Day Zero

After weeks of tackling travel-people with twisted sense(s) of humor and (mis)managing two thousand three forty things, we finally hopped on a flight and traveled to here.
The signs have been good thus far. The immigration fellow at BIAL (BIAL! First time. Whee!) looked at my passport and went "So, yen Siri, yell hogtidira?" The heart, it swells with pride. The sort of thing that will make amma cry and feel vindicated for naming me so.

My expert opinion on BIAL is that it is a decent airport. Certainly not bad. We may not have seen too many airports but we have seen good old HAL airport through its many avtars, through the days when J.H Patel rubbed shoulders with anopheles mosquitoes(arre, metaphor saar), and when the fellow at HAL airport explained that the Bangalore airport was justifiably sloppy because it was 'not Singapore' to amma.So, my opinions can be considered credible. I spent most of the time waiting for the flight speaking loudly over the phone and being generally obnoxious. The Turkish(I think) men in front of me at security check kept glancing back and saying strange things. They could have been talking about flowers, but the tongue made them sound extremely sidey.

I caught Gentlemen Prefer Blondes on the flight(This is important, because I say so)-- the earliest form of chicklit, discounting Austen maybe. Was breezy and funny. And god, I luuurve Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friend. Not the sentiment, no (Liquid cash is better than jewelry no? Hell, plastic money became all the rage only after Pretty Woman) but the humor in the song is oh so...(He's your guy when stocks are high, but beware when they start to descend, it's then that those louses go back to their spouses, Diamonds are a girl's best friend).

My flight was via Dubai. ("Thank you for flying Emiraat"). The airport is all that Dubai is to the world-- a grand picture of limitless luxury and dazzling, mythical opulence. I spent hours walking around the place. The duty free shopping area is, like my sister correctly warned me, 'More mall than airport'. Trust me to go looking for a place to surf the net and nearly miss a flight.  I Had to run quite a long distance to make it through the 'Last Call' (what an unnecessarily ominous thing to say about a plane. Pah) This is the story of my life--a constant battle with time.

I struck conversation with a Law student from Bangladesh as he wondered if I was having a heart attack from doing a P.T. Usha. "You're an engineer! Ah, you must've watched Three Idiots then." he laughed.cheerily and I shook my head in dismay. Even as I sprinted like a mad woman towards the gate I saw several isolated instances of people reading Two States by Chetan Bhagat. That man is taking over the world.

More politically incorrect observations, did you say? Yes, Yes, this is just the place. My flight was full of Arab rich-kids. There you go. And Emirates' emergency-escape-procedure videos had one guy in a muslim skull cap who, any self-respecting immigration officer would slot as a 'potential threat to national security' aided solely by his sharp intuition. Enough? Most of the women in Emirates' advertisements are European;  and rarely Arab. I should stop, no?

The flight to Heathrow was turbulent in patches. So much, at one point, that the hibernating bear of an Arab rich-kid sitting next to me and I had to hold the contents of my food tray lest it prance around on unsuspecting fellow passengers. And food I had enough of. I didn't want to be rude to those nice flight attendants and refrained from refusing any food they offered me. After a while, they didn't bother asking if I wanted something to drink/eat and simply plonked everything on my tray and marched off (gracefully, needless to say).


The forward/downward cameras on the plane were really interesting. This is the first time I've seen them. They project views from the front of the plane and of below throughout the flight. Some of the bits were brilliant. The view outside the window while taking off Dubai must be the prettiest there is. And no, I couldn't spot the Burj. The view of London during the daytime before landing is charming as I remember it. This time however, the fog made it impossible to make anything out. We were offered sporadic glimpses of city-lights but those were too brief. The 'view from the forward camera' is supposedly the view that the pilots have. I said a silent prayer as it flashed images of white nothingness and tried to concentrate on Transformers 2 instead.(What a terrible movie to watch when your legs feel like cement and you haven't slept). I also watched 500 Days of Summer. Very cute. Joseph Gordon Levitt is my latest crush. After that cute Arab flight attendant. And that omg-level Brit guy on the flight who I was loudly telling K about. I am writing about random people I was leching at. Can I stoop any lower?

Annnnyway. We finally landed and reached. And my sister toh-tally fawned over me and emptied half the stores into dinner which I obediently ate (Refusing food is considered rude in some cultures). Ah, so everything was going well. I mean, how much better can this get? Like amma rightly estimated, what can make me happier than being in a place where the sun lazily rises at 9 and hurriedly sets at 4? Nothing, did you say? Full points.


But, erm, things turned out a little differently. The sister trudged in importantly and has given me a six columned Excel sheet to fill in details of where I will go, what time I will get there and what my (hourly)agenda for each of the thirty days is. "You're on HOLIDAY. I want you to spend each of these days well" she says with so much intensity, she looks a wee bit like Urmila Matondkar from those hopeless films on maniacs RGV made (Kaun. whattafilm). Thus begins the holiday.