Trip to India: Travelling to Trivandrum

I woke up very early, at about 5:00 AM, in order to catch our 7:15 flight to Trivandrum. I quickly checked us all in, and we left. At the airport I had a Vada breakfast at a fast food place outside, before meeting up with my cousins again to check in. Good thing I had checked us in online, because we could almost entirely skip the line by going through the one marked "Online Check-in"! Unlike the US, the Indian airlines allow you to check bags for free as a standard feature; we checked our stuff in, and got going.
    The security line was pretty quick, and strangely enough, there was a separate line for men and women. Everyone needed to be passed over by a handheld metal detector (or whatever it was) as well as walking through the standard metal detector. Once you were cleared, your bag was stamped. It seems like Indian officials like to stamp things a lot.

The flight was very short, on a new-ish Airbus A320. It was so different being on a small aircraft, with little legroom and no inflight entertainment, knowing that I would get off in less than an hour! I guess I had gotten used to the Lufthansa long-haul Boeing 747 after only two flights! We arrived with little delay, and I stepped out into Trivandrum. I was hit by a wave of heat and humidity (but no smell of feces). I guess that is what is to be expected in a city so close to the equator. It wasn't that terrible, but it took a couple hours to get used to.
We were met with another driver in the arrivals area of the small airport, who the adults in our group again greeted very warmly while the rest of us awkwardly waited to greet him. He took us to the hotel, where they checked the underside of the car for bombs before letting us in. In front of the entrance there was a metal detector, so I was a bit confused as to why they were letting people just walk through it and set it off willy nilly.
Inside, the front desk was taking an unnecessarily long time to check our passports and OCIs, so we sat on a comfortable couch in the air conditioned lobby.

Later in the day, we met Doctorauntie at her house. We hung out in her house for a while before having dinner.

Me and my cousins talk

My uncle (who I call Ungle for some reason) and Appachan

Doctorauntie shows my father (who I call Appa) a magazine in her study

Finally, we had dinner: chicken, fish, rice, and cabbage. It was all right, though I would have preferred Basmati rice and another type of fish. The chicken and cabbage, however, were both very good. Again, I started getting terribly sleepy at around 7:00, so I was relieved when the driver took us back to the hotel. After a quick shower and tooth-brushing (using bottled water supplied for free by the hotel), I quickly fell asleep.

Trip to India: First Impressions

I woke up in the apartment of my grandfather (I call him Appachan) feeling quite tired, but clean, at least. After getting ready and relaxing a bit, I was immediately introduced to one of my relatives, Judgiaunty. Apparently she had been staying there overnight, so I went over to the other bedroom to meet her. It was a bit awkward, because her American English was not very good, so she found it a bit difficult to understand me, but we got some talking done. 

A little while later, I got my first true taste of India. Before lunch, we went to Thom's Cafe, an Indian equivalent of a corner store in the US, to get some random thing. I was stunned at how disorganized the roads were. Cars going every which way, not staying in their lanes, avoiding each other by mere inches. People use their horns like bicycle bells to alert others as to where they are going, rather than using the lanes for that purpose. I saw a couple cows lying down on the roadside, eating out of piles of trash, and some dogs passed out on their sides on the sidewalk. 

Thom's had an extremely strong, acrid smell (maybe bug spray, now that I think about it) which was a bit overwhelming. 

The checkout line was very different. First, a person with a handheld device would tally your purchases onto a receipt. Then you would bring the receipt to the payment desk. Finally, on the way out, a security guard would stamp your receipt to show that you have not stolen anything.

For lunch, I met up with my first cousins Aadi and Anoushka, along with a cadre of relatives I had never met (soon to become a common pattern in my stay in India). The food was very manageable; not nearly as difficult of a transition as I was told it would be. Later in the day, I was dragged to a photo frame store and a photo printing store, because we wanted to give a framed photo of our family to Doctorauntie (another relative of mine) as a present. By about 6:00 PM I was dead on my feet, and I went to sleep almost instantly after I got home.

My trip to India: The Flight

I am two days into my two-week-long trip to India (obviously not by public transit, but I decided to use this blog for this trip just because).

The Journey

It all began in SeaTac airport, where we arrived at about 11:50 AM. I was a bit worried that we would need to pay $100 for our bags to India, as the Lufthansa site said that only one 32kg bag was allowed per person, but apparently there are many exceptions to this rule. We checked our bags just fine, and got through security after a long line. While eating lunch at Wendy's, I got my first glimpse of our ride to Frankfurt.

