The day had finally arrived. We were off to India. We packed our car with our luggage, the cat and her stuff and drove to Christine’s parents’ place. We dropped the cat off with her stuff, commiserated with her about how terrible life is, and had Christine’s father drive us to the airport.
Of course the airport is the typical mumbo jumbo, security, fluids, pat downs and such. Fun.
We spent the next 2 hours talking about how great our trip is going to be. I had heard that India has some good Scotch type whisky, and decent cigars. I looked forward to trying them out.
We boarded our plane, and left for Amsterdam on a KLM flight. When booking our flights, we had the option to connect through Toronto or Amsterdam, since I have been to Toronto, but not Amsterdam, we decided to avoid Toronto.
This was really my first international flight per se. I’ve been to Cuba, but that didn’t really count as “international”, I don’t know why I say that but that’s my thoughts. In the air, we had a decent dinner and I noticed that they have whisky on the drink cart, wanting to start my holiday on a good note, I wanted to splurge and get one. It turns out that it’s FREE!! Hot Dog! This was going to be a good flight. Our second meal came and it was decent, a second scotch and I wasn’t feeling much pain.
I guess I should mention that Christine isn’t very comfortable flying, specifically she dislikes the take offs and landings(especially if the landing is an unplanned landing). She did great even though we had a little turbulence just before landing.
We landed in Amsterdam and walked all through the airport, trying to find something to occupy us for 4 hours and perhaps find a corner to snooze in. Occupy we did, snooze we didn’t. Amsterdam airport (Schipol, which I first heard as Sh*t hole) was full of lots of different stores and such so we had a bite to eat and tried to snooze, but to no avail on the snoozing. I found two things I liked in the Amsterdam airport, they had lots of cheese samples and they had smoking rooms. I enjoyed a cigar while waiting and I gorged on free cheese. (I love cheese)
The time for us to wait to board the plane to Dehli came and we made it to the gate with plenty of time to spare. Finally it was time to board and we were off to Dehli!
It was a typical flight in my opinion. We took off, we ate, we watched some movies, we tried to snooze, we were uncomfortable, drank some whisky, ate some more, and eventually landed.
We off loaded in Dehli and I found a giant display of one of my favorite scotches. The Glenlivet Founders Reserve. If only they had free samples. We made it to the immigration clearance section, go through there with minimal issues since we had done all of our paper work in advance.
We rushed to the luggage carousel to claim our luggage and typical to airports, one bag came out relatively soon, and the last one is the very last one to come out from the plane. By this time Christine was chomping at the bit as she didn’t want to miss the escort from the tour company. We rushed out to find our tour representative and found out we weren’t the last to come out from the flight.
We got into a taxi and zoomed to the hotel we were planning on staying at, The Trident Gurgaon. It took a while to get there from the airport. It seems the streets were in a sad state of disrepair.
We arrive at our hotel around 1:30 am and were whisked in to the lobby and checked in and escorted to our room to sleep off the flight.
India is 12.5 hours ahead of Calgary, so it was 1:30 am MONDAY, we had lost an entire day. Sunday was nowhere to be found. I’m pretty sure it was lost in Amsterdam, and I know for a fact that I wouldn’t be the first to admit they lost a day in Amsterdam.
This is a living wall in the Amsterdam Airport.