Hello from Chennai, India.
It is Monday here, noon local time, which means its 12:30 am Sunday night in Texas.
The flights were very long, but considering we flew Business Class, I have no right to complain. The first leg on American to Frankfurt was an absolute dream, to be honest. Each seat reclined to a setting called 'flat at an angle', which just means the seat is completely flat but not level with the ground. Good enough for me, I slept for a few hours. Also watched a couple of movies On-Demand on my own personal screen, built into the seat-back in front of mine. Ate American food for the last time for 2 weeks. They gave my order of dinner to someone else, so I picked something else, and I was rewarded with a second helping of ice cream later in the flight. Like I say, no complaints there.
The second leg was from Frankfurt to Chennai via Lufthansa. The crew on the plane were very nice, but the food was sending strong signals that I wasn't in Kansas anymore. They also had on-demand movies, but only some of them were American or even in English. I think I slept 3 or 4 hours on that flight, and read a book part of the time.
We arrived in India late Saturday night, after a solid 24 hours in transit since I left DFW. Got to the hotel at 1:30am or so Sunday morning, and then slept till noon. There are 7 of us here from the US, 3 from Texas, 4 from DC. We killed time Sunday afternoon, watched ManU play Newcastle. (ManU stomped them.)
Then around 4pm we met up with several folks from India and went to see a ... well, a little show I guess. The show was in celebration of a national holiday relating to the harvest of rice. First, a group of people played a (rather lenghty) song with drums and cymbals. Next another group played, this time adding a couple of instruments (similar to clarinets), and while they played, two ladies did a dance while balancing a very tall piece of decorated pottery on their heads. This was actually quite impressive. I'm pretty sure I couldn't have balanced the pottery on my head if I were sitting still in a chair, and these ladies were happily jumping and jiving. Fascinating, Captain.
The show was in a sort of rural area outside of Chennai. Read: mosquito fest. Made me glad for my deet, and my anti-malarials. (Side note: say anti-malarials 3 times, really fast. It's funny. Well, it is at 3:55am. When you're jetlagged.)
After the show we all went to dinner at a hotel near ours. We were able to sample a lot of different dishes, curry chicken and lamb, pepper chicken, some kind of hushpuppy-like ball made from lentils I think, another lentil concoction with the consistency of mashed potatoes but big-time spicy, naan (bread), etc etc. Naan is good, btw; think deep-dish tortilla. At the end of the evening, someone ordered desserts for us to try, and one was ice cream ... but it had some sort of spice in it, so it tasted like ice cream with sage in it or something. God bless Blue Bell.
Anyway, got back to the hotel at 10:30 or so last night and crashed into bed. Woke up this morning at 3:55am, not sure why. Never really got back to sleep. Met the others for breakfast at 7:30am, and meetings started around 8:30 or 9.
I won't keep up this play-by-play thing -- the next couple of days will be meetings here in the hotel. So I'll plan to write tomorrow about general items of interest. Traffic. Motorcycles. Cows. Overturned buses. You know, stuff like that.
I miss my wife and kids. A lot. If you see them, hug them for me.
God bless, Brian
2 comments:
Well, the post worked. Glad the travels were smooth and efficient - albeit strange at times. Hope you're a curry fan. It's not my favorite - but I do love their fried breads :) Hope the meetings go well. Enjoyed the post.
Anti-malarials! Anti-malarials! Anti-malarials!
You're right - that IS funny!
I hope that your adventure continues to be enlightening - and that your follow-up trip is as short as possible!
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