In a series of posts, I will try to write a point of view on my not-so-recent trip to India. For now, I will write only about the way there which was pretty far from boring.It seems somehow that every time I travel by plane something has to go wrong, e.g. got luggage lost, plane landing in another airport, a big knife in my hand luggage, overbooked flights and the examples can continue. Unfortunately, this time was not going to be any different. Briefly, my day started great with a Julefrokost, continued really nasty and ended at the borderline between tragedy and comedy. A welcome coincidence made it that just before the day of my departure (scheduled Dec 9th, 3:15 a.m. – bus to Billund) the Computer Science department organized the Julefrokost. Since I was not in any mood to return from Julefrokost to Brabrand, take the luggage and go, the plan was to get my luggage to the Uni, go to Julefrokost and afterward, around midnight, go downtown, spend some time in Tir na nog and get the bus. Well, everything went smoothly at the beginning. The Julefrokost was nicer than usual (I guess Claus deserves most of the credit for it), it had some very interesting quiz that revealed some interesting facts that not too many knew, good food, good beer and schnaps, great company, lots of Santa hats, all the good Danish traditions. However, as all the good things come to an end, I regretfully had to quit the party and leave downtown. And now comes my fatal mistake. Since I did not want to get into Tir na nog with my big luggage, I decided to let it for a few hours in a locker inside the railway station and pick it up around 2:30, just before going to catch the bus. And not little was my surprise to find out, the hard way of course, that the railway station is locked between 2:00-4:00, this particular night with my luggage inside. The bottom line is that I found myself sometime in the middle of the night, downtown Aarhus, awfully tired, semi-drunk, and with no luggage, bound to take a bus that would take me to India. A situation I could do without, certainly. However, in all this mess there is some ray of light too. First of all, I still had my hand luggage. Second, Tord came to make sure I got on the bus (and I am VEEERY grateful for his gesture), which means somebody could get my luggage out of the railway station. Needless to say, I immediately got sober and instead of some well-deserved sleep, on both the bus to Billund and flight to Amsterdam I started to make some kind of shopping list upon arrival. After some shopping in Amsterdam and a loong and tiresome 8 hours flight to India, here I am in Delhi, almost midnight, no luggage, lots of warnings from Saurabh (take care, no taxi from anywhere excepting a single spot, no drinking tap water and some other nots that I don’t remember now).
Following Saurabh’s suggestion, I hired one of the prepaid taxis from a booth inside the airport. Until exiting the airport building, India looked somehow like Europe, excepting maybe the dressing style for girls. However, once outside, the differences got huuge. First of all, I got struck by the huge amount of polution, since I could barely breathe. Second of all, my taxi was kind of a small van, which could barely accomodate three danes. Once the engine started, it sounded like one of the really old Romanian Dacia cars, meaning I had the feeling it would break down at any moment. And I was not very far from being true, since about 10 mins drive, the car started to produce a really ugly sound that determined the driver to stop and investigate what the problem was (some nice topping for my whole trip 
). To my surprise, after some 5 mins of detective work he returned from the back of the car with a pretty long chunk of the exhaust pipe. The trip to the hotel went on smoothly with no further mechanical problems (a miracle, considering the way that car looked), but I got the oportunity of getting a glimpse of Delhi in the night. Since Delhi is a XXXXL city (its population is about 20 million people, meaning almost the population of Romania, or almost 4 times the population of Denmark), the drive to the hotel took quite some time. The car drove through some really poor neighborhoods with people on the side of the road warming themselves on improvised fires, also through some empty areas, it hit some good roads which were no less than European motorways and some bad roads that looked like some bombardments took place. Also, it seems like the red color is some times optional and some times mandatory, since the driver stopped only in certain cases that I could not reverse engineer. To give the reader a glimpse of Delhi traffic, we even hit a traffic jam at 2:00 a.m.
When arriving at the hotel, I felt a bit like the character played by Tom Hanks in “Cast away”. I had in my hand luggage some really neceesary things, but I also had with me things that I could do without (e.g. sun glasses), that could be carried by somebody else (the present for Saurabh), or that were simply useless (a Santa Claus hat). Since I managed to write what it seems to me like a huge post and I am not planning to spam the daimi blog, the first part of my trip to India concludes here. I’ll get back soon with the best part of the trip, Saurabh’s wedding.
to be continued…