I see the Lufthansa 747-400 taxiing to gate S15

After a short ride on the SeaTac airport people mover train, we were at the S gates, the terminal where all of the international flights originate in Seattle. I steeled myself for the worst: my recent experience with international plane travel had been not good. I remembered the 7 hour flight to Iceland, where I got practically no sleep and felt very cramped. Knowing that the flight to Frankfurt would be more than 8 hours long, followed by another 8 hour flight to Bengaluru, I was not expecting anything more than living hell. Thankfully, I was pleasantly surprised!

Okay, I was lazy and forgot to take a picture of our plane. But this is generally what it looked like!

I had never been on a widebody plane since I was two years old, so the 747-400 was a great experience for me. So much space! Interestingly, the ceilings and overhead bins were very squarely shaped: no curving panels like on most planes. Some other people were having a lot of trouble closing the bins and squishing their bags in place, but we managed to snag a spot in the bins very quickly, without much trouble. I settled in, and was amazed to find out that I could stretch my legs all the way out, even with a backpack stowed below the seat in front of me! IN ECONOMY CLASS!

I fake smile for the camera before getting back to the In Flight Entertainment system

    The IFE system was excellent: the screen was extremely responsive (not the screens displayed in the picture), almost like an iPad. Nothing like the terrible, unresponsive, overheating screens on certain other airlines (cough cough, Icelandair). Everything worked very smoothly. Oh, and every passenger was handed headphones for free. There were a couple screens on the bulkhead in front of me, presumably left over from before the addition of screens at every seat, which displayed the flight info (obviously you could also see it on the screen in front of you). I settled in to watch Titanic, a movie I would highly recommend.

    In what felt like no time at all, the flight attendants came by with dinner. Compared to any other flight I had been on, it was like a gourmet meal. Chicken or pasta? they asked. I went with the pasta. It came on a tray with the food all there, no unwrapping of bags needed on the most part. There was a little bowl of salad, a hunk of bread, a small triangle of brownie with a strawberry, and a microwave bowl of pasta. The pasta was good tasting, though very unhealthy. It was basically a bunch of pasta circles embedded in a sea of cheese, with a small amount of tomato sauce added. Delicious! The salad was good too; crunchy and fairly good tasting. I liked the roll, though it was a bit tough and cold. The brownie was the best part; you can definitely go wrong with a brownie, but the one they served was moist, sweet, and (relatively) delicious. 

    After finishing Titanic, I tried to sleep for a while, with some success. After about two hours of a half-sleep, I watched Goldeneye. The two movies, plus dinner and the short nap, easily filled the eight-hour flight. I left the plane feeling pretty good, with the sense that a night had passed. After three hours of sleeping on benches at Frankfurt, our 747-8 to Bangalore arrived.

Old-livery 747-8 to Bangalore

Boarding was pretty cool; the passengers used their tickets like Oyster cards (but barcode scanned, of course) to pass through turnstiles which admitted them onto the jetway. On this flight I got quite a bit of good sleep, before having a standard Indian veg dinner. The screens on this flight were much more run-of-the-mill: low resolution and less responsive, but still better than the Icelandair system! My legs began to cramp at the end, and I realized that I had not stood up for the entire eight hour flight. 

When we arrived in Bangalore, it was two in the morning. No other planes were in sight taking off or touching down, only our behemoth 747-8 was on the tarmac. We pulled up to the gate, and I braced myself for a strong assault of the smell of crap and pollution... it wasn't there. We walked up the very standard jetway to a highly modern and clean airport. The bathrooms were spic and span, and the building was not outdated at all. The only downside was that it was pretty humid in the terminal! After a relatively short line to check our OCI cards and passports, we were in the baggage claim and soon outside. Surprisingly, it was much less humid outside than in. Again, very little smell of pollution or feces, as I was told there would be. One of the most noticeable differences was the fact that all of the cars had stickers on their fuel panels that says what fuel it takes.

Our driver pulled up, and we began driving down the highway. The highway was well-paved and orderly, especially at that time of day. Everyone was going way over the speed limit, and this is probably the reason why there were speed bumps right on the highway!

Once we pulled off the highway, the differences began. Large packs of wild dogs were roaming the streets, eating the trash piled on the roadside. The road was so cracked and bumpy that the driver had to slow to a stop almost ten times along the way. I was glad when we pulled into the gated apartment parking lot. I was ready to sleep. After riding a musical elevator three floors up, I said hi to Appachan and went to the shower. Unfortunately, it was freezing cold, because the water heater hadn't been turned on! I took a shower anyway, barely getting by. The water was metallic smelling, and the bathroom was kind of sketchy, so I quickly dried off and brushed my teeth before, exhausted after the 20 hours of flying, quickly falling asleep. 

Don't get the impression that I have been having a terrible time; in fact, I have been having quite a good time. It was just that the first night was kind of difficult and hectic. More to come!