India, Chapter One.

The first in a long series of posts about our trip to India and my sister's wedding:


Early Thursday morning (February 18), my uncle dropped us at the San Diego airport. We had an uneventful flight to Chicago, sitting in the two seats of a two-three configuration. In Chicago, we worked our way towards the American Airlines Club (the first perk of flying Business class), and settled in to wait seven hours for the rest of our group and the big flight.

Three of my mom's high school friends and my parents met us in the club, where we excitedly chatted and sipped on adult beverages in peace. We boarded around 7 at night and immediately took advantage of the free-flowing champagne

 

and the other marvels of flying in luxury for the first time (yes, we were totally dorks - this is a video, so be sure to click on it - sorry about the awful face-freeze shot):

We ended up waiting on the plane for two hours before finally taking off...but for the first time in my flying life, I DIDN'T CARE! We were having altogether too much fun, kid-free, champagned-up, and watching movies on demand.

A few hours into the flight, I decided to sleep for a while...and I woke up EIGHT HOURS later. Yep, my best night of sleep in eight years, and it was on an airplane. Who knew!?

So...after flying over Greenland, Finland, Russia, and Kabul, Afganistan (thank goodness for 41,000 feet), we arrived at the Indira Ghandi International Airport on Friday, February 19, right around midnight. We gathered our bags and were greeted by my sister, her fiance, his brother and sister-in-law, and some friends. Mom and I were handed beautiful floral bouquets, and we were ushered to cars for the drive to our guest house.

Oh the drive. Let me tell you, it made for quite an introduction to India. Mom, Anna and I rode in one car, while the men-folk took the other - an arrangement made reasonable by the fact that my sister's Hindi skills are on par with the natives!

So...we left the airport and immediately hit traffic. Did I mention this was at midnight? I quickly discovered that despite the lines of paint winding down the roads in Delhi, drivers don't actually use lanes. The road is shared with trucks, cars, dogs, auto-rickshaws (tuk-tuks), bicycle rickshaws, camels, motorcycles, scooters, cows, bikes, elephants, and pedestrians. On a three-lane road, at least five, if not six vehicles will be crammed next to each other, within inches, dancing through the streets accompanied by the music of incessant horns blaring. Oh, and sometimes, drivers go up the wrong way of streets, if they decide they want to go where THOSE streets lead, not where the proper direction streets take them. Since I didn't take pictures at midnight, you'll have to make do with these daytime shots...

 

So now, imagine: midnight, crusty old car, no seatbelts, pretty much scene set as the pictures show (but dark). Bouncing up the wrong direction of a street, facing trucks and cars who really don't care to move out of your way, no medians, no curbs...and no clue what the driver and the only Hindi-speaker are saying! We kept hitting construction and not being able to go where the driver obviously wanted to go...so we circled a few times, backtracked, and drove places I'm pretty sure cars should not have driven. About an hour later, we arrived at the serene guesthouse, which Anna and Ashish had kindly stocked with nibbles and booze...and by the way, my plug for this post: if you are ever in Delhi needing a place to stay, Sham Nath Villa is a must!

  

 

We stayed up late, and finally retreated to our respective rooms - mom and dad, Dan and me, and poor exhausted Anna, who had just flown in from Jammu earlier in the day after a long week at work...

to be continued