Okay, 24 hours of airplane and airport sitting could be easier.
While I must admit that the Indian airplane food is now rank 1 in my master list of extreme airplane dishes, I still feel pretty fatigued after almost 24 hours of being awake and mostly waiting (in the airplane, for the airplane, to the airplane, …).
I find myself at Mumbai airport, drinking a huge 210 rupee coffee. International rupee price. In 4 hours my third and final airplane will leave towards Coimbatore, and then the only remaining challenge will be to find the hotel and to actually have it booked (gogo random online website).
Even though last year, on my only other trip, I had to take a total of 4 or 5 airplanes, the experience does not show itself yet.
Thank god my dad had the idea to leave before the morning traffic jam, so that we arrived in Brussels airport more than 3 hours early.
Apparently I could fly from Brussels to London, but no further, without a return ticket from India. I would be sent back in the first airplane.
This surely battled my adventurous spirit that made me a one-way-ticket believer. I had to quickly order a random ticket back, that would not be too expensive to cancel.
Funnily enough, a retour ticket was cheaper than a one-way ticket (almost half the price), and so, I’m not only flying from Delhi to Brussels in september, I’ll also have a nice empty seat in november back.
When I landed here in Mumbai, and had to take a bus to the other terminal, I immediately remembered. The humid heat, the stares of the people, the awesome flora (palm trees wut?), the filth on the street and the big business buildings next to sheds where the poor live. Bam. In your face. India.
So as of now, I’m quite curious about what will happen, how I will enjoy it, which people I will meet.
Since now the fatigue is pretty great, my brain just switched to waiting in lines with apathy. It works.
Let’s see what happens when I walk around in Coimbatore, hopefully later today.
Well, at least there’s no mistake that I arrived in the right country already!
Namaskar, India.