through a construction zone to get to the international terminal, which seemed more like a decrepit apartment complex or high school that an airport. 

I was too early to check in so I sat around and read for a couple hours.   Eventually I was able to check my bags and went to get my boarding pass.  Although I’m very proud of my heavily stamped passport and love it dearly, it is beginning to be something of a liability.  My visa was delayed because the Bangladeshi embassy wanted to know why I traveled so much, and to such random countries (really, who goes to Cameroon?); the check-in guy in Calcutta spent 5 minutes just scanning through it, counting my Cambodian visas (3).  Finally I got through and sat in a corner reading and waiting for immigration to open.  (There are apparently only a few flights out this terminal, so the immigration officers take many extended lunch/snack breaks.)  Within a few minutes the check-in agent was back, but this time not to look at my stamps, but rather the background of the pages: the 50 state seals.  This is a rough transcript of our conversation:

Him: What is this on the front?

Me: The official US seal.

Him: What is it for?

Me: Um, for putting on official things, like passports…and um, money.

Him: What about this? (Looking at the 1^st real page)

Me: That’s the state seal of Alaska.

Him: A-las-ka. Is that a state?

Me: Yes

Him: What is the seal for?

Me: I don’t know.

Repeat 49 more times.

During all of this he was writing down each state in a little pocket notebook, which was kind of cute. It must have been for his children; at least I hope it was.  I didn’t have the heart to tell him he could look this up on the Internet, or in any geography book for that matter. 

After some more waiting around once past immigration, I finally boarded my fourth and last flight (hooray!) at 1pm.  Unfortunately for me, it was a little tiny plane with propellers, as the flight from Calcutta to Dhaka is barely 30 minutes and traffic between the two cities is light.  That I was sitting in the first row, right next to the emergency exit door, was reassuring, especially after the pilot announced that there was “cyclone activity” in the area and that we could not expect a smooth flight.  Ugh, my least favorite combination of things: propellers and cyclones.  However, at this point I was too exhausted to really care and the flight was not as bad as I expected.  Perhaps being in a tiny plane helped with the turbulence. 

Regardless, even on this flight we were served lunch, which came in a rectangular cardboard box.  Because of the box’s shape, and the fact that the propellers were so loud I couldn’t hear the flight attendant properly, I thought it was a carton of cigarettes, which struck me as weird to give out on the plane, so I politely declined with “I don’t smoke, thank you.”  That garnered me a strange stare from the flight attendant, and I had to call her back once the person behind me opened his and I saw that I was actually just a sandwich.  When it came time for her to clear our lunch she said “May I take your cigarette box?”  Served me right—I am an idiot.

Thirty minutes later we were over Dhaka, an amazing landscape with a multitude of rivers and streams connecting and diverging, enormous high-rise apartment buildings next to humble slum dwellings, and gleaming mosques not far from farm plots.  Even from on high one could feel the city’s frenetic energy, sense it teeming with life, ambition, and fervor.  Of course, this was in contrast to the disorganization and mistaken priorities of the government, as reflected in the fact that we spent another 30 minutes circling the airport while the air force completed exercises on the city’s one runway. 

By 3pm we were on the ground.  After another cursory swine flu check and extended review of my passport, I was able to collect my bags and meet Azad, a UM researcher and the local contact in charge of organizing and facilitating our work here.  Outside was the familiar pandemonium of an Indian airport: hundreds of cab drivers (and pickpockets) shouting, begging for you to take their taxi, trying to grab your trolley and steer it towards their car.  It was hot, over 100 degrees, and so so sticky, and although I was sweating like hell, I dared not take my jacket off, as my bare arms would have been as much an outrage-causing faux pas as Michelle Obama wearing a cardigan to meet the Queen; this is after all a Muslim country.

Our car showed up and we were able to escape the chaos.  I was initially struck by the lushness of the tress and vegetation along the road, the colorfulness of the bicycle rickshaws that swerved through the traffic, and the general Wild West-meets-Bollywood feel of the city.  

Although I arrived at my new home in Dhaka just 38 hours after leaving my old one in Ann Arbor, it felt like a lifetime ago and a world away—such different lifestyles, cultures, and atmospheres.  Let’s see if that sentiment lingers, or if it was just a product of jetlag…..